ISSUE 57
THE DROUTH
WINTER 2016/17
Reflections of the City in the Light at the End of the Dial of the Dial at the End in the Light of the City Reflections
Mark Vernon
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‘The Light at the End of the Dial’ is the strapline for Radiophrenia, a temporary, artist-run radio station based in Glasgow of which I am the co-manager. The station transmits on FM in the Glasgow area and broadcasts worldwide through its internet stream. The project aims to promote radio as an artform, encouraging experimental approaches to the medium and provides a home to work that is too radical, contentious or experimental in nature to be broadcast elsewhere. The vast majority of the broadcast content is selected from submissions to an international open call for sound and radio works. One element of the station’s remit is to encourage those who may not normally work with sound to create and experiment with the medium.
This Page; The Mackintosh building in the aftermath of the fire.
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This survey will focus on the various ways artists, musicians, radio producers and amateurs have responded to the location of Glasgow itself over the two years of Radiophrenia’s broadcasts. It is also about what new and unexpected insights into the city this diversity of approaches brings with it. This method is by its very nature fragmentary; glimpses of aspects of a city which add up to a contradictory portrait in sounds.
ISSUE 57
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WINTER 2016/17
Transmission Time: 15:00 – 16:00 – 16/04/2015 Michael Umney’s ‘Rewarding the Observant’ is an imaginary audio guide to Glasgow School of Art’s iconic and tragically fire damaged Mackintosh building, crafted from the recollections of students and staff. “I had never seen Glasgow School of Art’s iconic Mackintosh building before a sudden and violent fire destroyed much of its interior in May 2014. Over two days.....I set out to recreate the building as it was before this disaster, using only the memories of the people who worked and studied there. This programme combines interviews with tour guides, reception and janitorial staff, students and tutors in a collage of interwoven voices and ideas. Smell, emotion, light, colour, walking routes and hidden places combine to build a highly subjective but surprisingly consistent map of The Mack”.
It is arguably due to his detachment and lack of prior knowledge that Umney was able to elicit such personal and unguarded responses from his interviewees. Sensitively he removes his own voice in the final piece, editing out all of his questions allowing the voices to speak for themselves in subtle interplay. It is interesting as an exercise in memory and visualisation and it is sad that this is probably the closest most people will get to a tour of the Mackintosh building for some years to come. Memories and anecdotes, some passed down through the generations, serve to bolster the Mack’s mythic status. Here, the most conspicuous absence is the building itself and the acoustic spaces that these voices would naturally inhabit. The voices are present but the acoustic site they would normally resonate within is absent.
Umney, from London’s Resonance FM, could be described as an outsider or even a tourist. This, combined with the fact that the GSA were unhappy that interviews were taking place without their supervision, raises questions of who gets to describe and assess the legacy of a city and its buildings.
This Page: The Psychogeographical Commission’s reimagining of the Glasgow Subway System
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Transmission Time: 20:00 – 20:30 – 13/04/2015
Transmission Time: 18:00 – 18:30 – 17/04/2015
In ‘Widdershins’ The Psychogeographical Commission took listeners on a hauntological heritage tour with a difference. Intermingling fact and fiction, this exploration of subterranean Glasgow consists of field recordings augmented with eerie ambient synth and collages of found sound.
In the programme ‘I Belong to Glasgow’ Gill Davies aimed to “... create a soundscape of Glasgow representing the experiences of citizens who aren’t given a voice in the mainstream media”. As an independent producer for BBC Radio 4 and Radio Scotland, Davies has to adhere to strict guidelines about content in her day job so the opportunity to make a sound piece that wasn’t subject to a restrictive editorial policy and scheduling constraints was appealing to her.
“This recording documents the inner circle of the Glasgow Subway System which travels in Widdershins (or anticlockwise direction) – a constant banishing ritual performed daily on all of the West side of Glasgow. The subway first opened on the 14th December 1886 but it was soon closed after an accident which resulted in train walls painted in blood being traced around the circuit of the track which acted as a blood sacrifice to energise the protection”. Taking in the Covenanter movement, Prophet Peden, the Societas Rosicruciana in Scotia and the hermetic order of the Golden Dawn the arcane references in their introduction amount to an esoteric fantasy of an alternative Gothic Glasgow. Their intention was to play the recording back on a train at an astronomically significant time allowing the timing differences of the stations to gently pull the banishment out of phase allowing a glimpse at the imagined horrors that subway passengers are shielded from on a daily basis. This inventive (and humorous) reimagining of our urban environment invites us to look beyond the surface and create mythologies of our own about our everyday surroundings.
