We were delighted to accept an offer by Octopus to work as artists in residence on the first Full of Noises (FON) festival, together with Haco and Susan Matthews. Mobile Radio proposed to develop content for a live radio broadcast to be performed for an audience at the festival. We worked closely with the above artists, who also joined us for the performance of our piece entitled MORSONATA.

Our idea for the work was to convert the sound poem Ursonate, by exiled German artist Kurt Schwitters, into morse code (he spent his last years living and working on his final Merzbau in the region), and weave this into an intimate portrait of Barrow-in-Furness. We utilsed contrasting recordings by the other artists made around the town’s nuclear submarine facility and wild coastline, combined with reflections from our own research into a surprising historical wartime moment linking Barrow’s past to its present.

The shed, the museum, the submariner’s letter, Haco recording with FON host Fern Oxley

The unavoidable thing about Barrow is the town’s primary occupation – building nuclear-powered submarines in the enormous white shed. Inevitably, almost every local person has some relationship to the town’s military industry. You are not allowed to photograph the shed, or indeed capture anything with electronic devices on Barrow Island where it is situated. Octopus held their festival in its shadow, and invited sound artists to work for a week in the area. Haco, who we had requested to work with, lives in the pioneering nuclear-free port of Kobe in Japan. On her first recording outing she nearly got arrested, spotted within seconds by security guards with eyeballs fixed on their monitors.

We were on safe ground in the Dock Museum, which gave up its secrets willingly. Here Sarah found the letter that was to become the second defining text of MORSONATA, sent by Prisoner of War James M. Freel, Leading Seaman Temporary D/JX.149484, informing his mother that he was alive after evading certain death on his scheduled submarine – having been transferred last minute to another vessel. He was a Charioteer – human torpedo – charged with riding a missile launched from a sub, and detaching the warhead mine to plant on the underside of an enemy ship before (idealy) riding the chariot away again. His letter is hauntingly humble and prosaic, and was brought into vivid relief for us by local actor Damo. The mood was set by an opening and closing song, the anti-war anthem Shipbuilding by Elvis Costello, written for Robert Wyatt. We made our own simple version for voice and harmonium in the privacy of the ladies toilets.

Keying the Ursonate by Kurt Schwitters

It was utterly delightful to get the chance to work with ex-Navy and Merchant Navy hands Mike Cumming and Bill Jenkins, who approached this unusual and challenging request undaunted. They enjoyed listening to morse code again, in fact it sounded like music to Bill’s ears. When it was his turn to listen, Mike was able to follow along the otherwise nonsensical rhythmic developments of the Ursonate, and could relate the exploits of some of the strange ‘characters’ he encountered within. The work is made up entirely of repetitive patterns of speech sounds, which when converted to Morse we used as a rhythm track for our submariner-inspired impression of Barrow.

Secomark Hand Operated Syren Type 447 we recorded behind-the-scenes at the museum

The performance set-up, recording with Susan, Haco’s egg slicer, Damo lending his voice

The radio show went out live on Resonance 104.4FM in London and on Radio Zero in Lisbon. This Portuguese connection lead us to include a thrid related text in Portuguese, the poem Barrow-in-Furness by Álvaro de Campos (a heteronym of famed poet Fernando Pessoa) read for us by Kat and recorded by Ricardo Reis (coincidently another of Pessoa’s heteronyms). MORSONATA was made up of layers of morse code which floated in and out, the texts, local field recordings, plus piano and organ treatments created by Susan Matthews, Clutter and Haco. On top of that we intertwined live performances by Susan on harmonium, Haco on egg slicer, electronics, cymbal and voice, and our longstanding duo Tonic Train featuring our electronic instrumentorium of homemade circuit bending and radio feedback. You can read a little more about the residency process on the FON blog.

It’s not possible to do the marvelous FON festival justice on this site and recount all of the inspiring performances, instead here are a few samples of John Wall’s extreme waveforms as a teasing taste of how his music sounded. Over the years, Octopus went on to develop FON into one of the world’s a premier sound art organisations. Latest FON activities can be found on their website.