Commissioned Radio Productions

In addition to our Live-to-Air performances we also commissioned 14 new studio works. We selected a range of artists and producers from Scotland and further afield, both established practitioners and those new to working with radio. We discovered many of these artists through their submissions to our open call in previous years. These productions are a showcase for the diverse and inventive approach to the medium that Radiophrenia represents. After receiving their premiere on Radiophrenia these works have been syndicated to our partner stations around the world.

Our Production Commissions were supported by Creative Scotland, CCA Glasgow, Outset Scotland and The Jerwood Charitable Foundation.

Commissioned artists

// Gregory Whitehead // Alessandro Bosetti // Meira Asher & Maya Dunietz // Jason Lescalleet // Sarah Tripp // Sisters Akousmatica // Luke Fowler & Richard McMaster // Wojciech Rusin // Doog Cameron // Lisa Busby & Rose Dagul // Klaysstarr // Rob Kennedy & Jess Worrall // Catherine Street // Isabelle Stragliati //



Catherine
Street

Photo by Henrik Thorburn

So what is your vibration?(2017)


So what is your vibration? is a poem and a stream of consciousness. There is fire, lava and molten metal as well as electrical storms, spiders’ webs and votive offerings to the gods. The work is in part inspired by visits to the geology collection of the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.


CATHERINE STREET is an artist whose work consists of layers of experience. In installations her body is often present amongst projections and audio works, drawings and texts, creating an atmosphere that may be sensual, comical, joyful or disturbing. Street pays particular attention to themes of transformation and to the relationship between matter, thought, emotion and sensation. Street has worked with many of Scotland’s institutions such as Glasgow School of Art, CCA Glasgow, GoMA, DCA and The National Galleries of Scotland. She has also performed and exhibited further afield for example in Norway, Germany, Czech Republic, New Zealand and USA.
catherinestreet.net


Jason
Lescalleet

Sketching an Arc


Jason Lescalleet assembles recordings to create a narrative meditation on the passage of time and our perception thereof.


JASON LESCALLEET Since establishing himself as a preeminent voice in contemporary electro-acoustic study, Jason Lescalleet has exploded the notion of what is possible within the realm of tape-based music. His recorded catalog acknowledges a diversity of application, from lo-fi reel-to-reel soundscaping and work for hand-held cassette machines, to digital sampling and computer generated composition. Lescalleet’s live actions further expand his ouevre to include work with video, dance, performance art and multi-media concerns.
In the past two decades, Lescalleet has gradually and painstakingly compiled a compelling discography on notable labels such as Erstwhile, RRR, Intransitive Recordings, Kye, Celebrate Psi-Phenomenon, Hanson Records, Chondritic Sound, and most recently via his own Glistening Examples imprint. He has collaborated with Kevin Drumm, Aaron Dilloway, Graham Lambkin, Phill Niblock, Joe Colley, John Hudak, Rafael Toral, Thomas Ankersmit, and CM Von Hausswolff, among others, and during this time he’s built a solid reputation for delivering a visceral live experience in concert.

He currently lives in Maine, where he operates the Glistening Examples publishing label and the Glistening Labs studio for audio recording and mastering services.
lescalleet.wordpress.com


LISA BUSBY
& ROSE DaGuL

Untitled for cello, mangle, youtube & voice


Lisa and Rose have a shared interest in making visible process activities. Also in the intangible connections, hidden layers, and emergent materials of the compositional process. This, as yet untitled, work exists as a series of movable parts; all of which form the most expanded conception of its material and immaterial elements but not all of which need to surface in any given iteration of the work. These include – scored elements both notated and instructional, objects, songs by other artists, online video, a decibel meter, conversations between collaborators.

Iteration 1 for RadioPhrenia, 2017.

