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

last gasp of the DJ, Lines of Flight 2009

I was offered an impromptu DJ slot at the legendary Dunedin experimental music festival Lines of Flight on Friday, filling in for Peter Kirk, who hosts the experimental radio show A'sides for Betaville, which I have been sporadically involved with since its beginnings in late 2007 on Lyttelton's independent broadcast station Volcano 88:5FM.

Despite being currently fairly uninterested in live DJing (apart from the prospect of developing a no-electricity set with wind up gramophones), the challenge of providing a segue from artist to artist, something i'd become used to thinking-through on a regular basis during my organisational involvement hosting monthly events with the Borderline Ballroom experimental music group in Christchurch from 2007-8, led to something pleasingly minimal, near-inaudible, and raw, heavy on field recordings and live outtakes.

While I didn't go in the A'sides direction of maximalism and kept everything gesturally restrained to the laptop and a single CDJ, a lot of the audio was sourced from my archive of bootleg recordings, many featuring people present in the room, with the general idea of not competing with the music, but providing a convivial, yet stimulating ambiance. Less cegeste than 'suggest' for a night, I felt rather privileged to be able to provide such transitions for the sounds of Peter Wright (Christchurch), Crude (Dunedin), EYE (Dunedin), and the wonderful Xe (Auckland - (Rachel Shearer, Guy Treadgold, Sean O'Reilly, and Dean Roberts)).

radio cegeste at Chicks Hotel, Dunedin

the inaugural radio cegeste live micro radio performance on 12th Dec 2008 involved creating a site-specific radio programme for the iconic, historically notorious Chicks Hotel, in Port Chalmers, Dunedin. a playlist of environmental and anecdotal field recordings collected around the Port Chalmers area within 24 hours of broadcast were played back via itunes, handmade Mini FM transmitter and hand-held radio receivers.

Nigel Bunn helped me collect the field recordings. Our sonic mapping exercise took in various indoor and outdoor, cultural and natural environments. Along the way I also talked to a church organist about trains, a publican about the artist Ralph Hotere, children exiting a school bus, and the Chicks Hotel proprietor Hector Hazard about his attempts to 'unlearn the guitar'.

I shared a bill with various improvised noise / sound practitioners and DJs from Christchurch and Dunedin : Adam Willetts, Dirt Room, EYE, and A'sides for Betaville. Kim Pieters took the following performance photographs.