The majority of the episodes from the series are now available on Resonance FM’s mixcloud. Please use this resource for the time being until the ‘Audio Archive’ side menu links are fixed and updated.
Episode 17: a conversation with Peter Cusack
Photo by Anna Sherwin
In Episode 17, I am discussing with sound artist, musician and field recordist Peter Cusack his ‘Favourite Sounds’ project, the importance of sound in our encounters with the city, the role of voice, memory in our listening exchanges as well as Cusack’s own understanding of sonic journalism. The episode will be broadcast on Resonance FM on the 15th of March at 1pm (Repeat 17th of March, 4pm).
About Peter Cusack
Peter Cusack is a field recordist, sound artist and musician and with a long interest in environmental sound and acoustic ecology. Projects include ’Sounds From Dangerous Places’ , ’Your Favourite London Sound’, ‘Sound & the City’.
Links:
http://sounds-from-dangerous-places.org/
http://sonic-places.dock-berlin.de/?lp_lang_pref=en&page_id=6
*Audio:
- Football by Ear, Germany v Greece Euros 2012 Favourite Berlin Sounds, Courtesy of Peter Cusack
- Cuckoo radiometer Cernobyl Sounds from Dangerous Places, Courtesy of Peter Cusack
Episode 16: a conversation with Alessandro Altavilla
In Episode 16, my guest is sonic interactions researcher, sound designer and composer Alessandro Altavilla, discussing his research and practice engaging with the role of sound in human-technology interaction, sonic memory and the quest for a more nuanced articulation of our listening processes. The episode will be broadcast on Resonance FM on Tuesday 8th of March at 1pm (repeat 10th of March 4pm).
About Alessandro Altavilla
Alessandro is a sound designer, artist and composer working in cinema and interaction design. He is currently a PhD candidate in Arts and Computational Technologies at Goldsmiths, researching listening experience and embodied sonic interactions mediated by digital technology.
He gives workshops in Sonic Interaction Design, which have been taken to IRCAM (Paris), Parsons (New York) and ZHdK (Zurich). He has delivered workshops on sound design for e-textile interfaces in KHB (Berlin) and KHiB (Bergen) with artist Berit Greinke. His work has been shown at Biennale of Art in Marrakech, Invisible Architectures (Newcastle), Papey Listskjul (Orkney, Scotland) Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival (Hawick, Scotland).
Links
Episode 15: a conversation with Will Montgomery
Image courtesy of the artist
On Episode 15, I meet sound artist Will Montgomery in the Elephant and Castle shopping centre. We discuss his projects about the shopping centre and the Heygate estate and the notions of representation and translation that often inspire, challenge and contextualise his practice. We also talk about opacity, openness, literature, text-scores and their intertwining with sound and field-recordings.
The episode will be aired on Tuesday 11th of November at 5pm on Resonance 104.4 FM (repeated on Friday Nov. 5th at 2am).
About Will Montgomery
Will Montgomery makes electronic music, sound art and field recordings. His musical pieces explore aural texture and narrative. He also constructs compositions from sequences of treated or untreated field recordings. He is interested in the acoustics of the built environment, particularly London. His work has been released by various labels: Winds Measure, Entr’acte, nonvisualobjects and Every Contact Leaves a Trace. He collaborates with the poet Carol Watts and teaches poetry and poetics in the English department at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Sensing Cities Ep. 14: a conversation with Zeynep Bulut
Image courtesy of the artist
Episode 14, finds me in a busy coffee shop inside Somerset House, meeting artist and scholar Zeynep Bulut. We begin our conversation by unraveling Bulut’s multifaceted journey through art and research and we discuss her notion of the “skin voice”, cities, atmospheres, listening, truth and inner voices among other topics.
The episode will be aired on Tuesday 4th of November at 5pm on Resonance 104.4 FM (repeated on Friday Nov. 5th at 2am).
About Zeynep Bulut
Zeynep Bulut is currently a Lecturer in Music at King’s College London. She was a postdoctoral research fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry between 2011 and 2013. She received her Ph.D. in Critical Studies/Experimental Practices in Music from the University of California at San Diego in 2011. Prior to her doctoral education, she studied sociology (B.A.), opera, and visual arts (M.A.) in Istanbul, Turkey. Situated in the fields of voice, experimental music and sound studies, her work theorizes the physical and phenomenal emergence of the human voice and its role in the constitution of the self. Her broader research interests include historical epistemologies of hearing, anthropology of senses and affect, deaf performance and culture, and voice and speech disorders in the history of science and medicine. She is currently working on her book, entitled Skin-Voice: Contemporary Music Between Speech and Language. Her most recent publication, “Singing and a song: The Intimate Difference in Susan Philipsz’ Lowlands,” appeared in the volume Gestures of Music Theatre: The Performativity of Song and Dance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Alongside her scholarly work, she has also exhibited sound works, and composed and performed vocal pieces for concert, video and theatre.
