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HALLE (SAALE) October 2016

October 30, 2016 by Mobile Radio | Comments Off on HALLE (SAALE) October 2016

Radio Revolten was the largest festival dedicated to radio art worldwide. As artistic director and co-curators we were involved in all stages and aspects of the festival and temporarily relocated to Halle to help with the organisation.

The scope of the month-long festival included daily performances, more than a dozen installations, two exhibitions, a 24/7 radio station, a conference and several international meetings and much more by nearly a hundred artists from around the world. In April 2018 a documentation in book form will be published by Spector Books. The festival’s website now acts as an archive of the proceedings and contains specific audio-visual archive pages for our own activities as part of the programme. Click here to view this for Sarah or Knut.

Below are audio excerpts of Knut’s silence detection radio installation “Changing of the Guard” and Sarah’s three frequency broadcast “In the Air We Share”.

HALLE July 2013

July 12, 2013 by Mobile Radio | Comments Off on HALLE July 2013

As guest curator and contributor to the Addicted2Random festival of Radio Corax, Knut assembled an international group to produce Imaginary Radio Band No. 1 for the opening of the proceedings at the Händelhaus. The musicians performing live on stage were:

Andre Damião (BR), computer, voice
Børre Mølstad (NO), tuba, voice
Xentos ‘Fray’ Bentos (UK), guitar, voice
Knut Aufermann (DE), electronics, voice
Sarah Washington (UK), electronics, voice
With additional voices by Helen Hahmann and Ralf Wendt

The idea was to produce an acoustic journey through an uncharted band on the radio dial, jumping from station to station. We were lucky enough to work with the museum custodian Christiane Barth, who allowed us to perform on the organ built by Johann Gottlieb Mauer in 1770. The recorded version below is a special reworking of the live recordings for the Radia network by Xentos.

Photos: Marcus Andreas Mohr

Other events of this wildly diverse and beautiful festival included a duo of Tetsuo Kogawa (on AM transmitters via live-stream from Tokyo) and Knut, a rare DJ set by the elusive Johnny Head-in-Air and the introduction of two people who should have already met decades ago…

LONDON July 2011

July 17, 2011 by Mobile Radio | Comments Off on LONDON July 2011

As the final event of the exhibition Gone with the Wind curated by Ed Baxter for the gallery Raven Row, we were invited by Ed and Richard Thomas to produce a live radio piece. Titled “Can the principle of yeast be applied to a lot of other things?” (Fischli & Weiss), this was a sonic exploration of the process of vinification from a biodynamic wine estate at the Mosel in Germany. The event was broadcast in London on Resonance 104.4FM and in Lisbon on the Radio Zero festival frequency: Rádio Real, 88.4MHz

David Motion of The Winery presents the Mosel region and the wine of Rita and Rudolf Trossen. Knut introduces our piece, which combines radio feedback and circuit-bent sounds with a wine bubbling in its cellar cask – Pyramide Riesling Spätlese trocken 2009, the actual wine the audience now have in their hands. Also prominent are the melodious words of the vintner Rudolf Trossen and recordings from vineyards, including a crop-spraying helicopter. (Not necessarily to cruelly shatter any illusions about the rural way of life, more to complete the picture of what was happening in the build-up to the performance.) A surprising motif is supplied by the music played from a car with speakers mounted on the roof which announces: “Early tomorrow, helicopter spraying!”

Lovely for us to catch up with our ‘home crowd’ and rejoin the Resonance fold, however briefly. The station was broadcasting for the duration of the festival from a booth at the back of the room. A warm hug to Vera for serving the wine, now everybody seems to be aglow. (That’s one good way to keep an audience happy!)

The Walter Marchetti pianos in the exhibition were a delight, Max Eastley’s work was equally sublime, with tiny scratchy wires stuttering across pieces of paper and a beautiful sound installation on the roof of the gallery which was periodically played live on Resonance. It’s wind-motivated metal plates were quiet and active by turn, blending with the London cityscape on the edge of the (noticeably bird-less) financial district. In fact we had joyfully listened to the installation from Germany during the festival, without knowing that it was soon to be clanging on our roof-light all night long during our stay at the gallery. That’s what you call presence!
Thanks to Derek Washington who took all of the above photos

Finally a word about the Resonance competition for self-powered sound devices which we were asked to help judge. A room in the gallery was brimming with all manner of chattering, whizzing and bashing, however the winning piece had been removed due to a problem with flies. It was an old radio powered solely by fermenting fruit, which of course had decayed beyond the staff’s comfort zone over the course of the exhibition! Also high in our estimation was this Lego glockenspiel player. Not directly because of its looks or the type of sound it produced, but purely on merit of the ingenious system of varied length wheel-chains and sizes, which created perfect mechanical randomness

BRUSSELS October 2007

October 29, 2007 by Mobile Radio | Comments Off on BRUSSELS October 2007

We are asked to produce an epic live Radia event for the festival Radiophonic 2007. There were many other events taking place over the four days, a few of which are documented below

The setting of Les Brigittines was magnificent – the old and the new building are connected internally and bridged by a very old bell

Festival coordinator Irvic D’Olivier talks with Silvain Gire from ARTE Radio

The Bing Selfish Radio Show in full swing

‘La femme sans visage’ radio drama directed live by Clément Laloy

Phil Minton gave a magnificent solo performance

Our project was called Radioactive Radiophony, and it involved receiving live streams from Radia member stations around the world which we ‘contaminated’ in Brussels before sending the stream back to them for broadcast.
Here we see the Radia back-room crew, with Ricardo Reis playing Communication Chief

Our show lasted 4 hours. During this time each station would send us a 20 minute broadcast from their studio. Our team of contaminators was on hand to react to the incoming streams.
Above is Dinah Bird – our continuity storyteller, with Anna Friz and Jean-Philippe Renoult poised for real-time contamination

Our contamination toolkit, for guests to add some foley action to the proceedings

Contaminators Jacques Foschia and Ricardo Reis

We also had some live music as part of our radio event, here is the excellent La Brocante Sonore, who were partially contaminated by some sweet music from Marseilles. The combination of the two things in the church was awesome, giving a unique atmosphere

It seems it wasn’t enough to run the radio show – we also played as Tonic Train, contaminated by Roland Wouters of Martiens Go Home

One last thing to do before we leave Brussels. Jacques Foschia organized a concert for us, which turned into a collaboration with La Brocante Sonore. This is our score for the various combinations of musicians. Some joker added a section at the end – whatever happened to Harry and Jane?

La Brocante Sonore perform the middle fifteen. The member missing from the picture is active with amplified and acoustic shoeshine (see above photo for the shoeshine chair)