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BARROW June 2012

June 30, 2012 by Mobile Radio | Comments Off on BARROW June 2012

Octopus Collective live broadcast to Lisbon from Peel View House in Barrow Park

The Octopus Collective is a Sound Arts and Music organisation based in Barrow, Cumbria in the UK, with its HQ in the former park keepers house in Barrow public park. Since 2009 we have delivered the FON Festival of music and sound arts, and a programme of commissions and education projects, working with artists from the USA, Europe and Japan including Mobile Radio, Faust, Richard Youngs, John Wall, AGF, Hildur Gudnadottir and others. Our interest in broadcast arts has led to collaborations with Tetsuo Kogawa, Haco, and an ongoing project with Mobile Radio who performed at our first festival in 2009.

For this commission we carried out a radio hacking workshop with the Octopus Collective Hacking Group, followed by a collective radio performance streamed live to the radio art festival RadiaLx 2012 in Lisbon, and finally a drone-based concert for assorted players around the building.
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The hacking workshop needed to be short and sweet, as we only had half a day to get each person equipped with an interesting-sounding instrument to perform upon for the radio broadcast in the afternoon. Luckily, everyone was able to bring along an old or cheap radio (or two) which they didn’t mind dismantling. After a bit of trial and error short-circuiting the electronic components, each radio was able to make a range of tones, squealing, hissing or crackling sounds. Knut then conducted the group in a simple improvisation involving tuning the radios in and out of a home transmission frequency which broadcast radio feedback, and this was interspersed with solo spots on the newly discovered circuit-bent sounds

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The radio show became an audio tour of Peel View House, led by Andrew Deakin. Each room was visited in turn to experience whatever brand of sonic exploration lay therein. When the hacking workshop room was reached, the group performed their mighty improvisation, before the roving microphone moved on to explore the basement where a percussion duo was taking place. Andrew narrated the tour of the work going on all over the house, including a touching account of his own audio obsessions during an examination of the noise-making objects crammed up to the rafters in his workroom. Throughout the hour-long show, pauses were made to play extracts from a few previous Octopus commissions by various visiting artists, and live backgrounds were supplied by tugging on a string at the radio desk which was attached to a guitar-string contact mic contraption hanging out of the window, made by Glenn Boulter – thanks also to Glenn for some of the photos on this page

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The improvised drone concert featured action in all the various rooms and the performers were invited to move around the house to find other people to play with. The ancient harmonium in the music room provided a ready-made drone machine, and the most notable sonic landscape was supplied by John Hall’s set-up where he performed on violin, bastardised turntables, self-made records and assorted objects

BARROW October 2010

October 27, 2010 by Mobile Radio | Comments Off on BARROW October 2010

Radio workshop for Octopus
We were invited back to Barrow to give an overview of working with radio for the sound art collective Octopus in their house in Barrow Park. The Octopus Collective run the wonderful festival Full of Noises
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Our stay was kindly hosted by Lanternhouse in Ulverston, a town distinctive for its unique inland lighthouse – shown here with its outstanding views of Morecambe Bay and the lakeland fells

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Luckily, there was plenty of time to check out what members of Octopus get up to in Piel View House. Here is John Hall in his vinyl experimentation room, with adapted turntables and glue records which play backwards from the inside outwards, watched over by Kurt Schwitters. Andrew Deakin can be seen recording tiny snippets of sound for the Radia show: In an Octopus’s Den. Outside the park provides distracting simple pleasures

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Now for some work

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Off to the bandstand and back

BARROW October 2009

October 25, 2009 by Mobile Radio | Comments Off on BARROW October 2009

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.