We put forth the notion that radio is primarily an idea, in excess of its technology John Corbett (Radio dada a manifesto)

(I resonate in radiophonic space)

we resonate together

when we speak

There is space, possibility, room for manoeuvre- we learn ourselves as we learn each other.

Resisting the depoliticallzing nature of 'virtual space'- here- we are you hear, dialogic, adventuring in chat: This is a work about making work-

a sort of oral writing, transitory.. . coiling, curvilinear curving in a arc of a circle, becoming a spiral, transferring itself, belonging to symbols, to names derived from sensations and pulling out of silence the forms, this syntax, this life (Chantal Chawaf (Elwina : The Fairy Tale Novel)

Radio spills out from the studio and into its reception environment – if some/ a few/ local/ varied/ friendly/ young mothers had a transmitter, what might occur?

Taking this idea and a recorder into 3 living rooms over 3 evenings and speaking with 4 women- seeking to hear answers to questions of territoriality, opportunity, femininity, technological approbation and voice. We worked together to generate a piece of art focused on our shared radio possibility- what, how, where and why would we wish to 'make radio'?

In our chatter- the disparaged, oft dismissed commonest female speech genre-- ther appears to be treasure - pluralistic, multitudinous - not linear yet full of significance...

There is a brouhaha, an opportunity for being heard differently and for hearing differently.

Felix Guattari writing in Popular Free Radio in 1979 predicted radio moving in two distinct directions; either toward mainstream corporate pop radio or I quote:

Toward miniaturized systems that create the possibility of a collective approbation of the media, that provide real means of communication, not only to the 'great masses', but also to minorities, to marginalized and deviant groups of all kinds.

Young mums, (single parents even!) are marginalized, and in our experience, should we refuse to comply with ideals of motherhood/ womanliness/ question the state of affairs, we are also considered very very deviant. Women chatting together, over a G&T, a coffee, the garden fence- turns out to be full of potential, laden with importance.

Part soundscape, part social arts project, part poem, this work emphasises radios' potential as a social communication tool, a performance platform and a community playground...

chat radio

Women chatting framed by longlegsrunning

o.oo - 2.oo; tuning in
2.oo - 21.46 Chat Radio followed by a framing statement....  ..  ..  ..  .    .    .      .      .

Mutations of Voice(s)

During my research on voice I have found this piece of theory by N Katherine Hayles regarding spliced voices that I thought was particuarly pertinent;

"Once someone’s vocalizations and body sounds are spliced into someone else’s, the effects can feed back into the bodies, setting off a riot of mutations. The tape recorder acts both as a metaphor for these mutations and as the instrumentality that brings them about". p79

..while this article is specifically talking of tape recorders rather than mics or radio, I feel what it's saying with reference to the work we are making is extraordinarily interesting...

"Through mutation, voices produce the bodies they inhabit. In this context ‘bodies out of voices’ does not indicate silence but its reverse, and interior monologue that infests the body and replicates through it to create physical changes and mutations within it". p79

Sound States; Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies
ed Adalaide Morris

listening to unfamiliar voices
overlapping
talking nonsense
trying to point in one direction
then another
can seal a fate

there was cohesion of a sort however
a shared striving
a meeting of like minds
talking of talking

listening but not for a point of entry
all boundaries had collapsed
a purpose built crashing in of words
and thoughts

our intention
simply
to explore voices travelling

open permissions

The performance of this work occurred on a sunny afternoon, on a rug on the grass outside the Performance Centre at Falmouth uni. I used a 'suround sound' set up of 3 transistor radios, all tuned to my transmitting device which played the work in mp3, as can be heard on the Soundcloud link.
This performance situation was inspired by my interest in minifm- my first proposal for this project was to craft  5 transmitters and run a radio station for the performance centre, as a immersive environment .(see proposal ,1st blog post- but UK legalities got in the way of carrying this work out)- i was happy to use a very miniFM situation and play radio 'as it might be heard in the park'- it was most important to avoid a studio environment, and nice to involve the additional sounds of the campus into my final performance there.

Soundart Radio 102.5 FM are going to broadcast this work, on FM and on their Internet stream at http://www.soundartradio.org.uk later in June...

REGARDING DOCUMENTATION:

As i write this project up, i recognise the tendency to try to own it, can be likened to killing it- holding it down, it suffocates. That was never the idea, this work exists in the space between potential and commitment- its been a strange shared process- and to continue (possibly continue...) in that spirit, the voices heard on the work  have been invited to edit this blog:

I am fortunate to trust them all-
i value what they have to say.

radio techniques, the space, terratorality

Shifts in technology bring with them new configurations of embodiment, and in addition resituate how voicing comes to make incarnate a sense of self.

La Belle Raw Orality: Sound Poetry and Live Bodies 146

There we find the radio contortionists- artists intent on finding ways of making the airwaves carry more than just signals of ideas, communications, questions or announcements.

The arrangement and rearrangement of voices, allowed by radiophony and telephony has encouraged a self awareness that could not be known before the possibilities of doubling and fragmentation that these technologies introduced.

