Cast and Figment: Radio as Metaphor and as Such is now ‘off air’. Thank you for listening. Please return to this website and subscribe to Soundfjord’s newsletter for announcements regarding future auditions of Cast and Figment.

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1: Lauren McCullum, Carla Espinoza and Leo Ashizawa performing (A Comedy of) Danger; 2: David Berridge reading A Hedgerow Doesn’t Have to Leave the House; 3: Homeland (Cat Moir, Terry Slater, Robert Quirk and Charlotte A Morgan) hold A conversation around presence. Photos 1 and 3 by Helen Frosi, 2 by Matthew MacKisack.

On the last day of Cast and Figment Soundfjord is open to the public.  RSVP to info@soundfjord.org.uk if you would like to attend, and please arrive before 3.00pm, when the final transmission will begin with a live reading by Dan Smith.

Modern Conditions is comprised of the words of radio broadcasts made by H.G. Wells for the BBC, drawing out a sense of utopian potential and possibility within these extraordinary recordings made for a mass audience.

This is followed at around 3.30pm by another live reading in which Mikko Canini considers White Noise on the Radio.

Most analyses of media draw a historical line from the telegraph, through radio, to the internet, and do so by focusing – for example in McLuhan’s analysis – on form rather than content. Thinking, instead, about the form of the content produced by these technologies would divide the historical stream into two groups: one that begins with the telegraph and leads to the telephone, and one that begins with radio and leads to television and the internet. While these groups might conventionally be distinguished in terms of public versus private receptions, the distinction to be pursued here is the capacity of the latter group to produce noise.

The programme concludes with the 1st screening – and 2nd broadcast of the soundtrack – of Bridget Crone‘s video Easy Listening Meets Flicker-Time, a “conversation between analogue and digital broadcast transmissions about time and affect”.

By 5.00pm we will be ‘off air’. Please return to this website and subscribe to Soundfjord’s newsletter for announcements regarding future auditions of Cast and Figment: Radio as Metaphor and as Such.

This evening’s broadcast begins at 7.30 with Karen Di Franco‘s Concrete Radio. Concrete Radio attempts to describe the relationship between producer and  the originator by exploring the liminal space of transmission and reception. Broadcasting within the Soundfjord studio, Music for the Next to Die will present a fractured dialogue for two radios, describing the economics of traversing the nameless zones, overlays of the near future and recent past as performed on the gold trading floor of the World Trade Centre and how to make the most of Time. Click here for programme details of Music for the Next to Die.

Next Lawrence Abu Hamdan will introduce a new work from the Aural Contract Audio Archive. Part of an ongoing research project into the politics of language and the conditions of voice faced by the Druze community in Palestine/Israel, On the Borders of Bilingualism, writes the artist, “offers an account of how borders, jurisdictions and colonial occupation become inscribed and worn on the voice of its subjects.” The work will then be discussed within the context of the Aural Contract Audio Archive (accessible here) by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Karen Di Franco and Matthew MacKisack.

Two artist-groups take to the airwaves this evening. At 7.30, Hal Silver speaks.

Hal Silver has collected transcripts from a wide-range of speeches, manifestos and articles of public address, focusing on those whose rhetoric assumes the mantle of speaking on behalf of “the people”, the singular that speaks to and for the plural. Hal Silver will re-make these speeches – edited and redacted – as six voices speaking the terms of collective command and affirmation, sometimes overlapping, sometimes punctuating the silence.

Then, at around 7.45, the collaborative project Homeland will hold A Conversation Around Presence, a broadcast for both analogue and online radio. Depending on their chosen medium, listeners will encounter one half of a conversation which addresses what it means to be live, in dialogue and in occupancy, as well as it’s own fragmented nature. As a framework, the conversation opens up to a range of concerns explored through Homeland including communication across boundaries, the domestic space, utopian potentials and the psychological effects of technology and capitalism.

Tonight’s listening begins at 7.30 with extracts from Orson Welles‘s dramatisation of H. G. Wells‘s The War of the Worlds. Welles’s version is notable for its form - the interrupting, then rolling news bulletin – as well as for its effect on many listeners, who, in a tense pre-war atmosphere, took reports of “alien” invasion as genuine. Since the original airing on October 30th, 1938, the re-broadcast of The War of the Worlds  has become something of a Halloween tradition. This includes a live re-enactment of the play in 2002 starring, appropriately enough, conservative radio host and conspiracy theorist Glenn Beck, whose involvement marks the text as what it always was: an essay on the cultivation and modulation of fear.