Series of six semi-improvised studies for cello, amplified mangle, and voice, in linear sequence with processed youtube audio ARCHIVE_ 10 Years Ago Today Britney Shaves Heads And Gets Tattooed! by X17Online Video [For all the latest Celebrity Gossip, Entertainment News and the best Paparazzi Photos and Video]. Pitch material for cello generated by application of various filtering exercises to Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds Hallelujah. Objects in performance of mangle include chalk, sugar, USB drives, tampons. Other performance instructions, for both instruments, derived from Fleetway Foldaway Wringer instructions for use. Conversations during the making process reflected on intangible experiences of everyday anxiety, fear and despair, and by contrast the ways we have to represent or articulate them; Britney’s instagram account; ASMR, slime and hydraulic press videos on youtube; does Lisa’s dad have any tools that we can crush things with; Rihanna ‘Diamonds’; an interview with Robert Wyatt that Rose heard (Late Junction?); Anne Griffiths Codiaeum Variegatum; recent/various reading on vulnerability, sadness, sickness and hysteria in relation to empowerment and resistance; whether to record our voices.


LISA BUSBY is a Scottish artist, composer, and vocalist working in London, in long duration forms, performance video, text based score, installation and site specific performance. She is interested in exploring the fringes of song; the appropriation of everyday objects and scenarios with a particular focus on using domestic playback media and objects as instruments; and how pop culture artefacts can be set in new and unusual contexts. She’s worked with venues including Blackwood Gallery Toronto, IAC Malmö, Tate, Wysing Arts, and Cafe Oto; curators Electra, Primary and Saisonscape; labels Adaadat and The Lumen Lake; and with collaborators Rutger Hauser, The Nomadic Female DJ Troupe, and Gabriel Bohm Calles.

ROSE DAGUL is an artist, composer and cellist living in London. She is the co-founder and coordinator of The Surround, a DIY platform for performance and music, and is a co-conductor of the Peckham Chamber Orchestra. Other projects include Rhosyn, Holy Island Sketchbook, Rutger Hauser and Alien Wind.
lisabusby.com


SARAH
TRIPP

One Hundred Tiny Glass Brains Waking Up…..


One Hundred Glass Brains Waking Up is a fictional conversation between two people who begin as strangers. Without any prior social bonds they discover they are free to make each other up. This is escapist fiction pared back to two people in a room looking for a way out of social stultification.

Performed by: Brighton Upton Trust

Composed by: Nichola Scrutton


SARAH TRIPP is an artist and writer working with fictional characters. Her recent works include a work for radio broadcast commissioned by Camden Arts Centre (London); a collection of her short prose published by Book Works (London) and the programming of a day-long event exploring characters on the stage, page and screen commissioned by LUX Scotland for the Tramway (Glasgow). Her forthcoming novel will be published in 2018 by Book Works.

NICHOLA SCRUTTON is a freelance composer, sound artist and experimental vocalist based in Glasgow. Her work spans a range of self-directed projects, interdisciplinary and participatory collaborations.
www.nicholascrutton.co.uk

BRIGHTON UPTON-TRUST is a composite of artists based in Glasgow working across a variety of mediums – A hypothetical model of production and procrastination.

Supported by Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, Sian Robinson Davies, Peter Amoore, Simon Buckley, Claire Walsh, Kitty Anderson, Suzanne van der Lingen, Shauna McMullan.


Gregory
Whitehead

NOTHING LIKE US EVER WAS


A radio performance based on Carl Sandburg’s Four Preludes to the Playthings of the Wind, with vocalist Laura Wiens.


