Radio d'Oiseaux : EVP recordings among the extinct bird collections at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa

This morning I talked about Media Povera, a group exhibition i'm curating at the Blue Oyster Gallery, Dunedin (July 13 - August 7), in an interview with Lynn Freeman for Radio New Zealand programme The Arts on Sunday. The conversation also included artists Kim Pieters and Nigel Bunn, speaking via distance from RNZ's Dunedin studio. This interview will air Sunday week, while we are in the midst of installing the show for its Tuesday opening.

Media Povera includes a work by Radio Cegeste. This will be an iteration of the Radio d'Oiseaux project with its focus on birdsong, museology, and NZ broadcast space. A first foray into the collection of bird silences for this work, in the form of EVP investigations into extinct New Zealand avian species at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, was conducted between 10:30am - 12:30pm on Monday 28th June.

Many thanks extended to Gillian Stone, Collection Manager of Birds at Te Papa, for access to the collections, and also to James Gilberd for technical assistance and use of equipment.

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

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

radio acoustic

under the Borderline Ballroom banner, I organised a special live radiophonic simulcast from iconic Lyttelton venue The Wunderbar, via local independent radio station Volcano Radio 88:5FM.

both I and the artists were interviewed about the initiative by Sage Forest for The Music Mix, a programme on Radio New Zealand, some mention of which can possibly still be found here

A'sides for Betaville's Peter Kirk designed the event's wonderful oscillatory wave-themed poster.

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the BORDERLINE BALLROOM casts out live into the electromagnetic spectrum this month with a focus on experimental radio, broadcast as art, and artists engaging with the technology of radio.

Fusing radio broadcast and live performance, the Borderline Ballroom #17 incorporates three live solo artists and the radio programmes Borderline Radio and A'Sides for Betaville, in a live to air collaboration with Lyttelton community broadcast station Volcano Radio 88:5FM, which has been operating in the port town just outside Christchurch since February 2008, and whose transmission area is locally bounded by the crater rim.

The Borderline Ballroom #17 will be on-site at the Wunderbar in Lyttelton and simulcast live on the station's airwaves from 8pm.

Sunday 21 September 2008
the Wunderbar, Lyttelton
8:00pm - $5, doorsales only

with:

ADAM WILLETTS (Chch)

Adam Willetts is a musician and artist whose practice shifts casually between hi-tech and handcrafted as he explores relationships and interfaces between people, technology and popular culture. His use of DIY electronics, radio, computers and game controllers creates dynamic and surprising live performances that carefully balance elements of fragile beauty with violent eruptions of static, electromagnetic interference and feedback.

Adam has been performing and exhibiting throughout New Zealand and internationally since the late 1990s featuring at numerous festivals and exhibitions including Lines of Flight 2006 (Dunedin), TASIE 2006 (Beijing), S3D 2007 (Auckland), and Cloudland at ISEA 2008 (Singapore).

For September's Borderline Ballroom Adam will be performing new work for synthesizers and electrosmog.

MELA (Lytn)

Mela is Helen Greenfield (Barnard's Star, the LEDs, Miss Mercury)'s experimental audio/visual project which focuses on (revels in) the medium specific properties of a variety of obsolete media, and within which "layers of repeating melodies, gradually effected drones, and suitably unrecognisable beats create an imperfect but mellifluous musical microclimate."

For this Borderline Ballroom performance Mela will be eschewing the easy translation of digital imagery to debut her OHP-projected, hand-coloured, hand-made slides, layering them in vibrant colour fields which recall the exuberant, colour saturated direct-film paintings of Len Lye, and also investigating the aesthetics of the constrained gesture and broken things, saying "maybe Mela more closely resembles her equipment at the moment... but who copies who?"

I-RORY (Chch)

I-Rory is an eclectic multi-instrumentalist, "a... dilettante, percussionist and improvising musician who plays the stereo." Last seen in a solo capacity supporting Philip Jeck at the Borderline Ballroom #13, for September's performance he is promising to celebrate the politer pursuits of the season, to take listeners on "a sunday walk" and will be contemplating a "pitch invasion" with semi-automatic percussion, obstructed field recordings and attack, sustain, decay, feedback.

"Was a delight to absorb self in the digi-soup of I-rory. Using crude objects of both home-made and exotic qualities, I-rory evoked the sound plethorae of Zoviet France." -Matt Middleton, April 2008

A'SIDES for BETAVILLE (Lytn)

a radio show hosted by Peter Kirk every Sunday on Volcano Radio 88.5FM from 10pm - 12am, A'sides is radio in the classic tradition of late night experimental collage soundscape, a maverick creative broadcast practice begun on US college radio in the late 1970s, with precursors in earlier music/audio/collage works and sound experiments, whose prior local manifestations include Rotate Your State (RDU, 1991-2003), as well as various programs on the original Radio Lyttelton.

A'sides rides the drift of the late night dial toward a poetics of the medium, becoming a framework through which to listen in to listening, playing with radio as-playback, making audible the sound of broadcast and its sonic storage media. In its collaged craftings, found-cultural detritus jams with precious artifacts of high culture, the mp3 speaks to the tape loop and the gramophone, hand-manipulated op shop records of Russian folk songs and sea shanties (the record as readymade... the medium as the massage) bump tactilities and temporalities with recordings of historic avant gardists speaking on the creative process, and live streaming of internet radio art projects.

for the Borderline Ballroom, A'sides promises as much de-mystification of its process as it promises further inscrutability, staging live radio art as event, while retaining its intimacy of late night listening for those who understand that "the ears don't have eyelids"

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the BORDERLINE BALLROOM is a Christchurch-based initiative aiming to provide a regular live presence for performative audio experimentation which supports local practitioners working on the peripheries of music and sound, while offering a resource for national and international performers touring the South Island.