The Audiosphere

Goodwin Sands Radiogram: Magical Mystery Tour (2019)

Another special live show from Free Range. The first live programme was such a success that I decided to do it again. This episode might be the funniest and most touching yet. It's certainly the most sweary. As before, the programme's interviews were prerecorded and loaded into a sequencer to be played out live for the audience while improvising  musicians interpreted the spoken word material for the audience in real time. They hadn't heard the material before and had no idea about the  various subject matters discussed. This time we also had Adem Hilmi [https://blogs.canterbury.ac.uk/practiceresearch/work-in-progress-adem-hilmi/] as the Radio Operator. Adem is undertaking a PhD in radiophonic sound – the hisses, crackles and noise that are the stuff of radio. His software R.E.D. enables him to generate and manipulate these sounds on command and in this episode every instance of radiosound is his creation, live before the audience. Improvising musicians were Sam Bailey on piano once again, this time joined by Oliver Perrott-Webb on guitar, currently completing a PhD in American Poetics at Kent University, Canterbury. Peter Kelly again appeared as The Announcer. For this slightly longer episode the live introduction was truncated and is instead replaced by a short non-diegetic opening, which also includes a brief appearance by Milo the barking dachshund. All of these decisions influence the affective content of the programme in a notable way, explored more fully in the accompanying PhD thesis.

Goodwin Sands Radiogram: Transmission (live special) (2018)

A special live edition of the Radiogram as an experiment. When you are a podcast/radio producer you are in charge of pretty much everything. You do the interviews, you edit the recordings, you choose the music and sound, and you choose how it is applied, and you control the mood and meaning of the whole programme. What if it was different? What if I gave up my power as a producer? What if, as my thesis suggests, the process could be more like music – open to interpretation, collaborative, improvisational? To find out what would happen, I asked two classically trained musicians to perform the music for this programme live in front of an audience. With the interviews pre-edited and loaded into a computer sequencer to be cued at will the musicians were to interpret and improvise as they saw fit. They had not heard the interviews before - they were allowed only a written transcription and my 'conducting' them in and out as a rough guidance as to the over all shape of the programme. In this way the mood and affect of the show would be influenced beyond my control. Would the work still make emotional sense? Would the audience receive the programme favourably? The musicians performing here, Sam Bailey (piano) and Tom Jackson (clarinet), both hold PhDs in musical improvisation so were ideal candidates to take part. Peter Kelly played The Announcer as usual, and appeared live. The programme as presented here features my introduction and concluding remarks to as to give a flavour of the evening as this adds some affective content as well as the show itself. For full details see the programme's own website: www.goodwinsandsradio.org [http://www.goodwinsandsradio.org]

Hibernus Opus Continuum (2019)

'Hibernus opus continuum' is a deliberate mistranslation of 'winter work continues', 'continuum' being a reference to the piece of the same name by Sophie Stone [https://soundcloud.com/sophiestone27]. Originally a 90-minute longform composition and performance piece, an exact 30 minutes of Continuum was selected unedited to form the 'bed' (or background) of this documentary and the interviews were cut to the music – a reversal of the usual feature documentary-making process. The piece is a deliberately experimental podcast documentary created for Canterbury Christ Church University's Wintersound festival 2019. It takes three interviews with people from Canterbury and surrounding areas whose work is affected by the seasons and presents them in a non-linear way, exploring the relationship between sound and narrative in the podcast feature documentary form. This programme features interviews with Jon Mills, director of The Foundry [https://www.thefoundrycanterbury.co.uk/] pub in Canterbury, Lucy of Lucky Hedgehog Rescue [https://www.facebook.com/hogrescue/] in Deal, and Danny Martin, manager of the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway [https://www.rhdr.org.uk/].

Nota Bene: Canterbury Christ Church University and the CPBRA (2018)

Within the Arts and Humanities school at Canterbury Christ Church University exists the CPBRA – the Centre for Practice-Based Research in the Arts.  It is a central repository for creative output across different departments and disciplines: all staff and postgrad students' work is catalogued there and it is a source of much pride by the university.  This feature documentary podcast interviews three musicians about their work for the centre in the 2017/18 academic year. The  compositional process was such that I was granted access to the entire practice research output for the year but asked the centre to not be told what the pieces were for, the conceptual ideas behind them, or who their composers were. This forced me to work intuitively with the music  itself, drawing on the mood of the pieces and their inherent semiotics as they might apply to feature documentary work. Rather like the Goodwin Sands Radiogram, this is a piece composed of a mosaic of voices and materials, but unlike that project the contributors here speak collectively around a single topic. The piece has a non-linear narrative and can be heard as an investigative overview of the subject rather than a threaded story. It features interviews from Lauren Redhead [http://weblog.laurenredhead.eu/], Sarah Gail Brand [http://www.sarahgailbrand.net/] and Dan Herbert [https://youtu.be/tr190BV9GLc]. For more details please visit: http://theaudiosphere.weebly.com/nota_bene.html [http://theaudiosphere.weebly.com/nota_bene.html]

Seaside Towns, Seaside Frowns: Margate, Twenty-Seventeen (2017)

Poet Sam Simmons takes us on a guided tour of Margate meeting fellow artist Polly and a raft of other people along the way. Interspersed with his poetry both longform and snappy, Sam recalls his time in the town and reflects on how it has changed since the Turner Contemporary gallery opened in 2011. 'I've always thought of Margate as a bit damaged,' he muses. This piece was written for the Composition, Improvisation and Sonic Art Research Group festival in the spring of 2017 held at the Turner Contemporary and features music by musicians who  performed at the event. Full credits are at the end of the documentary. This was an experiment into working in a single longform interview format (which I had not done before), and was recorded in a single day as a walk around the town. The snatches of Sam's poetry are read by members of the CISA research group. I had met Sam while working in a rather pointless and tedious office dayjob where his creativity was unrecognised and his worth undervalued; it gave me pleasure to give him a voice to express himself more fully. He is now completing a degree in modern poetry at a London university. For more information please visit http://theaudiosphere.weebly.com/seaside-towns-seaside-frowns.html [http://theaudiosphere.weebly.com/seaside-towns-seaside-frowns.html]