my piece Species of Spaces 0:02 – soundtracks for the city / Melbourne tram conglomerate has been selected for inclusion in Frequency Oz,
a thematic exhibition of sonic media art and radio art by Australian
artists, part of a programme presented and produced by Yanna Black,
curated by Colin Black, and hosted by NAISA (New Adventures in Sound Art) radio for the Deep Wireless Festival of Radio & Transmission Art.
Deep Wireless
is a Toronto-based month-long festival, running in 2011 from April 30 -
May 31. It includes performances, installations, radio broadcasts of
commissioned works, and the Radio Without Boundaries Conference. Frequency Oz's stated wider aims as a project are to act as "a nexus for supporting new and innovative sonic media art, and building on the legacy of Australian radio art". They also maintain an online research resource for Australian radio art history.
The work by radio cegeste included in Frequency Oz's
2011 programme is an experimental documentary edited from field
recordings and recordings of performances gathered during my time as
one of 11 artists participating in the keynote project of the Melbourne Fringe Festival, a residency and "large scale collaborative live artwork" called Visible City which ran from 22 September - 10 October, 2010.
The
initial work of the Visible City programme, in which "a live
collaborative radio work for a transient audience" was created on
Melbourne's number 57 tram by radio cegeste
as a curatorial project involving the collation and transmission of
audio and field recordings from the home cities of the 10 other Visible
City participants, occurred at the Visible City launch on Wednesday 22
Sept 2010, followed by other transmissions during the residency. More
can be seen at the Melbourne Fringe website. 
some Visible City video documentation of one of these performances :
Visible City - Species Of Spaces from Martyn Coutts on Vimeo.The entire programme for the fourth week of Frequency Oz, as well as my writeup for the piece, appeared as follows :
---
Week Four, 23 - 31 May 2011 (duration 59:30)
New Australian works submitted to Frequency Oz responding to the theme of “transmission, dislocation, space and place” and how this theme relates to them as Australians :
- Daniel Blinkhorn - Built Environment
- Automating - DePreston - Dedicated to Ambulance Victoria
- Radio Cegeste (a.k.a. Sally Ann McIntyre) - Species of Spaces 0:02 – soundtracks for the city / Melbourne tram conglomerate
- Garth Paine - Present in the Landscape
- Sam Gillies - Dichotomy:Assembly
- Pamela Lee Brenner and Johannes Muljana - Overhead, By the Way
- Jordan Lacey - I'm Really Conscious Of Myself Talking Here
---
Species of Spaces 0:02 – soundtracks for the city / Melbourne tram conglomerate
Radio Cegeste (a.k.a. Sally Ann McIntyre)
In Melbourne during October 2010 on a collaborative residency for live art called Visible City,
the keynote project of that year’s Melbourne Fringe Festival, I spent
much of my time roaming around on public trams, foraging in record
stores and libraries, and recording the sound of the city I was living
in, a sustained private psychogeography which served as an investigation
of an Audible City, which, via its various outcomes in small public
art projects, was my response to the residency’s daily challenges.
Despite
growing up three hours east of Melbourne, the concentrated attentive
focus on the city which the residency allowed meant this was the first
time I had got to grips with the place through its sonic details for
some time. The sonic textures of the inner city’s life, poised as it
was between a historically unprecedented draw in the local football
league’s final match and the re-play outcome the week after, something
that had left the city on some level of standstill, like a held breath
within the weave of its tribalisms and rivalries, seemed richly
interpolated with mythologies, accents, the tension between older ways
of life and newer, globalised mall culture.
My
public art works during the Visible City residency included creating
Mini FM stations for localised situations and spaces in response to my
wandering research, such as narrowcasting a series of field recordings
collected on inner city public transport back into the tram system via
distributed radios, installing a dawn chorus of radiophonic native
Australian birdsong in an inner city arcade in the week of the 70th
anniversary of Walter Benjamin’s death, and the project ‘soundtracks
for the city’, a live radio show and film soundtrack which involved
sitting on a chair in a public space (in this case the corner of
Elizabeth and Little Collins Streets in the Melbourne CBD, and within
the former Greville Botanical Gardens, now Grattan Gardens) with a
portable record player and a stack of library records thrown away from
the channel 10 TV archives (with such titles as “Stranger in the City :
Alienation”), over-dramatically responding to an imagined narrative
crafted from the movements of passers by for a two hour period, with
appropriate feedback from the city’s population of viewer/listeners
(this work was not a one-to-many, but many-to-one transmission).
This piece for Deep Wireless
Toronto is a re-situating of some of the audible elements of this
series of works, within a new transmission work for Mini FM recorded in
Dunedin, New Zealand in April 2011. As a memory space, Melbourne
appears here as fleeting and fractured, its narratives disconnected,
fragmented and subtle at turns. In such a bewilderingly rich
environment of signs, one gets the impression that the smallest spheres
of holding are the only ones really trustworthy: either the cloistered
private spaces of the headphone-listening space, where people build
private rooms in public space via the delineation of their own
sound-worlds, or that of intimate spaces of private conversation,
whether it be between two strangers on a tram of different
nationalities and generations, or an old regular being welcomed into an
Italian café that has been in the same site for four generations.
Here, on the level of city life, grand narratives of romantic
nationalism seem as pompous, outdated and misrepresentative as public
sculpture which tries to speak “for” a population so diverse and
decentred. People sing their own songs on the trams of Melbourne, in
exchange for a dollar or two.
The
medium of radio, with its potential to site sound in small bounded
transmission spaces (in the case of Mini-FM) and in the immaterial
materiality of the ether, is an apt exploratory tool when thinking
about sound recording, memory and place. This experimental documentary
eschews a centralized narrator in favour of letting the city ‘speak for
itself’, reflecting and re-posing the shifting, ephemeral fabric of
the city’s sounds, where we listen in daily to many such fragmented
narratives and imperfect attention-spaces, quiet whispers and clamours
to be heard. The specificities of the spaces in which this work’s
original recordings move, layered together in a field of interference,
imperfect recall and re-transmitted siting within the present, become
analogue for my own dislocation from Australia as an emigrant whose
cultural identity is informed by spending half my life living in, and
identifying with the cultures of, New Zealand. For me, asking the
question(s) ‘what is it to be Australian’ from such an observational,
yet immersed perspective seems the gateway to a potent set of
trajectories.
