Dinah Bird: a radio relay for "A Box of 78s"

Tonight, Avant Gardening is delighted to be the latest port of call in a 22-station traveling radio relay, which since November 2014 has been distributing the aural contents of Dinah Bird's work A box of 78s to the listeners of radio stations around the world. by the time it is played over the R1 airwaves, the record will have accumulated scratches and associated material traces from 17 other stations in 13 countries.

Like the peer-to-peer share culture of the radia network, but conducted via the pre-digital distribution methods of the postal service, the radio relay for a box of 78s is a form of audio mail art.



Explaining how this radio relay works, Dinah writes:

"It is not a race, quite the opposite. It is a playful protest against the way sound is propagated in the digital age. The idea is simple. I have made a piece of radio pressed to vinyl available on Gruenrekorder. I would like the same copy of the record to be relayed between the different partner radio stations, so that no single broadcast sounds the same. The scratches formed en route will become part of the piece, mirroring the journey my grandmother’s records made. I will also ask each station that plays the record to fill in a listening log, a bit like the piece of paper that used to get stamped when you took a book out of the library. So far twenty one radio stations from places as far flung as Newfoundland and Dunedin have agreed to take part and play the record whatever state it might be in after all its travels. It is a radio relay, a kind of chain letter if you like. I am hoping that sometime around October 2015 the record and the physical traces if its journey will be returned to me, accompanied by the written observations of those who have played it." 

and here she is, on how this relates to the wider conceptual grounding of the project:

"This is the story of a box: A leather box that is over eighty years old and has lived in three different countries, and on two different continents. It contains over fifty 78 rpm recordings of classical music and opera hits of the day. The box and its contents were inherited by my grandmother who was born on the Gulf Islands, British Columbia, in 1910. She grew up on Salt Spring. She took the box with her when she left the island in 1925 and carried it to her various adult homes until her death in 2000. In September 2012 I retraced the box’s long journey and took the records back to the island where they were first played. Using my great-grandfather’s diary and daily notes on the weather as a guide, I played the records outdoors, on a portable gramophone in spots around Salt Spring where my grandmother and her family had picnics, played tennis or danced, and I recorded what happened. I also talked to today’s Salt Springers, and my late Great Uncle, about their memories and reasons for being on the island. This composed sound work blends memories, observations, field recordings and music. This piece is about rekindling lost, and perhaps forgotten, sounds. Are they so very different to those my grandmother heard? It is a personal response to the people and places of Salt Spring Island, British Columbia."



Here is the full list of radio stations that are participating in the relay, including many friends and familiars ears!:

Kunstradio RadioKunst, Vienna.
Radio On – Berlin.
The Lake Radio , Copenhagen, DK.
Radio Nova , Oslo, Norway.
Radio Worm , Rotterdam, Netherlands.
Radio Panik , Brussels, Belgium.
Radio Papesse , Florence, Italy.
Radiophrenia , Glasgow, Scotland.
Nova , on RTE Lyric FM, Ireland.
ResonanceFM , London, UK.
Soundart Radio , Devon, UK.
Radio Grenouille , Euphonia, Marseille, France.
Voice of Bonne Bay , Newfoundland, Canada.
Wave Farm, WGXC 90.7 FM, Accra, NY. USA.
CRFC 101.9 FM, Kingston, Ontario, Canada.
CKUW 95.9 FM , Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.
Tree Frog radio, Denman Island, BC, Canada.
Radio One (91 FM) Dunedin, NZ.
Creative Audio Unit on ABC Radio National, Melbourne Australia
Radio Campus Bruxelles , Belgium.
HRT _ Croatian Radiotelevision , Zagreb.
Radio Campus Grenoble , France.

Avant Gardening will follow the broadcast of Dinah's work with an airing of other recent sound projects which also explore the tactile materiality of recorded media in the digital age.

exchange culture: motoko kikkawa in japan

Tokyo-born, Dunedin-based experimental violinist Motoko Kikkawa has lived in New Zealand's southernmost large-ish city for over a decade, and been an important presence in Dunedin's collaborative improvised music community throughout that time. Like many of us (and confounding the hoary yet persistent old cliches of Dunedin's sound culture as emerging from the yearnings and nostalgia of a peripheral place which is 'marginal' and 'isolated'), she regularly travels to update living links with the other places she draws on as history, in the process weaving a uniquely personal  geographical and cultural mindset, through the constant curiosity, learning and fresh listening such peripetatic activities inspire.

Motoko's most recent visit to Japan resulted in many audio documents, both while visiting family and field recording at a temple in Hiroshima, and being a participant and listener at various small venues for experimental music in Osaka and Tokyo. With her collaborators Takashi Masubuchi and Rosie Langabeer, she performed various dates on a tour of Osaka. Motoko's audio documents of these gigs are mostly captured at two venues: Futtari (in Suidoubashi), an improvised/experimental music store which has a regular programme of live music, and Art Space Bar Buena (in Shinjuku). Her capturing of the everyday life of the cities she traveled through also includes attention to the sounds of "foreigners" - part of a reflection around the strangeness of being a stranger in your own land, and  hybrid cultural identity: being always, on some level, in both places (and languages) at once.

