AJE Witness Special on Polynesians and Taiwan

Wooooow…

What a terrific show. "Made in Taiwan" is a Witness Special by Al Jazeera English, where a Samoan and Cook Islander analyse their genes, and follow the path they make.

I had known for years that Pacific Islanders, it's generally held, originate from Taiwan. That was a bit of information in my head.

And I had known how girls on the streets of Auckland would remind me of a Taiwanese woman.

But this show brought it together. I spent ten months in New Zealand, until mid-May, then two weeks with American-Taiwanese. The faces, accents and attitude reminded me of my diggs in Auckland and working Radio New Zealand International.

And it somehow worked deeper. This programme moved (me at least) in both the head and the heart. Ace programme.


I can't find it on their website or YouTube channel – I'll post an update if I do!

Edirol R-09 RIP again

A week ago, my Edirol R-09 got a soaking, and in spite of being left next to a toasty Aga for a day, no longer works.

:(

Thinking of an Olympus LS-10 as a replacement, but I should earn some radio-money first!

New series of All Day Everyday

I missed most of the first series, even though I thought I'd set Audio Hijack Pro to record…

Anyway, Martin Williams is producing more All Day Everyday for Resonance FM. 

A L L    D A Y    E V E R Y D A Y
Every Wednesday at 5:45pm on Resonance FM – 104.4fm in London – worldwide via the internet: www.resonancefm.com.
 
Reflections on the mundane and the miraculous.
 
As if in response to Walter Benjamin's belief that the everyday is saturated with the marvellous, All Day Everyday presents an array of artists addressing the quotidian – the beauty and banality ever-present in the everyday.
 
Documentaries, musical compositions, radio drama, essays, poetry, soundscapes, performance, interviews…
 
Series produced by Martin Williams
http://www.notfarfromhere.co.uk/
 
Details of the next few programmes in the series…
 
Wed June 18th:
Tartu Sound by Murmer
In February, 2008, Maksims Shentelevs and Patrick McGinley led a workshop in the southeastern Estonian city of Tartu entitled Sound as Space/Sound as Language with a group of 15 Estonian and Finnish university students. The work focused on a development of deep listening skills, and on the use of sound as a communication tool, or as a way to describe or create real or imaginary spaces. Only acoustic objects, brought in by the participants, and elements of the space itself (floorboards, walls, windows, chairs) were used during the two-day workshop. This piece, intertwined with reactions by a few of the participants, was composed by Patrick McGinley using recordings made of the workshop exercises.
Murmer, aka Patrick McGinley, is a sound artist and composer.
http://www.murmerings.com
 
Wed June 25th:       
Boots Brown: All Day Everyday by David Grubbs
The Swedish improvising group Boots Brown takes its name from a pseudonym once used by the clarinetist and saxophone player Jimmy Giuffre. Guiffre came up with the name for a recording session in order to sidestep the demands of a recording contract. The current Boots Brown is premised on the perhaps impossible melding of free improvisation and the kind of US West Coast jazz for which Jimmy Giuffre was a key figure.

This short programme, Boots Brown: All Day Everyday, takes as its subject a set up and soundcheck prior to Boots Brown's concert on 25th April 2008 at the Bunker in Bielefeld, Germany. It is inspired by the series of documentaries that Luc Ferrari and Gérard Patris made for French television in the mid-1960s under the title Les Grandes Répétitions. These five documentaries about musicians in rehearsal beautifully capture the sounds of the comparatively empty time that leads up to a performance. I've also admired Leonard Cohen's idea on Live Songs of recording the final song on a live album in his hotel room after the show. The live recording was made prior to the concert.

Boots Brown consists of Mats Gustafsson on saxophones and electronics; Magnus Broo, trumpet and, at least during this soundcheck, opera singing; David Stackenäs on guitar; and Johan Berthling on double bass.

On the day of this performance, Jimmy Giuffre died at his home in Massachusetts at the age of 86.
David Grubbs is a New York-based musician and writer.
http://www.dragcity.com/bands/grubbs.html 
 
Wed July 2nd:          
All Day Everyday by Esther Leslie
This mini-radio lecture in high-flown scientific language backed by quotidian sound effects is an exploration of the everyday as lodged in the microworlds of domesticity and the macroworld of the cosmos, directed by SM Eisenstein and montaged of Marx's Capital and Joyce's Ulysses.
Esther Leslie is Professor of Political Aesthetics, Birkbeck College, London
http://www.militantesthetix.co.uk/
 
Wed July 9th:           
Doors: Through and Into: Brooklyn: Winter ‘07-8 by Rick Moody & Laura Vitale
Inspired by Sun Ra’s Door Squeak piece from 1967, Doors: Through and Into is a sound collage constructed from the multifarious doorways of Brooklyn.
 
Bathroom doors, garage doors, elevator doors, subway doors, doors on municipal buses, car doors, apartment doors, doors to various appliances…
 
In addition to the doors themselves, Rick Moody and Laura Vitale present the passage between spaces, from public to private and back again, always through the lovely, musical thresholds that are a regular part of everyone’s daily fare.
Rick Moody is a novelist and short story writer.
Laura Vitale is a NY-based sound artist and radio producer.
 
Wed July 16th:
Everyday Indeterminacy by Catherine Dyson & Martin Williams
In pastiche of John Cage & David Tudor’s Indeterminacy, Catherine Dyson reads a series of everyday yarns at a rate of one per minute, accompanied by a series of minute-long accompaniments by Martin Williams, each component recorded with no knowledge of the other.
Catherine Dyson is a writer and theatre artist.

Lest WE forget

On Richard Sambrook's blog today:

In Memorium