Questions relating to such ‘affective modulation’ can then be heard at around 7.50, in the soundtrack to Bridget Crone‘s Easy Listening Meets Flicker-Time (2011). Based in part on Welles’ infamous broadcast, the monologue is “a conversation between analogue and digital broadcast transmissions about time and affect”; the Easy Listening Meets Flicker-Time video will be shown in its entirety at Cast and Figment‘s closing event, at Soundfjord, on the 5th of November.

First on this evening, a short work for radio by Andy Weir, The direct result of considered planning churning new courses creating new concepts (2011):

‘Nothing more, we are nothing more of the today of which we are a part. No, we need something more. A call from the future hurtling towards the past and back, picked up on antennae and shot through the city. The air gets thick, so I can feel it, then it gets thicker, so I can’t breathe it. Oohs and Aahs.’

This is followed at about 7.32 by Jonathan Trayner‘s Tales of the Woodland Folk (2011), re-broadcast after technical problems last week.

‘A children’s story, this radio play is the tale of an encounter between Mr Rabbit and Ms Squirrel discussing the best way of governing the Woodland-folk. As the play unfolds the characters argue whether it is better to rule the forest using ignorance; which is Mr Rabbit’s argument, provided by ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tze or terror; which is Ms Squirrel’s preferred option, echoing the words of French revolutionary Robespierre.’ Ms Squirrel: Stephanie Dickinson, Mr Rabbit: Vince Stephen, Narrator: Jonathan Trayner, Music: Vince Stephen, Production: Bill Kenny and Michael Page, Assistant: Jennifer Pengilly, Script: Jonathan Trayner.

A pre-recorded discussion between Jonathan Trayner and Matthew MacKisack follows Tales of the Woodland Folk.

Lastly tonight, at around 7.45, a live reading from the writer David Berridge. With A Hedgerow Doesn’t Have to Leave the House, Berridge intends to

‘… explore the contradictions of radio as a mainstream source of news, weather, DJ and shipping forecast, alongside its role as a model of experimental poetic communication for Marinetti, Khlebnikov and Cocteau. [1] I propose to explore this through an act of storytelling in which a story of the countryside extends its porousness to a Hackney landscape in which it is told again and again. I would like to explore how experimental  ideas of radio can be absorbed into the texture of a written narrative that is then read aloud… I would like to test how much a story of one place can be filled by the details of many others, in a manner akin to moving quickly between radio stations… I would like to explore how much and in what manner this storytelling can open up to reflections upon the role of radio and sound within histories of experimental poetry/ prose. I have been making a study of “silent sound” in Claude Cahun’s Disavowels and am interested how this could be entwined within the narrative I am telling so that each becomes a way of elucidating the other…’

[1] Rubén Gallo, “Jean Cocteau’s Radio Poetry” in Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin eds. The Sound of Poetry/ The Poetry of Sound (The University of Chicago Press, 2009), 205-218.

Tonight’s broadcast begins with a live lecture from David Howells,  A Voice in the Dark: Rhetoric for Radio. Howells introduces the lecture with the following:

“For all our belief in rational discourse, we know that words – the very stuff of thought – are dangerous. They are not only a reflection on the world, they also have the power to change it, to call things into being, for good or ill. And our only defence against words is to use more words in turn.

Rhetoric was – is - the political art of persuasion, born out of the need to make laws and customs, culture out of nature, to civilise men, and to civilise the power of the voice, to make it public. But we have come to distrust rhetoric as misleading and destructive, and it is now difficult to use the word in any positive sense. ‘Rhetoric’, if it does not mean an empty display of language, suggests the use of it to some ulterior purpose.

Nevertheless, my purpose in this lecture is to consider whether artists may not, after all, make something useful out of rhetoric or if – as Aristotle maintained – rhetoric is any case a universal human trait, whether they may at least come to recognise themselves as speaking and working rhetorically. And there are particular reasons for them to do so now: given the ‘performative’ turn of contemporary practice, and a political and economic context which will not leave any public act untouched.”

Howells’ lecture is followed at around 8pm by Claire Chard reading extracts from T W Adorno‘s 1936 analysis of Martin Luther Thomas’ radio addresses.

A product of Adorno’s research into the social reception and significance of radio in the 1930s, The Psychological Technique… analyses the rhetorical devices of right-wing Christian broadcasting: a rhetoric, Adorno makes clear, intended to produce a submissive, psychologically regressed audience. Extracts here are from the book’s fourth section, ‘Ideological Bait’, in which Adorno examines the form and content of Thomas’ claims regarding the contemporaneous economic recession.