We are very pleased to have Motoko as our guest tonight on Avant Gardening. During the show we will be playing and discussing her observations and listenings-in to the current underground network of Japanese experimental and noise music, revealing the current crop of tiny city spaces and the particular sounds emerging from them, as well as talking more widely about sound in Japan, and pondering place and other geo-cultural reflections.

lost in music / i'm a believer: toward a theory of the original non-original

 

The notion of "originality" in contemporary music has long been boringly over-contested territory. Within the world of popular song, in particular, genre has become central to how we understand music. Songs are most often interpreted through a combination of dramatic and affective devices that are strictly codified within these genre norms and a politically conservative hierarchy that determines value through tradition and the market. 

Similarly, the idea of song composition as being somehow intellectually superior to other elements within the process has remained - within more unconscious music consumers, especially - while other, less generic and perhaps more lateral possibilities within music are marginalis ed.

Contemporary music's increasing obsession with statistics, lists and other status indicators only highlights the problems with the pre-set canon as a market tool rather than a broadly useful indicator of the way we actually use music within communities.

The Original Non-Original is a way of understanding and clarifying that the top-down approach to music value presented to us has little value within actual music communities. The coalface of music production uses this kind of approach as a tool of resistance, as an interrogation of the locus of individual and community worth within music and music history. This is opposed to the Non-Original Original which seeks to replace like with like in terms of maintaining a controllable music structure.

With that in mind, we present a show of songs and other music that starts from a position of awareness of a place in history and in genre. None of the songs here are written by their performers in a legal sense, but many of them have presented a far more complex engagement with what musical composition and performance may actually mean in the lives of musicians and listeners. To cover a song at the same time as ignoring the self-evident aims and ambitions of the original is a bold response to a conservative environment, with a wide range of exceedingly valuable possibilities for engagement with community-level musical practice.

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This playlist was originally aired as a set by DJ Concrete Steps (aka. Avant Gardening's Campbell Walker) in the Friday Night experimental sessions at Dunedin's Mou Very Bar, 14.8.2015. The night also featured an all original, all live set of non-new music from the ever-erudite ears of Mick Elborado, who we understand is currently listening to this broadcast. Hi Mick! Thanks also goes out to LSD Fundraiser, for cluing us into the above image - Lady Gaga wears Les Rallizes Denudes.

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Playlist:

