radio cegeste presents Radio d'Oiseaux at Chicks Hotel, port chalmers

Newcastle-based organisational and musical force Chris Hearn, aka Alps, briefly alighting at None Studios in Dunedin while on his New Zealand tour with Ray Raposa, aka Castanets, from Portland, Oregon, pleasantly coincided his stay with my arrival in the city. As it eventuated, no local support act had been organised for these fine gentlemen's southernmost NZ gig. Consequently, discussions in the None kitchen resulted in Radio Cegeste being invited to support Alps and Castanets in a certain esteemed experimental music venue at a nearby charming port, the very next evening (ie. "your name is on the poster"). Rather than baulking at this short notice thrust into the limelight (such as it was, on a Wednesday in Port Chalmers), I very sensibly recognised an opportunity to experiment with the public presentation of the slowly evolving Radio d’Oiseaux project, and, as you can see from these photos by Markus Gradwohl, verily jumped at the chance.

Sound sources this time were field recordings of birds played through mini FM transmitter, Radio New Zealand vinyl pressings of birdsongs played on a portable record player, 78s, music box and related sonic ephemera (such as one of those musical cards, emitting the song of a New Zealand native bird - the Saddleback - via an activation of an embedded digital chip/music box, every time it was opened).

You can't see them too well here, but there was also a live visual element, involving a slowly diminishing stack of c. 1960s Forest and Bird magazine covers, propped in front of a static video camera routed through the in-house projector, and progressively removed one by one during the performance.

My one regret concerning the evening, apart from its various minor equipment failures, was that Ray's set, vulnerable, desolate, delicate and blacky humorous at turns as it was, had included, as was evidently his habit, a cover of everyone's favourite pop song about death, Blue Oyster Cult's (Don't Fear) The Reaper, in every NZ show except this one. Damn!

more photos of the event at Markus' site, noise redux, are viewable here

radio cegeste with Motoko Kikkawa at NONE

the first public unveiling of the violin / radio duo with Mo Kikkawa on the 20th of June came at the end of my two month stay in Dunedin, as the closing act of a gig which umbrellaed a variety of new combinations of artists from NONE's dynamic, vibrant improvised music community.

i've posted the second part, or more correctly the 'encore', here

a video of the first part of the performance by Edie Eves is on vimeo and also to be found blogged at the free103point9 newsroom here

Radio Cegeste from Edie Eves on Vimeo.

thankyou to Markus Gradwohl and also to Edie for the wonderful documentation, and to Matt Middleton for such a fittingly aphoristic recall of the event's ghost-on-the stairs driftscapes (whose bogan aether-spectres appeared less as the ubiquitous air-guitar solo than in the form of the opening organ refrain from Andrew Lloyd Webber's 'Phantom of the Opera', incessantly wafting in from some obscure, unpluggable radiophonic wormhole) on the ever-readable Crude blog :

"Radio Cegeste - Stairwell install - Ghost channels - Bogan Ghosts scream for Stairway to Heaven - Fine-tune my Runes - Droppers und Spoons - Motoko/Vapour/Viol - Ether transmit - Aurorae, Weather, Morse - European Venous Forum - Estonian Volleyball Foundation - Quantum Rind - "

owls do cry : field recordings in the grounds of seacliff asylum, dunedin

a field trip to the grounds of the old seacliff hospital on the outskirts of dunedin produced some recordings of local birdlife, and associated reflections on Janet Frame's history on site during the most troubling period of the writer's life. Her first short story collection The Lagoon and Other Stories was published while she was a patient – advance copies arrived on 4 March 1952. Nine months later, in December of the same year she was scheduled for a leucotomy at Seacliff. As Michael King puts it in An Inward Sun – the World of Janet Frame :

“Nine Months later, when Janet was once again committed in Seacliff, the book may have saved her life – or, at the very least, her intellectual and artistic life. There medical staff informed her that she had been selected for a dreaded leucotomy operation (the same operation known in the United States as a lobotomy). This intervention severed the fibres connecting the front part of the brain to the rest of the cerebral cortex. Most patients who had the operation experienced a reduction in anxiety; some were rendered vegetative. In Janet’s case, momentum towards this outcome seemed unstoppable. John Money advised against it. But Lotte Frame was persuaded to give written consent. Within days of the scheduled surgery, on 26 December 1952, newspapers around the country carried a story headed ‘Writer Wins Prize for Prose’ – Janet had won the Hubert Church Award, New Zealand’s only literary prize for fiction or non-fiction prose, for The Lagoon. And the superintendant of Seacliff, Dr Geoffrey Blake-Palmer, took her off the operation list. ‘I’ve decided that you should stay as you are. I don’t want you changed.’”

built in the 19th Century, the Seacliff hospital buildings were structurally unsound from the beginning, and after the relocation of the hospital staff and patients to Cherry Farm psychiatric facility in the 1950s, various uses for them were mooted but never realised, and they were left to slowly decay.

birds however have found their home here in abundance. in a improptu lo-fi tribute to Messiaen, and perhaps Sebastian, and certainly the people who once wandered the grounds here, some spontanious human-bellbird imitations were also recorded...

environmental radio : radio d' Oiseaux

radio d'Oiseaux is a solar powered radio station for New Zealand native birds. Currently a fieldwork project, it will eventually manifest as series of radio cegeste site specific performances.

as an "environmental radio" and conceptual media project, radio d'Oiseaux looks at the links between transmission, locality and territory.

as a sound-site, the birdsong is a place of trauma and nostalgia in NZ, a situation helped along by its long association with public broadcasting. the public outcry a few years back at the intended removal of field recordings of native avian species, long a temporal marker for news reports on Radio New Zealand National, provided weighty evidence of its cultural place. The presence of bridsong as ‘soundmark’ can be percieved as displaying a memorialising or museological function. To replay already-extant sound has its own embedded politic - the loop itself is a ‘territorialised’ refrain in Deleuze’s terminology – here, Radio New Zealand's treatment of the sounds of birds is a paradigm reiterated in cultural terms by the replay of songs sent to radio stations by record companies. Instead, to deteritorialise this medium’s approach to art, we might learn from talking to the animals.

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“the plan was to put microphones in remote locations uninhabited by humans and to broadcast whatever might be happening out there; the sounds of wind and rain, the cries of birds and animals – all the uneventful events of the natural soundscape transmitted without editing into the hearts of the cities. It seemed to us that since man has been pumping his affairs into the natural soundscape, a little natural wisdom might be a useful antidote”.

“An excess of environmental noise produces sloppy listeners. We no longer listen to the radio, we overhear it. It stays on, shielding us from the coarseness of modern life. Radio has become the birdsong of the twentieth century, decorating the environment with “pretty””

- R. Murray Schafer