Cast and Figment then presents a clip from a more recent broadcast by another right-wing demagogue, Rush Limbaugh, in which he declares that Democrat interest in Darfur is due to the desire to secure the “black voting bloc”. The clip, from 2007, includes a variety of rhetorical devices clearly recognisable from Adorno’s analysis of Thomas. “You’ve got it”, Limbaugh tells the caller, “Now you just have to believe your own instincts”.

Monday night on Cast and Figment:

At 7.30, hear Study for Composition I (audio) (2009), by Sidsel Christensen, with Rohid Juneja.

In an extract from Christensen’s ongoing experiments in hypnotic regression, the hypnotised artist narrates the rise and fall of a secret cult in ancient Greece. Separated from the video to which it has previously been the soundtrack, the monologue encourages the listener to imaginatively align themselves with the narrator’s psychical explorations. In turn, radio’s atavistic promise, what Gaston Bachelard saw as its ability to evoke collective archetypes in the creation of domestic reveries – effectively relocating the psychoanalytical session to the airwaves* – is made powerfully manifest.

Study for Composition I is followed at 7.50pm by Matthew MacKisack‘s Hörspiel (The Tribulations of Usefulness) (2010):

“Looking from one window, you see the Statue of Liberty; from a window in another wall, you see a daffodil. A daffodil is sitting on top of the torch held up by the Statue of Liberty. A daffodil is hidden inside the torch held up by the Statue of Liberty.”**

Hörspiel is a narrative radio play in which ‘remote viewing’ – a form of codified extra-sensory perception –  is presented as a metaphor for radiophonic experience. Based on documentation of British military research into remote viewing***, the play also draws on the histories of radio drama and technology’s interface with the supernatural. The resulting scenario describes – potentially, enacts, for the auditor – the attempt to instrumentalise reverie.

The cast of Hörspiel are: Olivia Armstrong as the Supervisor, Simon King as the Monitor and Adam Loxley as the Subject. It was written by Matthew MacKisack with Adam Loxley.

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*In his 1951 essay ‘Reverie and Radio’, collected in The Right to Dream, 1971, trans. J A Underwood

** From U Neisser and N Kerr, ‘Spatial and Mnemonic Properties of Visual Images’, in Cognitive Psychology, 5, 1973

*** See http://www.mod.uk/DefenceInternet/FreedomOfInformation/DisclosureLog/SearchDisclosureLog/RemoteViewing.htm

At 7.30pm on Cast and Figment, listen to Walter Benjamin‘s 1931 radio talk for children, The Lisbon Earthquake, read by Katherine Lunney.

One of several broadcasts that Benjamin wrote and delivered for German Radio between 1929-1932, The Lisbon Earthquake is not only an account of the natural disaster that tested the Enlightenment belief in Man’s power over Nature, it is also, in its comparison of theories on the earthquake’s cause, an excursus on language and interpretation. Benjamin’s point, as Jeffrey Mehlman has noted, is to drive home ‘the deconstruction of the metaphyics of (volcanic) expression through an appeal to the inherent violence at play within the terrestrial (or linguistic) surface.’*

The Lisbon Earthquake is followed, at around 7.50pm, by Jonathan Trayner‘s Tales of the Woodland Folk (2011):

A children’s story, this radio play is the tale of an encounter between Mr Rabbit and Ms Squirrel discussing the best way of governing the Woodland-folk. As the play unfolds the characters argue whether it is better to rule the forest using ignorance; which is Mr Rabbit’s argument, provided by ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tze or terror; which is Ms Squirrel’s preferred option, echoing the words of French revolutionary Robespierre.

Ms Squirrel: Stephanie Dickinson, Mr Rabbit: Vince Stephen, Narrator: Jonathan Trayner, Music: Vince Stephen, Production: Bill Kenny and Michael Page, Assistant: Jennifer Pengilly, Script: Jonathan Trayner.

Tales of the Woodland Folk will then be discussed by Jonathan Trayner and Matthew MacKisack.

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*Jeffrey Mehlman, Walter Benjamin for Children: An Essay on his Radio Years, 1993, p30

“The Lisbon Earthquake” is reproduced by permission of the publisher from Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, 1927-1934, translated by Rodney Livingstone and Others, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, pp.536-540, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

This evening at 7.30 on Cast and Figment: Tamarin Norwood’s Musica Practica (2010).

“Now to keep you all together, I’d like you to bear in mind that not all of you will be hearing my voice at the same time. If you’re listening to this on the internet, the sound will reach you with something like a 384 millisecond delay, so you’ll hear what I’m saying just under four tenths of a second after any listeners on analogue radio will be hearing me. If you’re listening online you can account for this lag by playing almost four tenths of a second after my beat.”

Musica Practica will be followed by a contextual discussion with Tamarin Norwood and Matthew MacKisack.