Zepelim has been invited to participate in the AV Festival as part of a 744-hour continuous online radio project called Radio Boredcast, curated by Vicki Bennett (People Like Us).

In response to our ambiguous relationship with time – do we have too much or not enough? – Radio Boredcast celebrates the detail, complexity and depth of experience lost through our obsession with speed. With over 100 participants Radio Boredcast includes new and unpublished works, freeform radio shows, field recordings, interviews, monologues and much, much more. Thematic playlists will run throughout from “Acconci” to “Zzz…”

You can listen continuously for a month, or for hours, minutes or seconds. Online 24 hours each day, avfestival.co.uk / thepixelpalace.org. Co-commissioned by AV Festival and Pixel Palace, hosted by BASIC.fm.

Radio Boredcast launches on 1 March.

The Uncanny Valley is the inspiration for this episode of Zepelim – a term coined by the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori that appeared for the first time in 1970 in the Journal Energy. The Uncanny Valley is one of the most intriguing and poetic concepts in robotics. It conveys an important message about how humans interact and how we deal with the perception of the unfamiliar and death. In this show, Zepelim follows the curves of the Uncanny Valley chart, presenting a sound collage featuring sounds from industrial robots to humanoid robots and uncanny soundscapes.

Charting the Uncanny Valley

The Uncanny Valley describes a phenomenon that arises when we chart human likeness in relation to familiarity. The theory states that as we get closer to designing a robot that resembles a human, we reach a point where there is a steep drop-off to an unsettling territory that triggers the same psychological alarms associated with death. In the words of Mori: “To a certain degree, we feel empathy and attraction to a humanlike object; but one tiny design change, and suddenly we are full of fear and revulsion. That area is what I call the Uncanny Valley.”  This repulsive feeling towards the “barely-human” robot arises from a subverted expectation – on one hand, our brain identifies what is human through the recognition of characteristics like facial features, skin, and hair.  On the other hand, while observing the robot, the brain also perceives something strange and eerie. Following the chart of the Uncanny Valley, the first peak represents something human enough to arouse some positive and emphatic emotional relation, yet at the same time is not human enough to avoid a sense of wrongness. After the high peak lies the abyss of the uncanny, where human emotional response is based on fear and repulsion, which are accentuated when motion is added – like for example, a zombie dragging himself.

Mori took the term Uncanny from the essay “On the Psychology of the Uncanny” (‘Über die Psychologie des Unheimlichen’) written by the German psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch in 1906, which explored the thought processes humans go through within the borderline that divides the familiar and the unfamiliar. Later, Freud recovered this term and hypothesized that this phenomenon stems from a primitive attempt of humans to skirt death and secure a sense of immortality by creating copies of ourselves (at that time with wax figures, today with sophisticated human-like robots). Freud quotes the Austrian psychoanalyst Otto Rank in saying that “doubling behavior is an energetic denial of the power of death”. Freud ends by saying that “the double reverses its aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death.”

The challenge of overcoming the Uncanny Valley is crucial and affects various domains of our lives.  The entertainment business would

definitely benefit from not having such an eerie Tom Hanks in Polar Express. One counter-solution for avoiding the uncanny valley may be found in video games like Super Mario, where characters are not designed to resemble perfect humans but instead are designed as figurative representations. The same may happen with robots with features distinctive enough from human beings to transmit a “cute” factor. If robots populate our future societies, scientists may want to cross over the uncanny valley to ensure that humans can build a constructive emotional relationship with the machines. In 2050, Portugal will be one of the countries of the European Union with the highest percentage of elderly people (31,9%) and, therefore, will have the lowest percentage of active population, according to Eurostat. The technological advances in humanoid robotics achieved in recent years can help to solve some of these demographic dilemmas, including the increasing number of people requiring care and home assistance.  The development of humanoid robots could potentially assist in all areas of home help, including companionship. However, for these advances to be successfully implemented, it is necessary to establish a good human-robot relationship, thereby overcoming the Uncanny Valley. Recently, scientists from Geminoid Lab at Aalborg University have claimed that they have made an android that transcends the uncanny valley – the Geminoid-DK.  See for yourself.

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Carlo Patrão

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Carlo Patrão

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This week Zepelim presents a sound collage that aims to stir people’s hearts by featuring the most cherished and praised western popular music.  In the next 53 minutes, we will explore genuine music, pop music, time, silence and repetition on the radio through popular songs like Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit, hits on the Billboard Charts,  the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, and The Most Wanted and Unwanted Music.

10 Banned Albums Burned Then Played

This episode starts with the sound of burned records. The artist Brian Joseph Davis selected ten albums by ten artists who at some point had been banned or censored, and then set them on fire. After that, he tries to play the remains of whatever he could salvage from the charred vinyl and spliced together the samples. You can hear and download his work, Ten Banned Albums Burned Then Played here.

Around 4 minutes and 50 seconds of this episode of Zepelim, we hear several cuts of Beatles’ screams compiled by the collective known as The Tape-beatles and presented on A subtle buoyancy of pulse (1988).