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The majority of the content for the piece is sourced from Youtube clips uploaded by ‘Mister Glasgow’ AKA Gary Barton. Barton runs the Great Eastern Auction Rooms in the Barras in the East End and has for the past few years been filming visitors to his premises and posting the clips on his own Youtube channel. The thick Glaswegian accent and language that the BBC would probably designate as ‘unacceptable’ mean that these are voices rarely if ever heard in the media, or only mediated through an ‘authoritative’ voice or diluted by being ghettoised as comedy.
ISSUE 57
THE DROUTH
WINTER 2016/17
Transmission Time: 19:15 – 19:45 – 11/09/2016 Glaswegian duo Cassie Ezeji and Siobhain Ma, performing as Sister in a live-to-air event presented ‘Hotline’; an exploration through interviews, poetry and prose of growing up mixed race in Glasgow, and the struggle to form a cohesive identity with no solid community. With its mix of TV samples, live and pre-recorded voice, the piece was imaginatively staged as a telephone advice line replete with office props and vintage phones. The experiences and challenges that face mixed race Scottish women is a subject that is rarely addressed within the context of Glasgow. “So, where are you from?” “Na – but where are you really from?” “I mean originally?” “Where’s your Mum from?” “What about your Dad?” “What’s your background?” “Erm, what’s your heritage?” “What are you?” “I knew you were something.” “You don’t look Scottish though.” “It’s really funny because I didn’t expect you to speak like that.” “I mean, your English is great.”
This Page: Sister – ‘Hotline’ poster.
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Transmission Time: 22:20 – 22:40 – 14/04/2015 Other Glasgow voices not commonly heard on the airwaves came in the form of ‘Central Belt Dictaphone Sounds’ by Doog Cameron. The show is a collection of surreptitiously gathered recordings made on his mobile phone – mostly overheard arguments and acts of random violence that break out from time to time in pubs or on the streets of any large city. There is a voyeuristic element to these recordings; the subjects are unaware they are being recorded, and consequently their behaviour is unmoderated and uncensored. We become privy to some quite hostile situations that would endanger the person recording them if the subjects became aware of that fact. The ethics of using these recordings is of course questionable.
This Page: Photograph: Doog Cameron.
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This illicit nature seems to be heightened further by the pitched up, voice-disguised commentary. The Smurfish aspects of this companion voice create even more unease – its comedic tones are in sharp counterpoint to the extreme content. Listening to perhaps the most verbally violent recording (recorded out of the bathroom window) our host tells us that he moved out of that flat about 6 months later. This is not a holiday in other people’s misery but a fair and accurate reflection of the darker aspects of the artist’s surroundings. Fear of the accusation that we as listeners might just be listening for thrills is negated by the extreme proximity of the final recording which seems almost to implicate us as listeners in the middle of the unfolding affray. After previously listening in at a polite distance, we are now in the thick of it – how this recording was obtained is left a mystery.
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WINTER 2016/17
Transmission Time: 13:00 – 14:00 – 19/04/2015
Transmission Time: 20:30 – 21:00 – 13/04/2015
Found recordings of a different nature are the subject of Thomas Leyland-Collins’ ‘Cornucopia.’ On obtaining a reel to reel tape recorder from the Southern General Hospital, he was also given 30 or so tapes that their hospital radio station no longer had any use for.
In ‘The Closing Ceremony’ Ian F-W takes the closing concert of the 2014 Commonwealth Games, a massive city-wide event, as a tool to unpick the many, varied ways such a festival is diffused / received. His focus is the city itself and the public who were simultaneously ‘subject of’ and ‘audience to’ the concert, either from being physically present, viewing second hand media coverage at home or through amateur camera or phone footage dispersed through social media. Using this multitude of different media perspectives as a starting point he attempts to piece together his own version of coverage to the event, examining its spatial effects both in the physical world and in media space. In his words he ‘assembles it to dismantle it’ and in so doing starts to gain a critical perspective on the proceedings.
He discovered a trove of vintage recordings from radio plays to interviews with patients, political messages and news reports along with adverts for discotheques and the Evening Times. The collage of sounds he created from this collection of tapes provides a fascinating insight into the world of hospital radio as well as an extremely idiosyncratic audio archive of 1980’s audio ephemera. The voices and sounds are evocative of the era and the playful juxtaposition of material adds humour and wit. Shining a light on material like this is more than just an exercise in nostalgia though. Listening between the lines we can gain “What can be understood from the sound of a large-scale open air concert when it is genuine insights into the values, attitudes and documented from the street, ‘from the outside’? mindset of a generation from our recent history. How does the audience inside relate to the event It is a valuable artefact of Glasgow’s audio through practices of (mobile phone) self-capture heritage that might otherwise have been and broadcast? What happens when you discarded. combine various types of documentary content of the same event, as an index of sounds, subject positions, and orders of mediated space?“
This Page: Photograph courtesy of TLC.
