Radio Art #1

Interview

Bernard Clarke is an award-winning radio broadcaster with RTÉ lyric fm, Ireland. On his new music programme, Nova, he combines contemporary music, history, Zeitfragen and politics to intense Radio Art pieces. I met him at the 2014 Ars Acustica meeting in Geneva, and enjoyed his complaint about an often heard comment: «This is too heavy for the listener.» «One day», Clarke said with irony, «I’m going to kill this one listener. I don’t believe that he or she even exists». Later, I heard his amazing work via Soundcloud. In «Tracing A-7063», for example, he narrates stories of Holocaust survivers through audio memory talk, music and sound [see liner notes of the piece below]. Moved by his works, I decided to send him a few questions via email.

[Thomas Burkhalter]: Why does Radio fascinate you?

[Bernard Clarke]: In a word: ephemerality. I find its very transience bewitching and frustrating. It also has the power within the listening moment to present lies as truths and truths as lies, where even jesting Pilate stays for an answer. Its rich sonic history is also dazzling: a journey into the archives is very illuminating, not only for accents, styles of presentation, the dead and so on; but also for noises on and noises off, microphone placements, jingles, theme tunes. In some of the early reels and tapes in RTÉ (Ireland’s state broadcaster) there are drafts of programmes with presenter and producer recording. The station was also at one stage situated beneath the General Post Office in O’Connell Street, in Dublin (literally in the city centre) and you can hear the rumblings of traffic, but also doors opening and shutting, footsteps and stray conversations suddenly passing you, listener listening, by.

[TB]: What are the aesthetic (and maybe technical) questions you are experimenting with these days?

[BC]: Immersion is everything for me – I want to immerse the listener in whatever experience is unfolding. But my dreams are far ahead of my abilities, so I spend a lot of time trying to realize even a shadow of them. Aesthetically, for me at least, I’m trying to reconnect the signal between what came before radio art and musique concrète. One did not grow out of the other, though both are now almost warring siblings, or at least estranged. It’s a weird thing. Ted Hughes’ poem «A Childish Prank» from «Crow» sums it up:

Man’s and woman’s bodies lay without souls 
Dully gaping, foolishly staring, inert
On the flowers of Eden. 
God pondered.  

The problem was so great, it dragged him asleep.  

Crow laughed. He bit the Worm, God’s only son, 
Into two writhing halves.  

He stuffed into man the tail half 
With the wounded end hanging out.  

He stuffed the head half headfirst into woman 
And it crept in deeper and up 
To peer out through her eyes 
Calling it’s tail-half to join up quickly, quickly 
Because O it was painful…

So it’s Crow FM for me, stuffing one into the other.

[TB]: What are moments you liked most in your radio work of the last year?

[BC]: To be brutally honest almost none. I’m looking forward to the day when I can listen to something without wincing and hearing the short-cuts. But not to be too pessimistic: subject matter is now absolutely everything for me and dictates form, tempo, mood, color. One piece true to that stance is «Tracing A-7063»; one completely opposite it is the he and the she of it. Both work, though I still wince and hide behind the sofa.

Liner Notes of «Tracing A-7063»

«Tracing A-7063» is a radiophonic impression of a new documentary film in progress (working title «A-7063») by the young Polish director Maciek Klich. It grew out of a conversation with Maciek: in Auschwitz last year he met survivor Eva Mozes Tor and interviewed her concerning her experiences at the hands of the infamous Doctor Joseph Mengele. Maciek has set out to tell Eva Mozes Tors’ story in documentary film and animation for the memory sequences of her experience in the Holocaust.

I was intrigued and inspired by what he told me and set out to render such a dual style of narrating a story in sound. I divided my sources into old and new, black and white. I dipped into archive interview audio of concentration camp survivors Roman Halter, Ruth Foster and Maria Ossowski (for me bleached out memory pieces) and also used some of Maciek’s present day interview with Eva Mozes Tor (for me this is black, a stereo present, but also black haunted memory).

I did the same with the music: the opening of Mozart’s Requiem (in a recording as approved by the Nazi regime made in 1941, with all references to Christianity’s Jewish roots excised: «Te decet hymnus, Deus in Sion» was replaced by «Deus in coelis»; whilst «in Jerusalem» was replaced by «hic in terra») with its whish and crackles and pops-I used these very surface noises to generate (through additive and granular synthesis) a lot of the sounds that follow.