GREGORY WHITEHEAD is the creator of more than one hundred radio plays, essays and acoustic adventures for the BBC, Radio France, Deutschland Radio, Australia’s ABC, NPR and others. Often interweaving documentary and fictive materials into playfully unresolved narratives, Whitehead’s aesthetic is distinguished by a deep philosophical commitment to radio as a medium for poetic navigation and free association. In his voice and text-sound works, he explores the tension between a continuous breath/pulse and the eruption of chaotic discontinuities, as well as exploring rhythms of linguistic entropy and decay.
gregorywhitehead.net
desperadophilosophy.net

LAURA WIENS is a Pittsburgh-based vocalist and composer, most recently performing with RML Jazz and the big band The Jazz Conspiracy, and previously at Little E’s Jazz club heading the Laura Wiens Quartet. Laura has sung on two previous radio dramas by Gregory Whitehead, “The Day King Hammer Fell from the Sky” and “Bring Me the Head of Philip K Dick”, both broadcast on BBC Radio 4. She has fronted blues and funk bands as far away as Belgrade, Serbia, and closer to home in West Virginia and Washington DC. Her own eclectic music compositions can be found and downloaded at www.purevolume.com/aurallaura

CARL SANDBURG was born on January 6, 1878, in Galesburg, Illinois. He fought in the Spanish-American War. In 1913, he moved to Chicago to work as a journalist. In 1914, his poetry was published in Poetry magazine. His well-received free verse poetry focused on American workers. He also collected folksongs into books and wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography about Abraham Lincoln.


Luke Fowler &
Richard McMaster

THE GREAT WESTERN ROAD (2017)


The great western road is a collaborative sound/photo work by Luke Fowler and Richard McMaster. Starting at sunrise on Saturday 9th September 2017 Fowler and McMaster walked the length of one of Glasgow’s oldest and longest Roman roads; Great Western Road (GWR). Beginning at St. George’s X they made timed 1minute recordings, every 7minutes, until they reached a point (near Old Kilpatrick) where it became too dangerous to continue on foot. Using identical location mixers and the same Mid-Side microphone configurations – Richard walked and recorded on one side of the road whilst Luke recorded on the other. They both recorded as prompted and by the agreed fixed structure – with no plan or anticipation of capturing any specific sound events besides the road itself. The two discreet, yet synchronised recordings are then brought together in the editing process and panned hard left and right to create a wide stereo image of the road’s soundscape on that day. The Great Western Road documents the city slowly awakening and traverses a cross-section of neighbourhoods and terrains from St. George’s X and Kelvinbridge to Anniesland and Duntocher. It crosses the River Kelvin and passes alongside the Botanical Gardens and Gartnavel Hospital before reaching the A82 motorway. The Great Western Road is a major route for commercial traffic and also the means for the city’s inhabitants to escape on daytrips to Loch Lomond and beyond.


RICHARD MCMASTER is an artist/musician – he lives and works in Glasgow (UK).

LUKE FOWLER is a filmmaker/musician – he lives and works in Glasgow (UK).


The Great Western Roadwas co-commissioned by Resonance Extra as part of Strands, supported by Jerwood Charitable Foundation



Jess Worrall &
Rob Kennedy

The three ring circus comes to town—————————–


“So…s… so what we’re seeing here is that there are things you can’t immediately control… you can’t control the motivations and the actions… but what we are seeing them seek to control is the physical space around this as much as they can… there are people as we’ve been speaking to…who are locked in… into other locations… they are now clearing the space around it and they’re… controlling what they can… they can’t control what’s in the mind.”

Edited quotes from panelist Hugh Riminton, Studio 10 News, Network Ten, Australia, 15/12/14

Radio Presenter: Fletcher Mathers

Thanks to: Ronan Breslin at La Chunky Studios & Pete Dowling.


