marcasite radio (an unstable object for ann ada): further and future experiments.

 

I'm starting writing this today on the 4th September, 2022, a date that marks 12 years since the 2010 Christchurch earthquake. A geological event understood within discourse for a while, after the even more devastating event of 2011, as the 'first' quake. And perhaps some of us reading and listening also believed this. Within the settler imagination and timescales, it was unexpected, and this in turn cast the settler imagination and its timescales into a shocked confusion, even as it affected personal histories on the immediate level of crisis. As time went on and the initial shock turned to learning, the questions proliferated - had this happened before, and if so how and when? 

The decade since this 'event' provides ample opportunity to reflect on several other temporalities, human and non-human. It has perhaps let us understand that the 'first' quake of the 4th of September was an event that cannot be understood as singular in any way, even if the structures of Anglo-Western naming initially led us - and continue to seduce us - into reifying it into a stasis, something that seals it into a nostalgic past. But far from singular, it is an event which kept - and still keeps - on its way. As a slow tremor, reverberating out beyond itself, into all of our histories, and as reverberant energy tends to do, changing and co-mingling them, through resonance as the fluttering and fraying of singularity, the troubling of borders. It has affected my family deeply, in ways that are ongoing, and complex, and will continue to be so.  

fieldnotes: tracing the source of the signal only opens the noise of the field (talking to the lyrebird about copyright)

“A trace is the apparition of a distance, however close that which it evokes may be. Whereas the aura is the apparition of a nearness, however far away that which left it behind may be.”
- Walter Benjamin, fragment from The Arcades Project

tracing the source of the signal only opens the noise of the field (talking to the lyrebird about copyright) is a site-specific research project currently being conducted as fieldwork by radio cegeste in the location of Sherbrooke Forest, in the Dandenong Ranges, about an hour out of the city of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

The project traces a particular vein of pioneering Australian broadcast and field recording experiments beginning in June 1931, and conducted throughout the 1930s. In this period, the nascent development of audio transmission and storage technologies became momentarily fascinated with the recording abilities of a particular bird species.

In their paper, First Sound Recordings of the Lyrebird, Peter J. Fullagar and Ederic S. Slater compile a useful evaluative overview of this history. They describe the first recording (on the optical soundtrack of film) and the first (non-live) transmission: "The first sound recording in Australia of a wild bird was made 28 June 1931. On that day the song of the Superb Lyrebird Menura novaehollandiae was preserved on sound-film in Sherbrooke Forest in the Dandenong Ranges, east of Melbourne. Australian Sound Films Ltd. made this historic recording with the assistance of Ray Littlejohns who was at the time completing a film on lyrebirds. The recording was broadcast during the evening of 2 July 1931, from a radio station in Sydney. Until this time all attempts at recording the song of the Superb Lyrebird in the wild had been frustrated by lack of suitable equipment with all previous efforts being of unacceptable quality."

These field experiments went on, and a subsequent session produced the first Australian commercially available sound objects documenting the vocal abilities of a wild bird: "The recording used in the production of a gramophone record was made on 29 May 1932; repeating the field recording methods used in 1931. This record was issued in late 1932 or possibly not until 1933. Further recordings on sound-film were made in Sherbrooke Forest; one of special interest being a 45 minute recording made in 1934 which was subsequently used in preparing the soundtrack for the film on lyrebirds produced on behalf of the Commonwealth Government by Ray Littlejohns."

But the 1931 experiments also included live transmissions from the field: "The first direct broadcast of the song of the Superb Lyrebird went to air on Sunday morning 5 July 1931, following some earlier test transmissions in Melbourne. This broadcast, by the Australian Broadcasting Company, was made from Sherbrooke Forest with various telephone and land-line connexions making it possible to relay the signal for simultaneous transmissions out of Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide radio stations."

