Where mostly do you listen to the radio? In the kitchen, on the M25 or M62, under the duvet, soaking in a bathtub? We’ve got used to moving around with the wireless, often listening with just half an ear, not really connecting at all, and with no opportunity to share the experience with anyone else. In the Dark, a band of radio enthusiasts who’ve got together to produce unusual audio documentaries, is trying to take us back to the sensation shared by those first listeners to radio, when families, friends, neighbours joined up to listen and laugh along to The Goon Show or Children’s Hour. They organise communal listening events in unusual venues, usually with the lights out, but with an unconventional twist. This is radio as ‘art’, not the mangled speech of politicians, DJ-managed music, weather alerts and shipping forecasts, but what In the Dark calls ‘found sound’ or ‘adventures in audio’.
Nina Garthwaite, a founder member, is taking the project on to Radio 4 this month with a half-hour magazine of documentary clips from around the world. Short Cuts (Tuesdays) has been buried in the afternoon schedule and I missed the first programme but was lucky enough to hear a snippet from it on Pick of the Week and was hooked.
A rather cheesy update of Brief Encounter to the last train home from Charing Cross and a couple who’d known each other at school and met up for a night out after a chance encounter on the Tube made me stop what I was doing to listen because of the quality of the production (by Eleanor McDowall). It was offbeat, yet acoustically sharp, and sent me back to iPlayer to hear the other items, lights dimmed, attention switched on. Out of the laptop came the voice of the climber Jim Perrin, suitably craggy and measured, as if with each carefully modulated phrase he was reliving a previously impossible route.
‘Misadventures’ was the theme of the week, or rather ‘True tales of risk-taking’, and Perrin’s focus was not so much on his sense of achievement on getting to the top of a mountain but on the experience of getting there. He equates rock climbing with rock music: both of them are drug-dependent. For the climber the recreational drug of choice is adrenaline, rather than acid, but the high is exactly the same (Perrin spoke as if he knew this for sure). After the terror of being halfway up overwhelms you, comes the unexpected surge of adrenaline, calming the body and clearing the mind to accomplish the task. But at the top something else happens, the release, when ‘the colours suddenly leap out at you, the forms take the most perfect aesthetic shapes…your eyes are wide open to the incandescent beauty of the world’.
Perrin’s story was originally broadcast by Resonance FM, the arts radio station dedicated to experiment. Over on Radio 3, our eyes were also being opened through listening, not looking, as the art critic Rachel Campbell-Johnston talked to David Hockney for the Sunday Feature: David Hockney — New Ways of Seeing (produced by Susan Marling). The Bridlington-based artist is on a mission to revive the art of landscape painting, using modern technology but enhancing it with his own draughtsmanship, rather than the other way around. ‘Why didn’t the BBC experiment with nine cameras?’ he asked, with blunt self-confidence, after watching a BBC nature programme. ‘Because they thought the picture was good enough.’
A single camera shot has never been enough for him. In the Seventies he created photo-montages of the LA scene. Now he wants to go bigger still, to create beyond-the-easel paintings, which allow you ‘to move in to the landscape’ so that it envelops you. Hockney took us on an audio journey into the landscape he’s been studying and painting for the past few years, the woods and lanes and windswept moors of East Yorkshire. ‘People don’t look that much,’ he says. ‘But if everyone drew, we would all understand beauty.’ Each May he waits for the hawthorn to burst. ‘It doesn’t last long. But when it bursts into blossom it’s as though thick cream has been poured over the bushes.’ He spoke with such passion, such clarity, you didn’t need to see the canvas to believe it.
Just before the West Pier in Brighton was destroyed by fire in 2003, sinking back into the sea, the sound recordist Chris Watson teamed up with sound artist Thor McIntyre-Burnie to capture the sound of the flocks of starlings that every night used to roost in the derelict concert hall. On Tuesday’s Nature (Radio 4, produced by Sarah Blunt) we heard the glittering, ringing sound of the murmuration that used to happen just before dark, as the starlings swooped and swirled around the pier before settling down for the night. For 24 hours Watson and McIntyre-Burnie listened in to the microphones they had carefully installed in the ruined concert hall, rigging it up as if they were about to record an orchestral concert. Through the shrieking of the starlings could be heard echoes of those long-gone waltzes as the sea flowed in and out beneath the rotting timbers.
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