radio cegeste at records records, dunedin

The bugler sent a call of high romance— “Lights out! Lights out!” to the deserted square. On the thin brazen notes he threw a prayer

- Robert Graves, 'The Last Post'

Records Records is an iconic second hand record store in Dunedin, New Zealand. An institution in the city, it was started in the 1970s by Roi Colbert, in a little space located in Stuart St, just off the central Octagon, where in the crucial decades of the 80s and 90s it filtered the ebbs and flows of the financial realities vs. the listening and collecting habits of various illustrious locals, while acting as an information and networking hub for Dunedin's sound culture. Recently, Roi sold up and the shop shifted to new premises over on Princes Street. Current owner Pat Faigan has continued the legacy and hosted many live gigs in the store, but, in an era when running independent record stores is a difficult proposition at best, Pat will be retiring from the record selling business at the end of October.

apart from a long history buying records from the shop, I spent a lot of time in the neighbourhood last summer, working right next to the current RR store at second hand bookstore Raven Books.

so, on Friday 22nd October, radio cegeste opportunistically crashed the end of someone else's gig upon finding out it was the 2nd to last one the store would host, and with half a day's notice, transmitted a site-specific soundscape at 8:30pm as a performative radio programme for RR, using the things I had at hand - namely, mini FM transmitter, 13 small radios, some of my 'bowed airwaves' violin tracks and field recordings transmitted via the above, alongside manipulation of room-sensitive radiophonic noise interference.

I also used a portable battery powered record player with material sourced from the shop that very afternoon (incl. an incredible spoken word 1-off private pressing of a british family recording an audio christmas greeting 'letter' to Grandma - the latter presumably located in NZ, which Pat sold me for a dollar), and some 78s found by a friend at the Dunedin dump (incl. a broken, skipping, cracked HMV 78rpm recording of the band of H.M. Coldstream Guards' rendition of ceremonial military standards Evening Hymn and The Last Post).

There were also some musical birdsong cards from the Otago Museum i'd bought that day, coupled with Radio NZ birdsong recordings on 45rpm which i'd picked up from the Blue Oyster Gallery after their inclusion in the Media Povera show. The lack of working overhead lights in the shop added to the huddled and intimate nature of the resulting peripheral, floor-based, no-mains-power performance for receivers and transmitter alike.

my post-Melbourne nomadisms have included, as is usual at some point in such Dunedin interludes, a temporary docking-point at None studios, and renewed engagement with the deep-listening silences and ghost-terrain of Dunedin has been balanced with a grateful nod toward the ongoing industrious activities and artistic vitality of the city's ever-shifting living communities.

Tonight's gig saw long term None residents Motoko (violin, voice) and Justin (percussion, voice) playing together as a duo they call The Surgical Department for this Records Records (second to) last post, as well. Also on the bill were local groups Communist Rainbow Relationship and QTPI.

as if this wasn't enough I cancelled my plan to see Robert Scott play at Chicks Hotel in favour of continuing the evening's energetic bust of engagement in event-based audio exploration by going back to None immediately after the gig to record a duo set with percussionist Lee Noyes.

This was more minimal, based on radiophonic feedback, and involved manipulating 'radios talking to each other' in theremin-like accompaniment to Lee's spacious and subtle acoustic manipulations of a drum, a wire, and various strings. Lee has since tidied this up and is treating it as a potential release, pending acceptance.

RIP, Records Records. thanks to Arron Clark who shot and edited the following video montage of the RR in-store proceedings...

"rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined...." : residual vistas : alexandra bridge, lake te anau, queenstown

residual vistas, imaginary landscapes: three undated hand coloured framed photographs found in opshop on St Andrews St, Dunedin, June 2009

"My working hypothesis was that any reasonably long memory - like every collection - is more structured than it seems at first. I think that a collection of photographs, taken apparently at random, or postcards, chosen on the spur of the moment, reaching a certain size, will start to draw a route, a map of the imaginary country inside us. By systematically looking through all these images, I am sure to discover behind the apparent disorder a secret map, like one of those treasure maps in stories about pirates."

- Chris Marker

imaginary media / the legacy of professor robert jack

In the “Second Introduction to an Archaeology of Imaginary Media,” Eric Kluitenberg writes that one of the tasks of the discipline of media archaeology is to scour the historical archive – “stories, drawings, prints, films, songs, advertisements or quasi-philosophical imaginaries” – for the utopian dreams of potential or possible media forms that might “compensate for the inherent flaws and deficiencies of interpersonal communication."

Siegfried Zielinski, one of the first scholars to use the term "media archaeology," breaks down the category of imaginary media into three groups of phenomena in his essay in the same text, "Modelling Media for Ignatius Loyola":

untimely media: media realized in technical and media practice either long before or after their invention

conceptual media: media sketched, modeled or drafted but not actually built

impossible media: media which cannot actually be built but nevertheless express ideas which impact the factual world of media

Slavoj Zizek’s book on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, Organs Without Bodies, argues not only that the emergence of the New is Deleuze’s central concern, but that for Deleuze, the New only emerges through repetition. In other words, the creation of something truly new always involves a kind of repetition. What is being repeated, though, “is not the way the past ‘effectively was’ but the virtuality inherent to the past and betrayed by its past actualization”. In other words, imaginary media present us with a series of possibilities for actions in the present precisely because they never fully appeared in the past.

By way of positioning the political project of media archaeology, Zielinski writes:

"[T]he main purpose of this archaeological work is to counter current tendencies towards standardization and universalization in the interest of a uniform global market with the rich variety of variants offered by bygone eras. If archaeology is the principal method for this special form of historical research, then variantology is the tactic (in the Foucauldian sense) by which individual genealogies are to be unravelled from its wealth of varieties."

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visiting the University of Otago's physics department with Nigel Bunn the other day (he was picking up a trolleyful of oscillators which, no longer used in the classroom, were going to be thrown away), we were shown around the labyrinthine environs of the teaching facilities by Paul Yates. the chance find of Robert Jack's transmitter sitting in a cupboard - the actual machine used in the first NZ broadcast, c.1921 (an exceptional imaginary moment in the history of our communications media), was predicated, after a wonderful, rambling tour of all sorts of nooks and crannies of obsolete technologies and teaching aids, by the statement, "oh, you might be interested in this"

... well, yes. I was.

an excerpt from Robert Jack's original broadcast can be heard here

the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography entry on Prof Jack can be found here

a timeline for New Zealand communications history can be read 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