The July 5th transmission also reached further, across Bass strait to Tasmania: "Reception was hailed as excellent; indeed, reception of this transmitted signal in Tasmania allowed for re-transmission from a radio station in Hobart." It was also heard live across the dateline: "A short wave overseas transmission of the broadcast on 5 July 1931 was provided by Amalgamated Wireless (A’asia) Ltd. and reception was confirmed, at least, from North America. Broadcasts of Superb Lyrebird song from Sherbrooke Forest were transmitted in 1933 and 1934, including further short-wave overseas transmissions."

In June 2016, during the depths of winter (which is Lyrebird breeding season), I traveled to the Sherbrooke forest on an initial field trip to conduct the first of a series of sonic re-mediations, undergirded by an exercise in investigative biomedia archaeology, researching and recording the site of the 1931 and 1932 recordings and broadcasts of the first wild bird in Australian media history. 

I took with me on this trip an 'original copy' of the 1932 gramophone record (from my own collection), which was one tangible object which emerged from these initial collisions of site, species, and technological invention, as well as a gramophone player on which to play back this record to the (presumed - Lyrebirds are extremely territorial, and don't roam far over the generations, a fact reflected in the content of their sonic repertoire) descendants of the single Lyrebird captured on it. In this exercise I was assisted by members of the Sherbrooke Lyrebird Survey Group in (approximately) identifying sites, and while in the area I also joined their dawn survey session the next day, and recorded the sounds of these dedicated citizen scientists in their work, as well as the dawn chorus of Lyrebirds in the forest.

The 1932 record, recorded on the 29 May and released later that year or early the year after,  is credited to "Herschells Pty Ltd. Sound Picture Producers Melbourne, recorded in the Sherbrooke Forest, Victoria, Australia under the supervision of Mr. Ray Littlejohns, member of Royal Australasian Ornithologists Union. Dialogue by Mr. Alfred L. Samuel."

From the first pressing of the record's original wrapper (beautifully illustrated with a drawing of a lyrebird), we can read a decsription of the bird it presents to home listeners, far from the Dandenong forests:

"His mimicry is almost uncanny and in addition to his wonderful repertoire you will hear above the roar of the wind in the forest, perfect imitations of - the Butcher Bird, the Kookaburra, the Australian Thrush, the Whip Bird, the chuckle of a flock of Crimson Parrots, the Pilot bird, the Black Cockatoo, the Honeyeater... You will also distinguish what appears to sound like a man hammering a fence, a water pump in action, a Dog barking the warning cry of a White Cockatoo, the chuckle of a domestic Fowl and a man whistling for his Dog."

Side A of this recording is a voiceover narrative, which functions to construct a setting of romantic wilderness, a framework into which a recording of a single lyrebird is placed, a "wild Australia" in contrast to the home listener's position in their domestic sitting room: "Don't forget that what you are about to hear", the male voiceover says, is "a bird singing its own wild song, with "the nearest human being almost a quarter of a mile away."

side B of this recording comprises a demonstrative cataloguing of examples of the lyrebird’s mimicry. the record's narrator, in introducing each of these in systematic fashion, describes the lyrebird as “Australia’s greatest mocking bird”

The record is copyrighted as follows: “Melbourne: Herschells Pty Ltd, 1932. Recorded in the Sherbrooke Forest, Victoria, Australia, under the supervision of Mr. Ray Littlejohns. Must not be sold below price fixed by Copyright Owners. Must not be used for Radio Broadcasting or Publicly performed.” No-one apparently asked the Lyrebirds whether they had given copyright clearance for their sounds.

In the re-recording I made on this initial field trip, the record was taken back to the place (as closely identified as I could manage) where it was recorded over 70 years later, to produce a new residue of its playing to living Lyrebirds (a demonstrative playback conducted without human listeners apart from myself), who are presumed to be direct descendants of the historically recorded bird. Listening back to the recording I made that day, the calls of various distant Lyrebirds in the present time of the 2016 recording echo that of the 1932 bird, their long-dead ancestor on the shellac record, but they also overspill the record's narrative framing, to answer, to speak back, to include their own voices in the re-recording, to include the recorded voice in their own transmission (broadcast/reception) space. Re-listening to this, they can be heard to "mock" the plummy radio voice of the narrator as he praises them for their mocking-bird abilities, and his efforts to systematically set out each incidence of mimicry as an audio catalogue frozen in time. Other sounds recorded on site include wind in the trees, human voices (of passing tourists), rain and other species of birds. The collision of the two times – 1932 and 2016 - destabilizes both the constructed soundscape of the record and the integrity of the location recording.