My idea is to investigate these possibilities further, as a collective of producers. i met with 4 women friends to discuss and explore radio. Rather than the acceptance of stultifying media formats and conversational mores, we might assume and attempt these technologies for a project in which voice, and therefore embodiment and person hood/ particularly womanhood might be reconsidered. (which voice? OUR VOICES).

Listeners are invited to not only hear the cacophony as a sound event, but to enjoy the strange sensation of gabbling gaggling giggling women talking private politics and personal passions on the public airwaves- and so to imagine both feminine art and radios' possibilities afresh- a site for collaborative projects, open, dialogic, a broadcast of a narrow cast, highly involved but very everyday.

Anna Fritz, in her essay Transmission Arts in the Present Tense, writes Transmission artists consistently engage in processes of cultural transception and feedback in their works. She states that a constant theme within transition arts is that of displacing one-way (mainstream) communications with a polyvalent transception- a appreciation of the elasticity of the mediums and their diverse uses within social groups. Conjoining sending and receiving, a transceptive approach to transmission is not only a statement (“I am”), but also an orientation towards active, engaged listening. Cultural transception -sharing- learning ourselves and learning others- occurs naturally in the confirmation of human relationships and communicational practices.
This perceiving production and reception as a interaction is a continuation of the thought of the- feed back loop-a sonic occurrence- is also found in talking/chatter- conversation that is self referential, recursive, a returning and adding to themes and ideas, a kind of sedimentary processes- allowing for many inputs and points of view...

I hear a resonance between the radioart techniques listed below by radio artist Alejandra Perez Nunez, which she calls bending strategies, and the way women chat together:

retransmission

cut-up

overflow

persistent use of discontinuity

silence

recursion

recycling

(p242 elpueblodechina a.k.a. Alejandra Perez Nunez. Bending Informational Circuits)

These techniques open up a subject to the listener, make it approachable: begin a discourse- share interpretations, turn it over and over, expose it to sounding from all possible angles so that rather than regularity ( expected forgettable?) there is a acceptance and delight in the complexity and 'strangeness' of the material. She writes of these techniques creating a listening experience which can operate as a 'interface to play with structures of the collective imaginary'.
Nunez describes the pattern of broadcast she develops in her work as recursive, 'looking at itself over and over'. She writes 'such strategy was understood to undermine the tendency toward production enacted by mainstream media, a vapid fanaticism toward the production of content, a kind of anxiety for and with production'. We were happy to experiment with form, and chatted over many ideas, using story-telling, testimony, supposing and references, woven through with odd tangents and sudden thoughts- each of us relaxed enough in the company to speak naturally- in effect- the chatting about the work actually makes up 50% of the sound material used...

Radio art encourages 'flux' (“the serendipity of the production process- occurring when one improvises in the studio or collaborates with friends.”) and rumour (noise [. . . ] talk-back, participation radio, pirate radio”) (Dyson according to Ellen Waterman, 123.) This ambiguity is what I love to be part of, craft, this is where I write and feel a creative force: radio and productive activities as polymorphous- multi levelled, open ended, and welcoming should you choose to hear the invitation.

A theme of this project has been to introduce these friends to the possibility of using the local community radio for themselves. The station sitting on the hill runs a open door policy- its approach to broadcasting is one of strong commitment to diversity and inclusion... yet still, there is a prevalent attitude that radio is a 'product' one has, rather than something that could be used in myriad ways...

Neil Strauss in his introduction to Radiotext(e), emphasises the recently introduced but now firmly entrenched unapproachablility of corporate mainstream radio. He illustrates this point by noting the difference between a normal 'radio reciever'- a back box, the object, the commodity and its mainstream accepted use of the bandwidth, contrasted with 'radio', unavoidable and unstoppable radio waves, as a concept, a playground : radio was originally a interactive technology, not dependant on the record industry and tied to the pop culture machine but a material for hands and mouths as well as ears to explore. Strauss calls radio a 'model built of putty', and 'a parallax- changing depending on how it is viewed'.

The distinction between listener and producer is contentious. I engaged with this work as a form of community mobilization, agreeing with Kathy Kennedy 128 The radio is generally used as a extension of the body... a bridge form one body to another.

However enthusiastic an artist is about the potential of radio, it seems unavoidable that radio is a politicized medium. Regulation of Content, political and conceptual, has introduced expectations : broadcast quality, balanced programming, congruent appeal, enforced programmatic assumptions, market research, the trained voice, restrictions to access, uniform time allocations, technical specifications, licencing regulations, to name but a few (Kahn,D Radiocastings: Musings on radio and art).

Bertolt Brecht writing in 1932 Radio as an Apparatus of Communication, suggested radio has a function beyond 'pretifying public life' and suggests, radio should step out of the supply business, and organize its listeners into suppliers. Any attempt by radio to give a truly public character to public occasions is a step in the right direction.

