location : rangatira
time : 5.00pm
notes : collaborative piece, with berlin based musician and sound artist johnny chang. we'd been talking a while about the notion of playing sounds back to environments. the composition johnny eventually sent me to transmit on kapiti was called 'construction', and it was ventriloquised to a flock of radios on the beach at rangatira, in a spot where the presence of phyllonite rock reveals the island's history of intense seismic activity. these were placed in small groups in the sand just before sundown, in the position oystercatchers might take while foraging, and infiltrated the elemental sounds of environment (the cries of sea birds, the crash of waves) with radio static, noise and the sounds of strings.
johnny writes of his composition of the piece : "just like the radio stations which you find in shortwave bands - the sounds were all recorded separately from one another. in fact, from time to time, i imagine them as complete and self-standing structures. or even, freestanding elements which lean upon each other. each element somewhat too fragile or obtuse to exist on its own. i imagined that your placement of this piece completes it. the elements in play are: Berlin-Kreuzberg open air sonic captures - threatening to burst out of the framework, whispy violin noise-tone combinations, viola low frequency resonances, zither tones gradually infected with extraneous noise radio static, in combination with pink noise, struggling to tune itself."