Many thanks to Jan Incoll (a.k.a "The Lyrebird Lady") and all involved with the Sherbrooke Lyrebird Survey Group for the dawn cups of billy tea, the companionship, and the tolerance of microphones. More field trips and other experiments and formalities are planned for this project. Stay tuned.

marcasite radio: experiment #1.

a brief post-midnight birthday-morning experiment / work-in-progress report. the first vaguely successful attempt at materialising an object i've been thinking about for quite a while now, which has the working title of 'marcasite radio' and is, essentially, an experiment in 1920s residual media, based around the speculation that the white iron pyrite that was used to make marcasite jewellery in the 1920s and 30s might also be able to be used as the crystalline mineral in a crystal detector. 

I'm pleased to be able to report initial success - when set into a crystal radio receiver of the same era, my maternal great grandmother's marcasite brooch becomes a radio mineral, a diode that faintly speaks the voices of the aether. her name was Ann Wright (i'm named after her) and she was born in the 19th century, and was 101 when she died. (as of around an hour ago, i'm 59 years younger than that milestone).

After quite a few years of searching for them after the museum where they were housed was destroyed in the 2010-2011 Christchurch earthquakes, I've recently come into possession of copies of Ann's oral histories, taped in the 1980s, which detail fragments of the everyday life of the small town of Kaiapoi, located just outside Christchurch, in the early 20th century, among static hiss, noise, and the lapses of memory. Ultimately I am hoping to use these taped gaps, erasures and traces as the basis of a composition which can be channeled back to radio, transmitted via the active collaboration of the brooch and the ring she wore at the time, and which currently remain mute witnesses of those histories.


My mother gave me the two pieces of Ann's marcasite jewellery I am using in this experiment, as a graduation present. I wear the brooch in the same place I sometimes clip radio cegeste's transmitter aerial when performing. I hope neither of them are too offended by me re-purposing such exquisite heirlooms (taonga) to channel aetheric-material ghosts, while also thinking back toward the work of this country's female radio pioneers in the first decades of the 20th century. 

That history, itself like a faint, crackling signal in the midst of static rain, could also do with more elaboration - likewise, a lot more work is also needed here, but it's a promising start, and an excellent way to celebrate the first few hours of being fairly old now, myself...

a memorial silence for Sceloglaux albifacies, on the centenary of its extinction.

On the 5th July 2014, I headed into Canterbury Museum to record the mounted specimen of the Laughing Owl/Whekau (Sceloglaux albifacies) to be found, grouped humbly under the designation "forest birds", with various other New Zealand endemic species both extinct and still hanging on, in the Museum's extensive, old fashioned 'bird hall'. A sonic still life which was quietly significant, this 10 minute recording occurred on the 100th anniversary of the day (05.07.1914) the last officially acknowledged member of this species was found dead by the side of the road at Blue Cliffs station, not far from here in South Canterbury, by an 18 year old girl named Airini Woodhouse.

It seemed appropriate to commemorate this small, bleak anniversary, not mentioned in the New Zealand public media (unlike the 100th anniversary of the First World War, which has diverted much arts funding towards various memorial projects this year), with a private mourning ritual, a memorial silence which mirrors the silence of the bird itself, from Airini's sad discovery in 1914 onward, despite the rich prior textuality of description which attends this bird's voice, the eerie "doleful shrieks" and startling, unsettling, mad night forest laughter documented so frequently in the late 1800s, when the Whekau was still found in South Island forest and plain. This took the form of recorded listening as a form of meditation, an inhabitation of a listening space, rather than merely a form of archiving, mixed in with a paranormal ritual investigation, via the practice of Electronic Voice Phenomenon - a nod to radio's long association with attempts to contact the dead.