Here’s a radio programme i’ve been busy making:
Nestled in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains, three times a day local radio station WPAQ 740AM proudly broadcasts obituaries of local people. Established by Ralph Epperson in 1948, WPAQ was founded to preserve a wholesome way of life on the airwaves, broadcasting local Old Time and Gospel music, firebrand local preachers, and the daily reporting of obituary notices. Today, to an outsider it seems a morbid anachronism, yet people across the town of Mt Airy tune in on a daily basis, especially to catch news of those who have died.
As well as exploring the Radio’s archive to build a picture of this wholesome way of life over the last 60 years, local people talk about how the town has changed since the obituary reading began. From a famed and thriving industrial town making socks, farming tobacco, building furniture and mining granite, Mt Airy has witnessed the decline of the American South, and the flight of jobs from its rural areas. Almost all the industry has gone and the town is struggling to find its place in a new non-industrial economy. Those who live there are concerned about the future for the town’s young people, but are full of nostalgia for the past, and love the close knit community.
Whether the daily Obituary Notices are for the local individuals who pass each day, taking with them another chapter of this part of America’s unique rural history, or whether they are a collective sigh for a disappearing way of life is not clear - life in some form will go on in the American South, and WPAQ will still broadcast obituaries.
All the material for this programme was recorded in and around the town of Mt Airy, North Carolina. Drawing heavily on local field recordings, the reminiscence of local people, and the archive of WPAQ 740AM, to create an aural portrait of a community of people united by a slowly disappearing way of life.
I saw this man twice over the summer, he rips up stages like a reincarnated Little Richard who learnt Swahili somewhere in the afterlife, and now tours with his tight Rumba band, L’Orchestre de La Katuba. Baloji is Congolese, via Belgium, and he’s guesting here on Hackney combo ‘The Very Best’s rerub of Super Mom..
http://soundcloud.com/theverybest/the-very-best-super-mom-feat
The Science Museum’s History of Electronic Music exhibition opens fully this week - they have Daphne Oram’s groundbreaking 60s Oramics machine too..
http://sciencemuseumdiscovery.com/blogs/insight/back-to-the-future-of-electronic-music/
New music from Anna Meredith - young British composer - this new EP has the same sense of playfulness that inhabits her orchestral writing, but this time it’s odd electronics, and deconstructed power ballads - fun.
This week I went to see, for the first and last time, the legendary Merce Cunningham Dance Company performing Roaratorio - an hour of intense sound collage from John Cage reimagining Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, accompanied by a merry-go-round of classic Cunningham choreography, with bright unitards to match. Formed in the mid 50s at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, MCDC tore apart the connections between music, dance and visuals, and re-assembled the three components back on stage with a sense of life, freedom and energy. From that initial trio of John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Robert Rauschenberg, and following Cunningham’s death in 2009, the company is now at the end of its legacy tour, and it will cease to be in December, with a final performance at the Armoury. New York in the 50s is now part of the history of experimentalism, a golden time preserved in aspic. Seeing Merce’s company dance one last time, brought it vividly back to life.
Junya Ishigami: Architecture of Air
Junya Ishigami’s installation at the Barbican Curve, running til October 16th, is almost non existent. Gossamer thin threads invisible against the gallery’s white walls support a 4m tall free standing structure that itself is almost non existant. The artists equates the wafer thin structures to rain and cloud drops, architecture as nature, it has an airy mythic quality calling into question ideas of space and structure.
http://www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery/event-detail.asp?ID=11988
Arrow Japan make some of the simplest most functional city bicycles ever. No one so far sells them in the UK, most probably because they’re handmade in Yokohama.
I finally made it to the third round of this Arnolfini-Camden Arts Centre-Oxford Modern Art triple commission. American artist Kerry Tribe uses 1/4” tape and 16mm film loops, in clever room based installations to look at ideas of memory and recall. This piece was a tape loop that ran round the whole gallery - one reel-to-reel machine erasing, the other writing, in a constant feedback loop of remembering and forgetting, blurring the lines between reality and story.