JESS WORRALL is a freelance theatre designer and occasional writer.
www.jessicaworrall.co.uk

ROB KENNEDY makes videos, sounds, sculpture and events both independently and in collaboration with others in keen awareness of the difficulties of any form of succinct communication.
website


Doog
Cameron

The Ongoing Drain of the Fight Between the Wild & Tame


This work comprises field and forgotten recordings, small town/city centre conversations and sounds with audio effects, synths and acoustics. It tries to promote then reign back the constant battle experienced, to lesser or greater degrees, of the wild and tame sides of personality and behaviour.  We experience brooding on madness with inner thoughts in and out of context of everyday living, or getting in a state where our outer actions and words lead us away from our ‘actual’ personalities, towards the Steppenwolfesque. Contrastingly we can be content in situations where we should be stressed, angry, sad or irritable – sound and music, whether audible to everyone or playing in our minds often play a part in this.
Worth listening out for are roaring polar bears, wind up chickens, rusty curtain hooks, clicking reindeer heel cartilage, geese, starlings on a Summers night, diaries, bin store gadgies, drunks, art exhibitions, junior football, domestication as an unattainable myth, sobriety, child’s play, shop ambience and last chance yelps.


No longer acceptable as entertainment student party and cheap deal booze nights got sacked for hard clubbing and sonic experimentation – only the good stuff from then on was pursued. The dawn of  multitrack recording ensued with late night sessions of improvised intoxicated songs with Ryan Lambie as Johns Indie Disco.  The JID  years were a productive period, tracks of techno punk quality and some flashes of pure genius, but only 3 live gigs, meant the main means of promotion was handing out home burnt CDs in the street. The Ladywell Lout era then ensued, involving the circle of contributors from JID with semi-documentary based audio on gala days, gadgies, losers and high rises.


Alessandro
Bosetti

Location Series #1


In this piece I have recorded as many people as possible within a certain period of time. Wherever I went I asked people to say “here” in their own mother language. Each person was asked to say this word only once, and only in cases of perfect bi- or tri-lingualism did I allow them to say it in additional languages. I have edited all of these single-word samples chronologically in the exact order in which they were recorded. All recordings were made between August 12th and October 30th, 2017 in Vicobarone (IT), Milano (IT), Marseille (FR), Porto (PT), Marseille (FR), Taipei (TW), Bologna (IT) and Lyon (FR).

People, microphones and languages move, at least in relation to each other. Their movement is somehow unpredictable and free as a beautiful dance. Whilst scanning the territory I experienced how linguistic and geographical landscapes intersect in complex ways and how every territory is constantly transversed in multiple directions by so many living beings.

Each of these recordings of a single word is evidence of an individual being in a specific place at a specific moment in time although we may not know the actual details of who, where and when. People come and go and are found in unexpected places, each one of them with her/his own biography and memory. The microphone has its own schedule, its own agenda, and opens a window towards the future and the not here. Languages moreover, travel with people, sometimes the same person carries two, three or more. Languages are not bound to a specific location or to a specific person as they migrate from place to place and from mouth to mouth.

In triangulating languages, individuals and the microphone we obtain precise coordinates of pure existence but we may not be able to infer proper locations. Nevertheless all these coordinates draw a path, a road, a corrugated and fascinating itinerary worthy of travelling over and over again with our ears and imagination. Consider this piece a travelogue, or a meditation on voice in relative space and have a nice trip.

Thanks to Pedro Rocha, Mark Vernon, Camera Chao.


ALESSANDRO BOSETTI is a composer, performer and sound artist whose work delves into the musicality of spoken language, utilizing misunderstandings, translations and interviews as compositional tools. His works for voice and electronics blur the line between electro acoustic composition, aural writing and performance.
www.melgun.net


Meira Asher &
Maya Dunietz

Spawning in the name of


While planning to meet for a 24hrs. radiophrenia session, we managed to relaunch, yet again, our elemental theme, with which we are engaged during 2017-2018, namely, the Israeli colonisation and occupation of Palestine for 69, 70 years respectively.
We discuss Maya’s new piece “18 Songs” for Choir and ensemble in the Arabic language, a language which is officially excluded by the Israeli State, of which its texture is systematically used to distance, separate and scare the Israeli population although being the mother tongue of half of its’ citizens. “I innocently believe that through the work of music, choir members in Israel will get the chance to initiate and embrace the Arabic language, a Semitic sister of their own language… “ Meira’s “The Last shall be First” Sound-Text act, together with artist Eran Sachs, has just returned from its 2nd trial at HearSay Audio festival in Ireland. “Dissecting Fanon’s words on our Israeli Colonial bloody sound altar is another ambiguous issue to explore…”
We play parts of the projects, discuss them, and knead together some specific materials from them.