I also transformed the shouts of Sieg Heil Sieg Heil and then used the results to generate the soundscaping of the various music (s) that «frame» the voices. The greatest challenge I faced was the risk of sensationalizing the material: alas, there is what is now called a «Holocaust Industry» particularly in print, so what was uppermost in my mind was respecting the voices, keeping them as the primary sonic material and letting them tell their tales. That said I also wanted these voices and sounds to work sometimes in opposition and sometimes in complimenting each other.

To do this I turned some of my new soundscapes to traces of themselves (blacks to grey’s): for instance the sound beneath Eva Mozes Tor’s tale of her being tattooed is a stereo rendering bleached out and scratched up to suggest vinyl and also the burning of the pen and ink that will mark her forever: A-7063.

The first version of this won Best Audio (Yamaha Música award) at this years Black & White International Festival in Porto, Portugal

Bernard Clarke (B. 1967) is an award-winning radio broadcaster with RTÉ lyric fm, Ireland. His new music programme, Nova, has won five consecutive PPI Radio Awards (National Irish Radio Awards) and one New York Festival’s award; he’s also won prizes for documentaries on Patrick Kavanagh, Glenn Gould, The Doors, and Jimi Hendrix. Clarke has also been shortlisted for the Prix Italia (Cagliari, 2008), the Prix Europa (Berlin, 2011), the Prix Phonurgia Nova (Paris, 2012); the Black &White International Audio Festival (Porto, 2013); and has just won Best Audio at the Black &White International Audio Festival (Porto, 2014).

Though he has extensive radio experience, his work in radio art is still fairly new with his radio art pieces being broadcast in Ireland, Germany, France, Austria, Czech Republic, The Netherlands, Spain, USA and Australia. He is a member of the EBU Ars Acustica Group and his interests include sound, sound, and sound.

Biography

Dr. Thomas Burkhalter is an anthropologist/ethnomusicologist, AV-artist, and writer from Bern (Switzerland). He is the founder and director of Norient and the Norient Festival (NF), co-directed AV-performances and documentary films (e.g. «Contradict», Berner Filmpreis 2020 + Al-Jazeera Witness), and is the author and co-editor of several books (e.g., «Local Music Scenes and Globalization: Transnational Platforms in Beirut», Routledge, «The Arab Avant Garde: Musical Innovation in the Middle East», Wesleyan University Press). He teaches regularly at universities, and runs workshops for arts institutions. Since 2022 he produces the Norient Mixtape for Swiss National Radio SRF3. Currently, he is working on his new music project «Melodies In My Head», and on the podcast series «South Asian Sound Stories» with musicians from the UK, Bangladesh, India, Maldives, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan. Follow him on Spotify, Research Gate, Academia.edu, Instagram, X, or Facebook.

Links

Bernard Clarke: Soundcloud

Bernard Clarke: Webpage

Published on July 18, 2014

Last updated on April 09, 2024

Topics

Experiment

Sound

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Gender Karaoke (photo: Léa Catach Belooussovitch)

Beyond Voice

Interview

by Lucia Farinati

With her new solo show Beyond Voice. Me, you and everyone who is listening sonic and radio artist Anna Raimondo is exploring the relational horizon of voice and its linguistic and political implications. On the occasion of the screening of Raimondos show at Arte Contemporanea in Brussels curator Lucia Farinati spoke on March 20^th 2014 with Raimondo about her project, the idea of resonance and feminism.

[Lucia Farinati]: What is voice for you, and why the title Beyond Voice?

[Anna Raimondo]: To me, voice is not just a mere sonic phenomenon, it is something more. This is why I chose Beyond Voice. However, what I am interested in the most is what follows the voice, its implications, what voice could provoke.

[LF]: You started your research as a radio journalist. What is the difference, if any, between using the voice as a radio broadcaster and as an artist?

[AR]: With radio, I feel more protected, I am just a voice, whereas when I am speaking in public spaces the degree of responsibility is different, because I assume much more with my own body, in that particular moment, and with what I am saying. When I am there, with my voice and body, I launch questions which, most often, are not immediately answered; but I like to think that my voice arrives at the people around and, if they decide to listen to me, they can create their responses within themselves.