Coming soon:: Episodes 14 and 15
This space has been silent for a while but two new episodes are scheduled to be broadcast on Resonance FM in November: Tuesdays 5th and 11th of November at 5pm (with a repeat on Sunday at 7pm). Watch this space for more information in the coming weeks.
Sensing Cities Ep. 13: a conversation with Budhaditya Chattopadhyay
Image courtesy of Budhaditya Chattopadhyay
Episode 13 invites Budhaditya Chattopadhyay to discuss his work Elegy for Bangalore released via Gruenrekorder in 2013. Among other topics, we talk about contemplative engagement with the urban environment, exile, Kundera’s Slowness, being a nomadic listener, the importance of developing a methodology that protects us and our individuality from the alienating effects of the urban soundscape as well as his notion of hyper-listening.
The show will be broadcast on Friday 31st of January 2014 at 5:00pm to 5:30pm (repeated on Monday 3rd of February at 1am) @ Resonance FM.
About Budhaditya Chattopadhyay
Budhaditya Chattopadhyay is an artist and researcher working with sound and listening. His work encompasses field recording, sound/audiovisual installation, and composition for live performance. Budhaditya was born in India, and studied cinema specializing in sound recording at India’s national film school SRFTI; later he completed a master’s degree in new media at Aarhus University, Denmark, with a dissertation in sound art. Among other awards, he received an Honorary Mention at Prix Ars Electronica in 2011. Currently he is engaged with a PhD project at University of Copenhagen working with perception and cognition of sound.
Sensing Cities Ep. 12: a conversation with the creators of Love Box
Image courtesy of Sensing Cities
In Episode 12, I revisit an old recording made in 2010 during Conflux Festival in New York where I chatted with artists Sabine Gruffat and Bill Brown about Love Box, a participatory locative piece based on a previous installment titled the Bike Box. The project focuses on the sexual politics of the East Village in Manhattan as the artists described. In our discussion we also talk among other topics about the challenges and possibilities of using such technologies for exploring the city. More like an informal conversation than an interview, the show also features sound-collages from samples of recordings and narratives featured in the projects.
The show will be broadcast on Friday 24th of January 2014 at 5:00pm to 5:30pm (repeated on Monday 27th at 1am) @ Resonance FM.
About the artists
SABINE GRUFFAT
B.1977, Bangkok, Thailand
Sabine Gruffat is a digital media artist living and working in North Carolina. She received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and MFA from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago. Currently Sabine is an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
Sabine’s films and videos have screened at festivals worldwide including the Image Forum Festival in Japan, the Split Film Festival in Croatia, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the PDX Film Festival in Portland OR, The Copenhagen International Film Festival, Migrating Forms in New York, The Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago, and PS1/MOMA in New York.
Her photographs and installations have been shown at the Zolla Lieberman Gallery in Chicago, Art In General, Devotion Gallery, PS1 Contemporary Art Museum, and Hudson Franklin in New York. Her artwork is represented by the Linz Gallery in Paris.
Currently Sabine is producing a feature documentary about grassroots movements that have sprung up as a result of the economic crisis in Spain. She is also developing a new feature film project about the uncertain future of several major public and land art sites.
BILL BROWN
B.1969, Cleveland, OH. USA
Bill Brown is a filmmaker, writer and artist who lives in Chapel Hill, NC. He received his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, and is currently a Lecturing Fellow in the Arts of the Moving Image Program as Duke University. His films have appeared at film festivals, museums, and galleries worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art and Lincoln Center in New York, and the Viennale, Rotterdam, London, Sundance, and SXSW Film Festivals. His travel zine, Dream Whip, is distributed by AK Press.