Featuring the voices and sounds of Daphne Banai – Machsom Watch, Tamer Masalha, Tamara Nasser, Bat-Kol Choir, Eran Sachs, Anat Pick, Faye Shapiro

Thanks: The Radiophrenia team, Guy Hirschfeld, Liam Evans, Jeff Zorilla.

* Press Here to watch ‘The Last Shall be First’ in White Trash.


MAYA DUNIETZ is a composer, performer and sound artist performing internationally for the past 20 years. Her work is always site specific and performance based, investigating various interconnections between music, visual art, performance, technological research and philosophy. Her works are commissioned by renowned performers and ensembles and she has created sound performance works for institutions such as Palais de Tokyo Paris, Arnolfini Gallery Bristol, Reykjavik Arts festival and many more. Maya holds workshops for experiments in group singing in various venues around the world, workshops this year are held in Paris and USA. Maya is currently composing a new piece for ensemble and choir to be premiered in December 2017, creating a new performance project in collaboration with light artist Jacki Shemesh and researching for her next sound installation, Root Of Two.
mayadunietz.com

MEIRA ASHER The research areas of composer-performer Meira Asher include Social Documentary and the Amplification of the Human Body.
She is a lecturer at Haifa University’s Art School and curator-presenter of the weekly Radio Art program radioart106fm on Kol HaCampus Tel Aviv between 2014-2017 (member of the Radia.fm network). Her recent works include “Voices vs. The Israeli Occupation of Palestine 2017” for Wurfsendung Deutchlandfunk Kultur, and the site-specific sound work “Still Sleeping” commissioned by EyeBeam (New York) for Acoustic Infrastructure and nominated to the Grand Prix Nova 2017.
Meira has collaborated with Eran Sachs in the Asher.Zax duo since 2012. With their electroacoustic setups, they carry texts by Artaud, Fanon, Wilfred Owen, and more, to new extremes. She is currently finalising a recorded Hebrew version of Antonin Artaud’s radio play “To Have Done with the Judgement of God” (1947), financed by the Mifal HaPais Council for the Culture and Arts.
Meira’s largest extended interdisciplinary work was conceived and implemented during 2003-2006 with the societal art project Woman See Lots of Things. It was created together with female ex-child combatants in Sierra Leone and became a framework model for her future work.
www.meiraasher.net


SISTERS
AKOUSMATICA

Photo by Keelan O’Hehir

NM, SK


Julia Drouhin and Phillipa Stafford, as Sisters Akousmatica, investigate mysterious radio broadcasts known as “the Silent Key”.

Radio: drag the dial across frequencies at any given time, any given place and you will hear a cacophony of sounds. Static, pops and crackles, whistles, the tap, tap tap of the world and the universe going about its electromagnetic business. In between those sounds are stations: broadcasts that are music, news, chatter, cryptic messages and espionage. Stretching out around the world in a network of terrestrial communication, bouncing off the heaviside and landing back again to be collected by radio-listeners – in cars and in kitchens. Sisters Akousmatica are always listening – seeking out the strange broadcasts destined for…? Well, who knows. NM, SK begins to examine some of the recordings they have made in their quest to research “the silent key” – a series of broadcast messages that they discovered in the winter of 2017.