[LF]: So, if you don’t hear people replying to you, do you imagine what they might be saying to themselves?

[AR]: Sometimes, my questions are direct, and so I really look for answers. In some of my sonic interventions and performances, I even give instructions to the public... but in other cases, and more and more often now, the exchange has become more conceptual, more metaphoric. In this sense I also use the expression beyond voice. Indeed, voice for me does not exhaust itself with the emission of sounds, it is a possibility to build a bridge, even if that’s an ephemeral kind of bridge. Voice is a process that doesn’t stop in the moment you hear me, my voice continues to exist after you have been listening to me, when you are still thinking of me or «reading» me, or simply remembering something that I have just said. So, all of these examples relate to the phenomenon of beyond voice.

[LF]: This is very much connected to the idea of resonance, the idea that at some stage your voice, your words, will start resonating within the other, within me.

[AR]: Yes, I will say there is a resonance, as you put it, and there is also a desire to contaminate the space around me... This is the reason why I often work with sound and with the voice; but I also define myself as an artist working with listening, because listening is a way to penetrate the other, in a precise moment, in a way that you cannot always control. I am very interested in this actually, and this is the reason why I recently moved from the radio to the public spaces, to urban space, because it’s even more evident, no?

[LF]: Resonance always implies two bodies which can respond to each other, something that sounds and resounds. Maybe you can say more about this...

[AR]: A lot of time I don’t see what happens after... but I can feel it... In the project Encouragements I have asked over forty women to send me any encouragement that helped them to affirm themselves in life and society.

What I did after was to embody these encouragements, these women’s voices, and simulate a conversation at the phone in public spaces. I am very curious about this listening device, very fascinated by talking over the phones because most of the time people forget they are in a public space, they get very involved in their own private sphere, speaking loudly and telling their own things... It’s a way of declaiming, of contaminating their surroundings... Coming back to the work, what followed was a dialogue not linear at all... mostly composed of more traditional statements about life, fears, desires, whereas at some other moments I was just saying «mother», «mother», the encouragement of a friend of mine whose child in those days had just started to pronounce this word. I did this in public spaces because it’s a way to contaminate what is around me... though I don’t know the reaction of all the others: I just saw some people laughing, or people being disturbed and going away, or somebody looking at me with a kind of complicity; but I don’t know what their interior voice was saying, and this is the invisible contamination which I am interested in.

[LF]: It seems to me that beyond voice – beyond the voices, if you like, as you are talking of the specific voice of these women, or your own voice – is envisaging an idea of listening which is neither active or passive. I wonder if for you there is any difference to listen to voice rather than any other sound. How do you listen to voice?

[AR]: At this moment, I am thinking of those works made of voices which explore the sonic possibilities of voice. In this case I can have an experience of voice as any other sound; in general, though, when I am listening to voices, independently from what they are saying and I can understand or not, it is a different experience. Even when I am listening to just a laugh, a cry, or a scream, my experience is totally different, because voice always implies a human behind it. It is easier that voices reveal to me a sense of empathy or a sense of repulsion. Sounds, in general, can evoke sonic memories, that’s for sure, but voices probably do it in a deeper way than other sounds. This is my experience, of course.

[LF]: It has been often said that the voice stands at the intersection of body and language, but this intersection, as Mladen Dolar, has remarked, belongs to neither. I would like to read you a passage from his book A voice and nothing more (2006). He said that apart from the two widespread uses of the voice, «the voice as the vehicle of meaning» (forming words, sentences, or phonemes), and «the voice as the source of aesthetic admiration» – the idea of «bella voce», there is a third level in which we can think about the voice: the voice as object, a object voice which functions «as a blind spot in the call as disturbance of aesthetic appreciation». Dolar talks about those manifestations of the voice outside speech such as coughing, hiccups, laughter, babbling, screaming which are defined as pre and post linguistic acts. Again this can be perhaps a way to understand voice beyond the common notion of language and meaning, and instead embracing an idea of voice which is more oriented towards body, affect, memory, as you said. In the past you have also been interested in languages and translation, often highlighting that the grammatical subject «I», is not an abstract subject but an embodied subject. In this new body of work it seems that the voice has become a tool to provoke a situation, to explore different modes of communicating or even to create a possibility for an encounter. But in these actions there is always an element of deconstruction or détournement which seems to be linked to a feminist approach and its attempt to critique categorised notions of subjectivity.