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Transmission Time: 14:00 – 14:30 – 02/09/2016 F-W used similar techniques to great effect in a follow up of sorts in 2016. ‘Ri-Ri’ used a series of ‘audio selfies’ taken around the exterior of Glasgow’s Hampden Park arena during a concert by Rihanna.
For a live radio performance this material was mixed and re-synchronised with audio from fan footage of the same event found online, cutting rapidly between these alternate perspectives. The spectral quality of the music reverberating through the outside of the arena is heightened by the juxtaposition of audio from inside. For the live performance F-W also utilised live microphones in the Radiophrenia studio, capturing live sounds of the studio as both a listening and performance space, adding yet a further layer to the mix.
“Heard from outside, the sound of the concert didn’t really seem to come from inside the venue, rather it sounded sort of omni-present and also strangely not there at all. It made the spaces we were walking in sound and feel similarly spectral – as if simultaneously real and imagined – actual and virtual.” “The piece functions as the real-time broadcast of a (past) gig within a (present) gig, and as a way of exploring recorded sounds as territorialising ambiences – fields through which sound might re-member listeners, and the liminal spaces between contemporary music production and reception.”
This Page: Photograph courtesy of Iain F-W.
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This Page: Photograph: Mark Vernon.
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WINTER 2016/17
Transmission Time: 16:41 – 17:03 – 04/09/2016
Transmission Time: 16:11 – 16:17 – 04/09/2016
This distance from the initial point of audition is something I have explored myself in ‘Non Members Night Out’. Some years ago I suffered from a bout of prolonged back pain. Bad reactions to the my medication meant social drinking was out of the question and, combined with the inability to stand for longer than 10 minutes without excruciating pain, this began to seriously curtail my social life. The pubs, karaoke bars and clubs became symbols of my exclusion. It was around this time that I began making recordings of the outdoor night life on my shadowy walks home. I was drawn to the back doors of clubs, deserted alleys behind bars, non-places where the filtered bass of the discotheque made the sense of isolation more palpable.
There are countless other examples from the Radiophrenia archive that might have been included in this article had there been space. Elodie Roy and Benjamin Belinska’s ode to the Cathcart Circle Line, the daily forecasts of satellites passing over Glasgow by Clare Davies, Louise Wilson’s sound map of the River Kelvin, Doog Cameron’s paean to the Glasgow highrise or the sobering real-life stories of Mark Chambers’ ‘The Glasgow Effect’. One of the oldest pieces to be aired on Radiophrenia was ‘Final Times’ by Alistair McDonald from 1998. Described as ‘cinema for the ears’, this short soundscape captures some of Glasgow’s most iconic sound marks, the Evening Times seller from which the piece takes its title, the hustle and bustle of busy shopping streets, football crowds, the escalator at Central station, the Subway trains, and of course, bagpipes. Eighteen years on it is remarkable how little has changed.
This piece was assembled from a series of surreptitious recordings made outside Glasgow nightclubs, skulking around back doors and fire exits in the early hours of the morning – sounds familiar to anyone used to prowling the streets of a big city late at night. Despite the obvious This raises some questions – What sounds are presence of others these sounds are strangely truly most representative of this city? What effect isolating. They document only the exterior, the does hearing our environment played back to periphery. The listener is excluded from the us over the airwaves have? Does it offer us exciting and lively atmospheres that can be heard reassurance? Does it reinforce our sense of self? at a distance through the barriers of closed doors, – or does holding an audio mirror up to it enable brick walls and back alleys. You can hear the us to reflect on our society, our national identity party going on but you haven’t been invited. and our relation to it? Does it encourage change or stasis? These recordings also document the effects that high volumes of music and the city’s club Although I don’t expect to find any straight culture have on the surrounding architecture answers to these questions this dialogue and acoustic environment. A door frame between the city, its inhabitants and the rattles in time, but at a slight delay, to the music complex relationship artists have with their within. A closely miked recording of a broken lived environment is something I hope we but intact windowpane at the rear of one club will be able to investigate further through makes the grinding together of the shards of future broadcasts. glass audible as they vibrate in time to the bass. Microphones inserted into drainpipes amplify the audible white noise content creating warm drones; filtered higher frequencies from the music and sounds from outside are still just audible. Windows rattle in their frames under an asUnless otherwise stated all quotations are from sault of bass heavy music. It is these ‘secondary the respective artist’s accompanying text to the vibrations’ that I am most drawn to in the work, specified work submitted for broadcast on the audible evidence of sound on other bodies, Radiophrenia between 2015 and 2016. spaces and structures.
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