Sensing Cities Ep. 11: a conversation with Mike Cooper
Image courtesy of Greg Clovelly
In Episode 11, I chat with lap steel guitarist and artist Mike Cooper about his Island project, departing from his project about the Chao Phraya River in the city of Bangkok to his residencies in Pulau Ubin (Singapore) and Lamma Island (Hong Kong). Our discussion takes the form of observations on walking, listening better, listening to the self, acoustic ecology, literature, chance, music and the exotic and how they all connect through the magic of storytelling and narrating.
The show will be broadcast on Friday 17th of January 2014 at 5:00pm to 5:30pm (repeated on Monday the 20th at 1am) @ Resonance FM.
About Mike Cooper
MIKE COOPER – plays lap steel guitar / electronics and sings. For the past 45 years he has been an international musical explorer pushing the boundaries of his music. Initially a folk-blues guitarist he is as responsible as anyone else — and more so than many — for ushering in the blues boom in the U.K. in the late ’60s.
With his roots lying in acoustic country blues he has, arguably, stretched the possibilities of the guitar even more than his better known contemporaries Davy Graham Bert Jansch John Renbourne etc. by pursuing it into the more avant-garde musical areas, also occupied by contemporary guitar innovators such as Elliott Sharp, Keith Rowe, Fred Frith and Marc Ribot, with an eclectic mix of the many styles he has practiced over the years. Ranging freely through his own idiosyncratic original songs,traditional country blues, folk, free improvisation, pop songs, exotica, electronic music, electro-acoustic music, and ‘sonic gestural’ playing utilising open tunings and extended guitar techniques.
He is also a film and video maker in his own right and his work, often featured in his live performances, was recently shown as “Some Sound Point Of View’ at GRIM in Marseille/France in a solo show of 12 films/video. Recently he premiered his first 40 minute feature video Hotel Hibiscus City, which he wrote, photographed, edited and scored music for.
He also composes and performs Live Music For Classic and Contemporary Silent Films. As well as presenting screening/concerts worldwide he has been a guest lecturer and given workshops at universities and colleges worldwide on scoring music for films, improvisation and songwriting.
In 2012 he was artist in residence for one month on Pulau Ubin near Singapore which culminated in “Walking In Ubin” – a sound map of the island, three short video films and a free download of his field recordings and 2013 he was artist in residence on Lamma Island near Hong Kong for three weeks.
* Mike Cooper will present an audiovisual installation titled “A White Shadow In The South Seas” opening February 1st in Rome at Teatro In Scatola. More info can be found here. He is also releasing a new vinyl LP to coincide titled “New Globe Notes” on NoFi Records.
* His essay “Listening Better” also mentioned in the show can be found in the electronic anthology “What Matters Now? (What Can’t You Hear?)” published by NOCH in April 2013. Additional documentation and audiovisual pieces in relation to our discussion can be found on his vimeo page.
* The show features excerpts from the following recordings: Platform 3, Platform 5, Bangkok Soundscape 3 (Bangkok River Project), JalanBatuUbin-nightime (Walking in Ubin)
Sensing Cities Ep. 10: a conversation with CONA
Image courtesy of Cona
Episode 10 of Sensing Cities discusses with Slovenian artists Irena Pivka and Brane Zorman, founders of CONA Institute of Contemporary Art about their locative audiopiece Walk the City, a project about the lesser known yet socially and politically important areas of the city of Ljubljana and the attempt to try and break the “bubble-ness” of modern city dwelling and commuting by slowing down the process through walking, exploring and listening. Walk the City invites its participants to start paying attention to the urban environment via its hidden narratives and soundscapes.
The show will be broadcast on Friday 10th of January 2014 at 5:00pm to 5:30pm (repeated on Monday the 13th at 1pm) @ Resonance FM.
About CONA
Irena Pivka, newmedia artist, architect, scenograher working as a freelance artist in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Brane Zorman is composer, intermedia artist, sound man-i-pul-ator, producer working as a freelance artist in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Irena Pivka and Brane Zorman estabished CONA institute for procesing contemporary arts. Cona creates and promotes contemporary art works in relation to society, technology, space and sound. In 2008 Irena Pivka and Brane Zorman launched a platform radioCona that uses and reseasches the radio frequency space in art contexts. FM frequency is understood as public space, explored from different perspectives and mediated through artworks audiobooks, programming and exhibitions. radioCona is intervention into public space.
* CONA will be curating a new RadioCONA programme of broadcasts as part of REuseCITY:REuseRADIO. The schedule will run from the 14th to the 20th of January 2014. More info can be found here.
Links:
Sensing Cities 