FON Air
Next FONair Broadcast: Tues 7th May 20:20 – 21:00
Twilight Gatherers – Don’t Turn Around
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Next FONair Broadcast: Weds 1st May 13:00 – 14:20
Kinokophonography Radio Retrospective
Illustration by T.S. Selm (AKA Green Elfcup from Kinokophone Collective)
Kinokophonography is an event for sharing sound recordings, exploring the experience of listening and discussing what these recordings and the process of making them can bring to life.
Kinokophongraphy features audio works submitted by curious listeners and recordists from around the world. For this FON Air Micro-commission, we are pleased to share with you some of the tracks sent in over the past few years as well as interviews of the recordists who have contributed their sounds to our world wide mycelium of sound spores.
Notes about each of the pieces featured in the programme can be found here.
About Kinokophone
Kinokophone collects and composes sounds, stories and imagery from around the world. Kinokophone take their name from the Japanese word for mushroom. Mushrooms are a product of intricate connections that lie beyond the surface, with roots in folklore and imaginary worlds, much like the work we produce.
What We Do
We are an artist collective, producing installations, sound for documentary films, oral history projects, music, tapestries, models; anything that we think is exciting and fun! We also organise Kinokophonography, an evening of sharing and listening to field recordings from around the world.
Broadcast: Thursday 27 March 12:00-13:00
The latest in our series of FON Air Micro-commissions broadcast live from our HQ in Barrow Park is Ghosting by Remote by Danny Bright, Brighton-based sound designer, composer, recordist, musician and sonic manipulator working within the fields of theatre, performance, installation, music and media .
Ghosting by Remote is a site-specific work that explores sonic memory and temporality in relation to the sound environments of the house and park that are home to the Octopus Collective in Barrow-in-Furness. It will be constructed over 36 hours of intensive on-site field recording, audio manipulation, improvisation and composition, and performed, mixed and broadcast live on-air for listening on headphones. The performance will attempt to ‘haunt’ the soundscape of the listener with a ‘sonic ghosting’ conjured up by the artist. A ‘ghosting’ that fractures the present soundscape with the sonic memories and auditory phantoms spaces now home to Octopus.
Visit Danny’s website here.
The next in our serious of FON Air Micro-commissions is an improvised collaboration between Shaun Blezard (electronics) and Kirsten Taylor (voice) broadcast live from our HQ in Barrow Park.
The show explores mental health issues, creativity and Shaun’s ongoing problems with depression. The text used is from the blog where Shaun and other guest bloggers have been writing about their personal experiences of mental health issues.
Broadcast: Friday 22nd March, 13:00-14:00
Due to the severe weather conditions Paul’s broadcast has been postponed. He is safe and sound and on his way back to Brighton.
The second of two broadcasts this week in our series of FONair micro-commissions is Brighton to Barrow by Thumb by Paul Stones. Paul plans to hitchhike from Brighton on the south coast to Barrow-In-Furness, Cumbria on 21st March, recording the sound of the trip and editing it as he goes for broadcast from Octopus HQ the following day. Really!
The last time I hitched was 20 years ago and it was becoming a much more difficult proposition than it had been previously. Less people were stopping for the dishevelled minority who chose to find their way around the country for free. As a consequence there were fewer folk willing to stand for hours on a motorway slip-road, in all weather conditions, whilst some road-users chose verbal abuse instead of a lift; or stopping, only to drive off at speed when approached; or in one extreme case, that I personally encountered, being shot at with an air pistol from a passing car. For years there have been a distinct lack of ‘hitchers’ on the road, but more recently I’ve been seeing a few. I wonder whether, once again, one can travel the length of the country by the goodwill of others and I wonder who those people are and why they are willing, if you believe the nay-sayers, to put their lives and property at risk to pick-up a total stranger at the side of the road.
Paul lives and works in Brighton. He makes programmes for RadioReverb 97.2FM (radioreverb.com) and makes soundscapes from them. ‘March For England’ below was taken from interviews at a St George’s Day march in Brighton last year and ‘Less a bolt of lightning than the lightning of Bolt’ was created for the FirstSpark radio festival competition in February and is a 1 minute long documentary. It was given a ‘commended listening’ award by the judges.