PIP STAFFORD and JULIA DROUHIN create curatorial and written international projects concerning collective radio practices, auditory-spatial exploration and the intersection of gender and emergent art forms, to support, promote and cultivate women’s voices in public space. Focusing on the concept of akousma – sound removed from its source – their projects provide a space to examine the possibilities of invisible and ephemeral radiophonic world.
They were the recipients of 2016 Next Wave Festival’s Emerging Curator Program presenting Sisters Akousmatica, a women street radio acousmonium with 8 sound artists performing and 2 curators walking for 7 hours in 7 public spaces in Melbourne, in partnership with Liquid Architecture, Signal, 3CR and The Channel.Sisters Akousmatica has since become an artistic and curatorial umbrella, awarded by the Arts Tasmania’s Artist Investment Program 2016 to produce a retreat for women sound artists, provide workshops (crystal radio and FM transmitter building) and develop new work.
Pip and Julia perform as well as an improvised duo Super Occult Cosmophon using radios as instruments, amplified mineral samples, lovingly re-kindled transistor parts and looped sources in acts of sound divination and occult listening to conjure delicate spirit noises and unleash domestic imps.
In 2018 Sisters Akousmatica will present XYL as part of Mona Foma in Tasmania.
www.thesilentkey.com
www.sistersakousmatica.org


WOJCIECH
RUSIN

The Funnel


The Funnel is inspired by a visit to the Port Talbot steel works in Wales, various occult writings, the art of alchemy, European medieval and early renaissance music.

Additional vocals by Milo Brennan.


WOJCIECH RUSIN composes music for theatre and film. He wrote music for the award winning show ‘No Guts No Heart No Glory’, which was filmed by the BBC and broadcast on BBC4 in November 2015. He works with digital and analogue technologies, sensors, solenoids (electromagnetic hammers), synthesisers and anything that can be used as an unique sound source. As Katapulto he released the LP ‘Powerflex’ on New York label Olde English Spelling Bee
www.katapulto.com


KLAYSSTARR
—————————–

Faux Départ 5———————————————


Imagination dead imagine autoethnography-collage hat-tip catalyzed by sammy beckett’s faux départ 4 dredged up from no put together by no channelled through no done by no end to end of end of end of end of end of end of beginning again etc. couldn’t have got in, can’t get out etc. field recordings of recordings of recordings of recordings of listening to listening to listening. sat still, still as possible, still again, still sat still, again sat still again. starts again, ends again. reflexive impotence etc. and piano. also funny.


KLAYSSTARR / Iain Findlay-Walsh is a sound artist and researcher who uses field recording and excessive self-reference to explore personal listening. His forthcoming record ‘w/hair ph<> n mus|x’ is due for release on Entr’acte in late 2017. His research has been presented across the UK, Europe and in the USA, and is due for publication in Organised Sound (2018). He is a lecturer in music at the University of Glasgow and currently curates the spatial audio event series, INTER-.
soundcloud.com/klaysstarr
ucorridor.bandcamp.com


ISABELLE
STRAGLIATI

Nothing here now but – A Tribute to Eliane


Eliane was my step-mother. She died last year from Alzheimers. In this piece I’d like to explore radio’s potential to evoke memory, disorientation and memory loss. Using her favorite songs on tape. And other memories. Sounds. Texts. Hers, mine. Ours.
sandstorm of memory/effacement/mental landscapes/details/temporal slide/bribes/cut-up method/erasing/éclats/sandstorm of details/memory landscapes/temporal cut-up/bits of landscape/erasing method/snipets of memory
Asking: In the end, is there anything to remember at all?

With the voices of François Cau, Isabelle Hainaud Griffiths, Eliane Ravanat, Gilbert Ravanat and Isabelle Stragliati.


ISABELLE STRAGLIATI is a sound artist, field recordist, radio producer, musician and dj living in Grenoble (France). Coming from the visual arts, she turned to the sound medium in 2002 through DJing, as an extension of her approach of the film editing (under the moniker Rescue). She then practiced numerous aspects of radio production (as radio host, producer, music programmer, technician and program director) before reconciling it with her creative work. Her productions, involving field recording, documentary, musique concrète or techno, have been broadcast on national and international radio networks, in festivals and events in Europe and in contemporary art centers.

noearnosound.net