I am thinking for example of your performance outside the Tate, Untitled (the stranger, the water and what I am), and at the same time of the work by feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero For more than one voice. Toward a philosophy of vocal expression (2005). In this book she talks about female myths related to voice, the siren, for example. Cavarero argues that the vocal expression has often been associated with the feminine and the body, and consequently removed from discourse, from logos. In your performance the voice is not that clichéd voice of the seductive and enchanting siren. The work is clearly about female identity. I wonder if this is a conscious decision because I know you have been involved in feminist activism in the past, collaborating with Radio Mujer in Madrid for example. What does feminism mean for you today?

[AR]: Actually, feminism is for me the expression of a desire, a way to feel comfortable with life and with who I am. It’s a research, of course, full of contradictions. I started with being a feminist activist whilst working with radio. I respect a lot activism, but at some point I felt that the militant language was no longer the one I wanted to use and that I needed to open, and to be open, to what I see as the outside. This is probably why I decided to move to art. Then, about the performance you were mentioning before, let’s say that for me it is feminist to the extent that it derides all categorised definitions of myself. In the performance, I am telling what I am, though whatever I am saying, even my name and surname, are at the same time socially given definitions. By saying «I am a woman» I express what I feel I am but it is also a social definition. Likewise by saying «I am a Buddhist», I am saying that this is my religion, but also what society defines to be my religion. Here the splashes of water thrown at me represent both a gesture of derision and purification that expresses my desire for freedom, to be free to change. Whatever I embody now would not probably be the same in ten years, and I think that, if there is feminism here, it is because it makes me intimately and deeply free and aware of the possibility of transformation.

[LF]: What are your expectations from the audience or the people you interact with in the street?

[AR]: I think the voice traces a territory that becomes collective when listening is taking place. The best thing I can expect is a kind of political reaction to what I am proposing. In this sense, the space of my actions becomes a territory of negotiation with others. Sometimes, it is a kind of call, clearly a direct call. In Gender Karaoke, for instance, people are invited not just to the playful experience of singing, but to think about the cultural representation of women in music.

Here, my desire is clearer, whereas in Mediterraneo I repeat this word endlessly like a mantra and at a given moment my voice is interrupted by the submersion of my mouth and the voice under water. So what I am saying goes under water and that word and voice, in particular my voice, becomes something else. In this case, what I expect from the public is for them to experience the sound of this metamorphosis and give to this moment their own interpretation by negotiating, through their own cultural backgrounds, memories, and sensations, its meaning.

Mediterraneo (photo: Léa Catach Belooussovitch)

[LF]: It’s a very striking image, the one you describe, a voice disappears within water, it is as if body and language, at whose intersection is voice, were sinking together. As if, «beyond voice», could ultimately mean both beyond speech and beyond body. I wonder if this image or gesture is a call for empathy.

[AR]: You started by asking what is voice to me. Well, it’s a tool, not just a sound, but a relational tool, a strategy to be in touch with someone else. Probably, my deepest desire when I use the voice is to be heard and to generate something, to launch something... The best thing that could happen is probably to generate empathy with another, even a stranger, someone whom I never saw before and perhaps would never see again. This is why my work is based on interactive scripts and why I allow for a lot of silence in them, so that the listeners can have enough space for their own memories and sensations. The choice to expose myself in public spaces without reservation is in itself a way of looking for empathy. The work in which that is best made clear is the performance in front of the Tate Modern, Untitled (a stranger, the water and what I am). As I think that even the image of someone splashing me is an image of failure as well, it’s like to be naked in the street and say, ok, this is me, do you want to love me?

Untitled (A Stranger, The Water And What I Am) (photo: Benedetta Ubezio)

Biography

Lucia Farinati (Italy/UK) is an independent curator based in London and the Director of Sound Threshold, an interdisciplinary curatorial project that explores the relationships between site, sound and text. She studied on the Curatorial Programme at Goldsmiths College, London, and History of Art and Aesthetics at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Trento, Italy.