Less a bolt of lightning than the lightning of Bolt
Broadcast: Wednesday 20th March, 13:00-14:00
The first of two broadcasts this week in our series of FONair micro-commissions is Delia Derbyshire Day .
Delia Darling Caro C presents a live one hour programme based on the first Delia Derbyshire Day event held in Manchester earlier this year. The programme introduces the life and work of the amazing electronic music pioneer Delia Derbyshire, the Delia Derbyshire Archive, The Delian Mode documentary and will include extracts of the new works commissioned and first performed on the day.
For more information about Delia Darlings and DDD click here.
Broadcast live 12.00, Thursday 14th March.
Grey Ladies by London-based artist Sybella Perry.
Grey Ladies is a composition of field recordings that document a series of attempts to resonate a stone circle using unamplified vocals and pure sine wave tones. Testing theories that some megalithic stone sites may have originally been conceived as acoustic environments.
With Special Thanks to Sam Ayre, Vasco Alves, Daniel Irons and Louie Rice.
Visit Sybella’s website here.
Floodtide by composer and trumpet player John Eacott.
Floodtide makes music from the movement of tidal water. A submerged sensor gathers information from the tidal flow that is converted into musical notation read from screens or mobile phones by musicians. The piece has been performed 12 times at venues including Royal Observatory Greenwich, Thames Festival, Southbank Centre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. Ensembles have included classical musicians, taiko drummers, and members of groups such as Tomorrow’s Warriors and Voice Lab. A full performance of Floodtide lasts around 6 hours, starting at low water and ending at high water, although todays performance will be much shorter. The piece is a kind of ambient work in which the audience may drift in and out of the music, returning later to see how it has changed. No performance of Floodtide is the same, with the music being constantly affected by environmental factors such as wind, air pressure, rain, and even passing boats. Floodtide is a sonification of tidal flow.
More info on Floodtide can be found here.
The latest in our series of FONair micro-commissions is a piece by Sound Artist, Composer and Field Recorder, Greg Potts. This piece will be followed (at 13.30) by Andrew Anderson’s piece which was postponed last week due to bad weather. A double treat! Details can be found below.
Radio’s In Spaces is a generative composition that documents the characteristics and atmosphere of different locales punctuated with radio broadcasts. The piece documents the transformation of broadcasts and popular compositions played whilst absorbing the locations characteristics transfiguring them into a new sound collage. This demonstrates the different surroundings radios find themselves situated in and how the communication or the use of miscommunication can be effected by different environments. Therefore projecting the composition into a continuous sound sculpture of radio programmes being broadcast in an array of different locales transformed into a sound collage.
More info about Greg here.
The latest in our series of FONair micro-commissions is a piece by Andrew Anderson, City and sound – an audio study of the the way the sound of a city influences some of the people who live there.
Andrew Anderson is a journalist, musician and film maker. He likes working on mixed media projects that engage the senses in new and unexpected ways. In the past he has created a radio show that verbally discussed paintings, stop motion animations depicting the feel of flowers blooming and he has written extensively about music. Above all else he is an amateur, generalist and enthusiast. Andrew is currently working on a new album of Kinks-inspired songs and a short film about the music that occurs in the natural world.
You can find more of Andrew’s work here .
Recent Broadcasts:
The latest in our series of FONair micro-commissions is a piece by Louise Harris, an electronic and audiovisual composer based in London.
Louise will talk about her development as an audiovisual artist, her primary concerns in working with both audio and video and some ideas on space and spatialisation in composition and performance. She will discuss her multichannel, audiovisual spatialisation system, systemic, developed for the aleatoric spatilisation of sound through a visual system, her rationale for developing the system and its potential applications. She will also play the piece sys_m1, which was composed using recordings taken from the system.
Visit Louise’s website here.