Brecht is calling for a radio that mobilizes its audience, and one which is both continuously open and approachable- a pedagogic experience that could counteract the mock-pluralism of free-market media-  the increasing concentration of mechanical means and the increasingly specialized training. . .  call for a kind of resistance by the listener, and for his mobilization and redrafting as a producer. Tetsuo Kogawa brings this early radio imagining into a modern reality reflecting on the MiniFM boom he helped organize in Japan in the 80's and 90's:

Even if one overlooks the dramatic effect on society, one must admit that mini-FM has a powerful therapeutic function:an isolated person who sought companionship through radio happened to hear us and visited the mini-FM station;a shy person started to speak into the microphone;people who never used to be able to share ideas and values found a place for dialogue;an intimate couple discovered otherwise unknown fundamental misunderstandings.
Radio can touch us in many areas of life...

process- editing, normality vs sensational

FIRST I WANTED TO I WANTED TO CAN YOU JUST LIKE THIS I WANT YOU TO CAN WE I WANT TO YOU

hearing implies a state of preparedness to both ignore and to listen to sounds. 
R. Murray Schaffer

Initial ideas, the 'plan' I bought to the gathering became a burden to the process that was unfolding. I had to relinquish my first proposal 'Illegal Broadcast' (see proposal, first blogpost as) unnecessary -this work revealed itself without any care toward my poor battered 'my plan, my idea' ego. I had suggested that the desires of all of us would find a place within the work and we would devise a drama together- but it became very clear very quickly that this radio work was to be about the experience of 'working together'- the sound material recorded was primarily us all seeking reasons for creativity (artistically, socially) and enjoying each other's company...I made room begrudgingly- I am amazed by the difficulty I experienced letting go of my 'workshop attitude' and letting what happened just occur. This project demanded a deeper level of listening and sensitivity than I had needed so far in my degree- this was community radio in practice, not just in theory!!!

As producer, I have choices to make. Every choice will have implications on many levels:

Recording and editing processes determine the tone, rhythm and amplitude as well as subtlety shaping phonemic, morphological and syntactic elements. They also subtly position the listener in position to the speaking voice Sarah Parry,(2002). This quote refers to recordings that seek to be as naturalistic as possible. I have considered my role in this work carefully. (I cannot own it- without the others- there would be nothing.)

I took recordings of conversations to which I had introduced ideas and introduced techniques to those recordings. Those techniques were controlled acts of chaos. To be true to the themes we were speaking on, and the slowly rising notion that this work was something to do with acceptance and deconstruction, I listened to the recordings, discarded 'that which could not be used- due to gratuitous swearing, or a too delicate subject matter- and then compiled the cut up audio- and let it find its own 'telling'- Why? Because, the juice is between the cracks... Roland Barthes (1985) , suggests the posture of listening is “an attitude of decoding what is obscure, blurred, or mute, in order to make available to consciousness the 'underside' of meaning.”Mixing up time lines, addresser/addressee relays and adjusting volumes are techniques of exploding the material. We seek new communication modalities when we perceive with 'an open mind'- work that makes sense on a more significant level than 'the expected'. I wanted to hear this work over/ anew/ refreshed- to listen and be struck by my own interpretation of its randomness- find its 'message' for me, and make a work that made every body's interpretation something recognisably original.

It would be honest to see 'producer' as 'anarchitect' after Sophie Gosslin. Writing on her collective apo33's radio work and their use of both orchestrated flux and random chaos in sound: Diffusion not only lets the substructure's ghosts be heard, those ghosts that hide behind the machines , the pipes, the electrical wires, waking the sleepless bodies of the real that stands locked in a repressive machine, but in turn allows such elements to come into a larger communicational network. P151 this 'larger communicational network' is that of interaction and possibility. Ambiguous works allow the reader such agency as can shatter the hold learnt interpretation holds over us, allowing listening to become re-invigorated and deeper- a engagement which feeds back into life...
 

Extraneous sounds to speech, coughing, clinking, hiccups, sniffs, chairs banging, cars passing, farts, burps and legally contentious swearing remain- the real body of the text remains unmolested in the processing, present as extra-linguistic contextualization- references to the finite happening and the human embodiment of the work's moment. Through the inclusion of these sounds in the mix, I hope to have generated a kind of 'sharawadaji' – a effect of- unexpected beauty in the absence of any discernible order or arrangement'. This effect is common in cite soundscapes- playgrounds full of children, demonstrations, bustling market places or carnivals- dirty busy places...

My choice to edit was influenced by montage techniques: I have not used any repetitions or effects other than adjusting the levels of amplitude,- my editing has been rather about cutting up and overlay as a reflection on the ways we speak and hear. Hello William Burroughs...

I think, create, cook, clean, share quality time with others- but- for the sake of critical discourse- the fact that, yes, I am invested here too- there should be a place where this important work of 'mining' can occur. 
 

Bojana says, the space attained, when acceptance of ones agency reveals a perspective that introduces a whole world of possibilities – this is what we seek.

Shelly states the projects that have failed the most are the ones which have rewarded her most.

These are the premises this work is founded upon- there is something for us as producers, and hopefully something for listeners too....