Published on August 01, 2014

Last updated on April 09, 2024

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Activism

Sound

Voice

Perception

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A Crash Course in Disco Polo #1: Today

Short Essay

by Jacek Szczepanek

Disco polo became popular in the early 1990s. It is still doing well and growing. Norient presents this Polish electronic dance music culture in a series of two posts. Part one: Disco polo today.

Try asking a Pole whether they listen to disco polo. Nobody does. Yet everyone knows at least a few songs and is ready to quote snippets of lyrics. It is at the weddings when all those who «don't listen» let go and dance to it. You can also encounter disco polo on a Saturday night at a village or small town discotheque. Hundreds of people flock to these to party to a live show of a disco polo act, which typically features a vocalist (or two), a few synchronised dancers, and a DJ. The show is the climax of the night, with resident DJs taking care of the crowd before and after. Discotheques aside, it can often be heard at small town and county fairs and at spring festivities on university campuses in the big Polish cities.

Anonymous polls have shown it to be the most popular music genre in Poland, ever since its eruption in the late 80s/early 90s. No major radio station dares play it, and the local ones that do tend not to stay on air for too long if 2-3 disco polo songs per hour is exceeded. It has traditionally been a taboo subject for music journalists.

With the spread of the Internet, which brought with it sky-rocketing Youtube playcounts of disco polo tunes, this began to change. 2011 saw the launch of the first TV channel devoted exclusively to disco polo (Polo TV). Since then, disco polo channels have mushroomed, popping up at a rate of about one a year. Some of those who used to turn a blind eye to the genre, now have the courage to say that disco polo is «coming back» or «doing better than ever». Even if it is only just increasing its presence in the media and in the cities. The first big disco polo venue, Explosion Club, only opened in Warsaw in 2010.

Disco polo musicians have never been poor. Most of them started in (or as) wedding bands and then gradually expanded to playing discotheques and festivals, often moving freely between both worlds. This means that even small local acts have enough paying gigs, and that the big shots regularly have their Saturday nights packed with two or three shows at different locations. On the threshold of fame there has always been fierce competition, but this intensified with the emergence of the disco polo TV channels.

Hard elbows, bribing, payola, accusations of fixing «audience» polls are common. So if you are a disco polo act, it makes sense to try not to offend the public. In case something goes wrong you can still land on your feet with weddings and company events.

«How do you like to play in [the name of the town]?»
«I love [the name of the town]’s public, we always feel at home here, you guys are fantastic.»
«What are you going to play tonight?»
«We are going to give our very best.»

Although disco polo is listened to just about everywhere in Poland, most top acts come from North-Eastern Poland with the city of Białystok being the centre of the industry.

If I was to demonstrate contemporary disco polo with a single song I will pick Soleo’s «Broken Heart». It was released in late 2013 by an act that is neither top nor small, and has gathered a moderate number of just over a million views in half a year. It is exactly 140 BPM and has a classic romantic minor harmony progression in the chorus. The video is shot in a small town and the images reflect the lyrics accurately.

Playlist

Soleo – Złamane serce

Avinion Dance - Płoniesz

Avinion Dance is a young act, who make sure their mobile phone number stands out so that they get more bookings. The beat is more cheerful as the love is still burning, and there are references to old school musicianship in the video.

Piękni i Młodzi – Kocham się w Tobie

The story of Piękni i Młodzi (The Young and Beautiful) illustrates disco polo’s controversial media presence. They made it to the final of «Must Be the Music» talent show in 2014, even though the four jurors (established Polish musicians) all hit «No» and the group progressed only through audience text message poll. Their song «I Am in Love with You» shows that it is hard to objectively pinpoint what really makes a song condemned as disco polo or let live as Polish pop.

Biography

Jacek Szczepanek, born in 1984 in Warsaw, listens to both people and sounds. He gained experience in ethnographic interview in Indonesia, Syria, Poland and Germany. As a PhD candidate at the University of the Arts in Berlin he watches the global dissemination of music production software. As a sound designer he is keen on field recording and sensitive to soundscape. His sound art is usually located in a community, as in Concert for Housing Estate Yells (Warsaw, 2012, 2013), made together with people from a high-rise residential area and played back on their streets. Having spent a fair amount of his childhood in the countryside he has always been exposed to disco polo. The genre has remained in his professional and artistic interest since 2012. Follow him on his Website.

Published on July 15, 2014

Last updated on April 11, 2024

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Dance

Place

Tradition

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