“..AND NOW A WORD FROM OUR SPONSORS”
DJ, Charity Shop Crate Digger and all-round Scarborough Music Scenester Pablo Mescalito presents a selection from his collection of advertising flexi-discs. Including celebrity grudge match time as Smiths and Golden Wonder go mano-a-mano with the Crunch vs Britain’s Noisiest Crisp. And if that sounds like thirsty work so why not wash it down with some Scottish Magic from Youngers Tartan beer or a cheeky Cherry B – complete with a chance to win a Sunbeam Alpine Sports car.
The latest in our series of FONair micro-commissions is a piece by Pablo Sanz, a Sound Artist currently based in The Netherlands.
[in]audible | 30’ | 2012
unheard, out of earshot; indistinct, imperceptible, faint, muted, soft, low, muffled, whispered, muttered, murmured, mumbled; silent, soundless, noiseless, hushed; ultrasonic.
“[in]audible is a piece for headphones based on the exploration of hidden acoustic spaces. Departing from the notions of indirect listening and blind field recording, unconventional listening technologies have been used to capture phenomena beyond the thresholds of our perception.
Magnetic fields, vibrating structures, infra, ultrasonic and underwater sounds have been amplified and used as source material in the composition, focusing on the spatiality, details and textural patterns of the original recordings.”
Sounds recorded between 2008 and 2012 in natural and built environments in Karlsruhe, Germany; Den Haag, The Netherlands; Bratislava and Mala Fatra, Slovakia; Madrid and Sant Bartomeu del Grau, Spain.
Pablo Sanz
http://pablosanz.info
http://soundcloud.com/pablosanz
Mr Leech’s Institution
by Lynden St John with Fred Pepper
Friday 14th December 13:00-14:00
The second in our FON Air series of radio commissions is a new work by Lynden St John, with voice and additional improvisation / material by Fred Pepper.
A monologue with sundry aural interruptions which centers on Mr Leech, who describes his present habitat, an institutional space which is of ambiguous nature and function. Mr Leech invites us to journey with him as he wanders empty corridors, recites from his favourite paperback, operates some audio equipment and flees another entity within the institution. His delivery is skewed by some kind of speech disorder which causes him to leave long pauses between words and to place inappropriate emphasis on various phonetic components. The audience is therefore asked to work between two spaces, one defined by the pragmatics of speech and the materiality of sound, the other by the abstract content of speech.
PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS BROADCAST CONTAINS SOME STRONG LANGUAGE
Image: Fred Pepper
FON Air is our ongoing broadcast strand that has included past projects by Mobile Radio, Mark Vernon and Paul Rooney.
Listen to our very first broadcast from Piel View House ‘Octopus Rising’, introduced by Sarah Washington of Mobile Radio, here:
To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.
‘Octopus Rising’ was produced for the RadiaLx Festival in Lisbon by Octopus, the Piel View Hacking Group and Mobile Radio.
FON Air Micro-Commissions
Following an amazing response to our call for new works for radio we have selected the following for our first season of regular web-based broadcasts of FON air radio:
Andrew Anderson, Natasha Bird and John Eacott, Shaun Blezard, Danny Bright, Caro Churchill, Louise Harris, John Linden, Mark Marrington, Gretel My, Sybella Perry, Pablo Sanz Almoguera, Gregg Potts, Paul Stones, Mark Vernon, Delia Derbyshire Day, Kinokophone Collective.
Get ready for a wide variety of programmes exploring notions of space, ranging from documentary and discussion to the, frankly, downright weird and disturbing including:
A preview of an exhibition curated by a flea.
A piece which makes music from the local coastal space of the Duddon estuary using real-time data from a submerged sensor.
A monologue from ‘Mr Leech’, who invites us to journey with him as he wanders empty corridors, recites from his favourite paperback, operates some audio equipment and flees another entity within the institution.
A pure tone composition transduced through a stone circle with vocal accompaniment recorded live in the field.
A show about the ‘Delia Derbyshire Day 2013′ project – celebrating Delia’s creativity and technical skills and including three new music based performance works made in response to Delia Derbyshire’s archives held at the University of Manchester.
There are 15 commissions in total which will be broadcast over the next few months – follow us on Facebook or Twitter for more information about broadcast times.
