lunedì 12 marzo h. 23:30 BLACKOUT

::: ON AIR :::
where were you last night?










This project (broadcast twice by Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum on a 12 hour-loop) was conceived as a reflection on the mutation and decline of the role of radio in daily life from cultural appointment (the original sense of Radio Times) to a comforting and controlling, though partly ignored, background continuum. The staring point is our existing transmission, Terminal Beach (Radio Blackout) whose highly composed nature asks the former kind of attention from the listener (the sense of a precise appointment or encounter) yet one open to a radical disorientation of expectations and scrambling of codes.

“Perhaps we are transmitting to listeners who inhabit a past that is yet to arrive. From our perspective in the radio studio, also because of technical problems relating to reception and bandwidth - problems common to any free, independent radio - this often results in feelings of solitude and paranoia. Is anybody listening? Who? What about those who aren't listening? Or who try to listen but occasionally miss an “appointment”? And what are the conditions of listening? Focused? Distracted? Multitasking?
The radical “otherness” of the imagined realm of the receiver is a phantom that haunts us to the point of provoking an almost Proustian jealousy. Yes, we would like listeners who are faithful but failing that we want to map their infidelity: "Where were you last night?" Such a dilemma may seem monstrously egotistical, but on a more abstract level it does raise the question of how an alternative collective is formed and what are the ties that bind its members together. Our feeling of isolation is redoubled by our relative marginalization within a radio station that often broadcasts for an already closed and defined community.”

For this project we got 9 listeners/non-listeners to record a sample of their environment between 23:30 and 01:30 on January 8th, 2007 during a Terminal Beach broadcast entitled “I Could Hear the Smallest Things”. These listener recordings - made on various types of recording equipment ranging from minidisc to dictaphones - we then remixed and manipulated together with the content of that particular show (which, to give space to the listeners/non-listeners’ interventions focused on 'small' music, microsound, field recordings and reductionist improv).

The resulting programme, Where Were You Last Night? is a spectral transmission where the boundaries between sender and receiver is partly abolished and where dislocations in time and space give rise to unforeseen counterpoints, echoes, harmonies, and dissonances.

Recordings include:

listening to an opera aria while washing dishes; whistling during a downpour; rehearsing lines for a bit part in a soap-opera; a walk by the river accompanied by the screech of gulls; a midnight tram ride tuning into our show on an ancient transistor; a stroll in castle grounds; stoking up a fire; driving home from the cinema after seeing Godard's Passion; listening to a jazz trio jamming in a trendy café; looking for the frequency of Terminal Beach; laughter in the dark on the way to the pub; pissing; breaths of sleeping infants...

an aural glimpse into, and reinvention of, the listening/non-listening other's hidden scene.

BLACK OUT!