Radiophrenia

Open Call for Sound & Radio Works

Radiophrenia - a temporary FM art radio station broadcasting in Glasgow during April 2015, announces an open call for sound and transmission artworks.

We are seeking soundscapes, spoken word pieces, radio experiments, found sound, innovative approaches to drama and documentary and radical and challenging new programme ideas. The station will be housed in Glasgow’s Centre for Contemporary Arts with a broadcast schedule including live shows, pre-recorded features and a daily series of live to air performances. Radiophrenia aims to promote the medium of radio as an art form and encourage experimental approaches to making radio that are not catered for by mainstream stations.

Objekt - Flatland

Widely championed techno/electronica producer Objekt deposits his detailed and complex debut album on PAN. Since 2011 at least, the Berlin resident known as TJ Hertz has been a vital cog in the European techno machine, self-releasing some of this decade's most vaunted white labels, plus 12"s with Hessle Audio and Leisure System - including this year's great split with Dopplereffekt - beside his role as software engineer for Native Instruments. With 'Flatland' he takes the opportunity to scud farther between electro and techno conventions with some proper production acrobatics, modelling a vivid 3D framework viewable from multiple perspectives, imagining "…a world in which any scene can be seen from any angle at once". Entering via the ambient airlock chamber of 'Agnes Revenge', we're given access to a subtly evolving soundsphere of sheer, incremental gradients and whirring mechanisms interspersed with nods to radiophonic experimentation and the melodic charm of '90s Warp styles. The scuttling funk of 'One Fell Swoop' or 'Ratchet' and the keening harmonics of 'Agnes Apparatus' recall classic Plaid, whilst elsewhere the album ranges from knackered techno ('Dogma') to Powell-esque hardwave ('Strays') and Rrose-alike techno churn ('One Stitch Follows Another', 'First Witness') via augmented hip hop ('Second Witness'). It's all certain to spark the interests of the techiest bass heads and IDM fiends around.

School of Scottish Studies Sound Archive

The School of Scottish Studies was established in 1951 at the University of Edinburgh to collect, archive, research and publish material relating to the cultural life, folklore and traditional arts of Scotland. Over the past sixty years, fieldworkers at the School have made thousands of recordings of songs, instrumental music, tales, verse, customs, beliefs, place-names biographical information and local history. Material in the Sound Archive comes from all over Scotland and its diaspora, and as well as being a rich repository of oral tradition it is invaluable for its range of dialects and accents in Gaelic, Scots and English.

The early collectors visited crofting, farming and fishing communities obtaining information on subjects such as the life of crofters and farm servants, the agricultural year, food gathering and preparation, house construction, the herring industry, traditional medicine, animal husbandry, emigration, whaling, religion, weather lore, lifecycle and seasonal customs. Urban life has also been documented and there are recollections of shipbuilding, factory work, transport, housing and street life, schooling, as well as contemporary fieldwork examining the re-invention of customs and use of ‘heritage’. Recordings from the Scottish Place Name Survey, and the Linguistic Survey of Scotland are also available along with ancillary materials such as maps and field notebooks. There is a substantial number of donated collections in the Sound Archive, including various local history projects, among them the notable Scottish Labour History Project which focused on work and occupations in the central belt during the 20th century.