1. Robert Wyatt, 'I'm A Believer' from The Peel Sessions (1987)

2. Peter Gutteridge, 'Don't Catch Fire' from Stroke: Songs For Chris Knox (2009)

3. Peter Jefferies, 'Slow Motion', recorded live, 1993

4. Big Star, 'Femme Fatale' from Third/Sister Lovers (1975) 

5. Cat Power, 'Freebird' [Peel Session] from Clear the Room [Rarities] (Undated bootleg album) 

6. The Bent Folk, 'Wrecking Ball' from Live Bent Folk (4cd box, 2015) 

7. Alex Chilton, 'I Will Always Love You' Live to air, WLYX Memphis 1975  

8. Don Howland, 'Sail Away' from Land Beyond the Mountains (2002) 

9. The Index, 'Eight Miles High' from The Index (1966)

10. The Renderers, 'Forbidden Planet' from That Dog's Head In The Gutter Gives Off Vibrations (1994)

11. Peter Laughner, 'Calvary Cross' from Take the Guitar Player For A Ride (1993) 

12. The Builders, 'Red Sky' from Beaten Hearts (1983)  

13. Big Black, 'The Model' from He's A Whore 7" (1987)

14. Primal Scream, 'Slip Inside This House' from Screamadelica (1991) 

15. The Fall, 'Lost In Music' from The Infotainment Scam (1993) 

16. Suicide, 96 Tears from The First Album (1977)

17. Drinking Electricity, 'Shaking All Over' from 7" (1980) 
18. Primitive Calculators, 'Shout' from Primitive Calculators (1982) 
19 Half Japanese, 'Tangled Up In Blue' from Half Gentlemen Not Beasts (1980) 
20. DJ Smallcock, 'Radio-Activity' from Kraftworks (1999)
21. Vertical Slit, 'I Remember Nothing' from Under The Blood Red Lava Lamp (1986) 
22. Dredd Foole and the Din, 'Ghost Rider' from Ghost Rider-Frankie Teardrop (2006)
23. Happy Mondays, 'Step On' from Pills 'N' Thrills And Bellyaches (1990)
24. Rowland S. Howard, 'Life's What You Make It' from Pop Crimes (2009) 
25. Slap Happy Humphrey, 'Chihei-sen' from Slap Happy Humphrey (1994)
26. Patty Waters, 'Black is the color of my True love's Hair' from Patty Waters Sings (1966)
27. Dead Raven Choir, 'Our Mother The Mountain' from My Firstborn Will Surely Be Blind (2007)
28. Townes van Zandt, 'Shrimp Song' from Rain on a Conga Drum (1991)
29. The Mountain Goats, 'Tell Me On A Sunday' from Hot Garden Stomp (1993)
30. Dear Astronaut, 'California Love' unreleased
31. The Gun Club, 'Cool Drink of Water' from Fire Of Love (1981)
32. The Lost Domain, 'Pearline' from White Man At The Door (2007)
33. Neil Innes and Son, 'Cum On Feel the Noize' from Miniatures (A Sequence of Fifty-One Tiny Masterpieces 
     Edited By Morgan Fisher) (1980) 
34. Alastair Galbraith, 'Getting Older' from God Save The Clean (1998)
35. Roy Montgomery, 'Used To' from Just Melancholy 7" (1996) 
36. Peter Jefferies, 'Scissors' from Electricity (1994) 
37. Akira Rabelais, 'Trisieme Gnossienne' from Eisoptrophobia (2001) 
38. Robert Wyatt, 'At Last I Am Free' from Nothing Can Stop Us (1982)
39. Plinth, 'Albatross I' from Albatross (2010)

i can't wait / wait for someone: the lovelorn music of waterfalls

On the evidence of last Thursday's Dunedin show out at Chick's Hotel in Port Chalmers - Wellington-based Waterfalls' first sojourn out of the North Island - solo artist Amber Johnson is creating a distinctive new voice, combining what is in New Zealand terms a fairly traditional level of music geekery, blending multifarious pop, electronic, classical and folk inputs, played out through a decidedly sophisticated experimental pop world of new structures and ideas.

One thing that's striking is the way these songs aren't sweet or innocent, but the music world they create comes across as directly about the possibilities of pleasure that can be found in music, even if only fleetingly. This inversion of much of the hierarchies of post-modern pop certainly covers a lot of terrain along the way - while contemporary pop, Sandy Denny-style folk, electronic noodle, hip-hop, modern classical, new age, techno, hauntology and 4AD layering may seem part of many a contemporary canon, it's unusual to see them as readily integrated together into such lateral patterns.  

Tonight, Johnson joins us on Avant Gardening to discuss the project, and play and discuss a diverse range of music that may have some relation to it.

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Playlist:

1. Waterfalls, 'Faun' (2015)
2. Waterfalls, 'Merecat' (2011) 
3. The Pentangle, 'Let No Man Steal Your Thyme', from The Pentangle (1968)
4. ABBA, 'The Piper', from Super Trooper (1980)

5. Owen Pallett, 'Scandal at the Parkade,' from A Swedish Love Story EP (2010)

6. The Raincoats, 'No One's Little Girl,' from Moving (1983)

7. Vox Populi!, 'Fassle,' from Half Dead Ganja Music (1987)

8. West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, 'I Won't Hurt You, from Part One (1967)

9. Bonnie "Prince" Billy, 'Someone's Sleeping,' from More Revery EP (2001)

10. The Capris, 'There's a Moon Out Tonight,' single (1961)

11. Apollo 100, 'Joy' single, 1972.

12. Claude Debussy, 'Arabesque no. 1' from Clair de Lune Piano Music of Debussy, 1975? composed 1881.

13. Olivier Messiaen, 'Le Merle Noir for flute and piano,' from Quartet For The End Of Time, (1972), composed 

      1952

14. Morita Doji, 'Wolf Boy' from Wolf Boy, 1980.

15. Eyeliner, 'Scenery' from High Fashion Mood Music, (2012)

16. Enya, 'Storms in Africa' from Watermark, (1988)

17. Kelly Rowland, 'Ice ft Lil Wayne' single, (2012)

18. Waterfalls, 'CalmTV: Cat' musical score for video artist Claire Harris (2014)
       https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0OjC2B4msw

19. Blossom Child, 'I Pray' single (1985)

20. Rick Wakeman, 'I'm so Straight I'm a weirdo, single (1980)

21. Goblin, 'Suspiria' from Suspiria OST (1977)

22. A-ha, 'Take on me' from Hunting High and Low, (1985)

23. Waterfalls, 'I Can't Wait' (2013)

23. Waterfalls, 'Mongoose' (2012)

24. Ol' Dirty Bastard, 'Shimmy Shimmy Ya' from Return to the 36 Chambers, (1995)

25. Kevin Saunderson, 'Transiztor' single (1988) 

26. Kraftwerk, 'Autobahn' from Autobahn (1974)