'gull lines, at a slope of conduction (for waiorua shoreline, violin and shortwave)' in TIK festival of ecological media arts, Brussels

gull lines, at a slope of conduction (for waiorua shoreline, violin and shortwave) was recorded during early May on Kapiti, as a contribution to the Time Inventors Kabinet (TIK) festival of ecological media arts (11 - 13 May 2012) in Brussels. It emerges from my current research into the area of Kapiti Island, supported by Creative New Zealand and the New Zealand Department of Conservation.

Both as a contribution to this festival and within the wider parameters of my current project, the piece extends the sounds of a remote place to listeners in the heart of an urban sphere across the other side of the world, taking as part-provocation R. Murray Schafer and Bruce Davis's concept for a 'wilderness radio' : “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”. (R Murray Schafer, 'Radical Radio' in 'Sound by Artists', ed. D. Lander & M. Lexier, 1990)

(It should of course be pointed out that Kapiti is in fact inhabited, albeit sparsely, as many such places are).

'shouting over the music' icecast to radio futura 2010

two days after arriving back in New Zealand, a live re-mix of the site-specific transmission work shouting over the music : a dawn chorus for walter and olivier, recently staged as part of visible city within Melbourne's Cathedral Arcade, was netcast over the airwaves of radio zero, as part of the Radio Futura programme (12 - 16 October), official radio station for the FuturePlaces media art festival, Porto, Portugal. The festival's byline was "five days of exhibitions and events addressing the potential and the impact of digital media on local cultures" and its radio station utilised the potential of radio to link particular and distinct localities via global networks, with a programme of various artist projects and live streams converging in radio space. My slot was from 2-3am (2-3pm NZ time), Saturday 16th October, 2010. This performance without an immediate audience took place in the distinctly localised, deco-era domestic, quietly end-of-the-world setting of Kerry Ann Lee's living room, in Mornington, Dunedin, New Zealand

a regular listener from another NZ city emailed me with the following feedback after the show (thanks CW) :

"Among the buried beauty through so much of the piece, there seems a strong theme of an almost science fiction (in a dystopian modernist vein) element around the relationship of changing birdsong... the way the manipulated ontological qualities of radio itself are bending the very birdsongs into the warped, corrupted forms they will need to find to go beyond the beautifully preserved sanctuaries of 1920s arcades and all they stand for - Also represented by the comparatively elegant weave of Messiaen, against the sounds of the birdsong melting into violin into wheel squeak into a shortwave solo(!) and back and around... with the burned twitch of the characteristic R/C mini fm collapse to hiss as a regular reminder of some kind of perverse and anxious and impatient logic or intelligence surrounding it all, again corrupted... A piece veering from a rather bewitching miasma into the terrifying at surprising intervals."

"white and aimless signals" : icecast to free103point9's Noise! festival at the Ontological Hysteric Theater, Manhattan

The 26th of June was a rainy Friday in New Zealand's capital city, and the aether was filled with reports of Michael Jackson's death (at 11am that day, NZ time), as I prepared a 2pm radio cegeste transmission to the other side of the globe from a lecture theatre at Victoria University of Wellington's school of architecture and design.

My half hour set opened the second night of New York state transmission arts organisation free103point9's Noise! 2009 festival, held at the Ontological Hysteric Theater in Manhattan. This festival had a local/global distributed element, as each of its four nights began with an artist casting in their performance from another location somewhere around the globe.

The dislocated present-ness of being live at such a distance, when combined with the bounded locality of Mini FM, fragmented the live immediacy of the radio cegeste project in fascinating ways, and the two sided anonymity of the performance, in so many ways like a traditional radio broadcast, framed the sonic content.

This was a palimpsest of noise and archival material, including laptop-mixed location recordings of New Zealand natural and cultural spaces, theremin, music box, the activation of aleatory airwaves, and live and recorded/transmitted violin, as well as some guest appearances by some of my favourite etheric ghosts: '80s one hit wonder The Buggles ("in my mind and in my car / we can't rewind we've gone too far" as Cocteau might have been thinking when writing code-transmission for Death's black Rolls Royce) and fleeting Cegestions of the electromagnetic poetry channel of Jack Spicer

the first half of this performance can be heard here