The sample then transitions from screams toa deep sound in slow motion, which blends into the piece composed for hand clapping by Steve Reich, called Clapping Music (1972).

Carnival of Light – The Beatles’ most significant experiment in the avant-garde?

January 5, 1967. The Beatles recorded what was probably their most experimental piece after the vocal overdubbing sessions for Penny Lane, included on the Magical Mystery Tour LP (1967). In December 1966, the designer David Vaughan, who Paul McCartney ordered to paint a psychadelic design for his piano, asks McCartney if he would contribute a musical piece for the upcoming art festival The Million Volt Light and Sound Rave, organised by Binder, Edwards & Vaughan as a showcase for electronic music and light shows. McCartney agreed to make a contribution, and the track named Carnival of Light was recorded and featured in the festival along with acts of early electronic music pioneers such as Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson.

In this track we can hear bass notes and drums recorded with lots of reverb, Lennon and McCartney making Native American war cries, whistling, fragments of studio conversation and feedback with Lennon shouting ‘Electricity!’. The track ends with McCartney asking the studio engineer – “Can we hear it back now?”

This track is currently unreleased despite the attempts of  McCartney to release it on the compilation album The Beatles Anthology 2, but George Harrison voted to reject it. The track is travelling through the dark alleys of the web. Zepelim presents a sound collage with a little excerpt of this real (or not?) mythologic Beatles’s track – Carnival of Light.

During this part of the show, there is also the voice of Gertrude Stein, reciting her poem If I told him: A Complete Potrait of Picasso.

The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time

Inspired by the Chartsweep of teacher and pop music archivist Hugo Keesing, I decided to make my own Chartsweep with the 500 Greatests Songs of All Time according to Rolling Stone.  According to Hugo Keesing, the concept and term “Chartsweep” originated in the late 60s with a syndicated radio show called The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll. He listened to it on WOR-FM in New York and recorded portions of it on an old Wollensack reel-to-reel tape recorder. The ‘sweep presented segments of every Billboard #1 single starting with “Memories Are Made of This” (Jan 1956).

In this Rolling Stone’s Chartsweep, 2.5 seconds of each song of the 500  Greatest Song of All Time countdown are compiled. The Greatest Song of All Time countdown comes on around 21 minutes. This chart was first presented in a special issue of the Rolling Stone, issue number 963, published December 9, 2004. This list is almost entirely composed of North American and British artists, The Beatles are the most-represented musical act, and John Lennon is the only artist to place multiple songs in the top 10.

Demographic Art: The Most Wanted and Unwanted Music

Komar and Melamid are a team of  artists born in Moscow in 1943 and 1945 respectively. Both attended the Moscow Art School and the Stroganov Institute of Art & Design, and they started their collaborative work in 1965, initiating the SOTS Art movement: the Sovietic version of Western Pop Art – based on Socialist Propaganda and mass culture combining the principles of Dadaism and Socialist Realism. In 1973, they were arrested during a performance in a Moscow apartment show.  Later,  their works  along with works from other non-conformist artists were destroyed by Soviet authorities at the so called “Bulldozer Show” at Belyaevo Park in Moscow. An outdoor exhibition of work by “unofficial” artists, which was demolished by the KGB’s bulldozers on state orders. Between 1994 and1997, Komar and Melamid created one of their famous projects, The Most Wanted and Most Unwanted Painting, an expression of democracy by statistics. Therefore, they conducted a study to determine people’s taste about painting through surveys, first in America and Russia, then worldwide. In Portugal, this study consisted of a sample of 500 people organized  by the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkia. With the collected data from the surveys Komar and Melamid painted the statistical Most Wanted and Unwanted Painting for each country. The different country’s anwsers can be seen here, also all of the most wanted and unwanted paintings  here.

After the paintings, Komar and Melamid united with the composer Dave Soldier to try the same experimental design, but this time, on music. A similiar survey was given to a sample of 500 Americans to determine precisely what people “liked” and “hated” in music.  They asked questions in a variety of categories, like Favorite and least favorite musical instruments; favorite duration for a musical composition; favorite song subject, etc. Here is a Powerpoint file with the statistical Figures.  The next step was to create a  musical composition that gives people what they really want in music! The conclusions are:

1. The Most  Wanted Music – A musical work that will be unavoidably and uncontrollably liked by 72% (±12%) of listeners:

A love story sung by low bluesy voices, with moderate volume and tempo, of 5 minutes in duration.

2. The Most Unwanted Music – fewer than 200 individuals of the world’s total population would enjoy this piece:

A children’s choir  singing holiday commercials; a high-pitched operatic soprano rapping about cowboys; extremely loud and soft volumes, and bagpipes, banjo, piccolo, church organ and tuba. It has a temporal duration of 20 minutes.

Carlo Patrão

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Hello……………. My name is Z.I.R.A,  Zepelim’s Intelligent Radio Application. I’m guiding this episode, documenting some attempts of humans to comunicate with other animal species and artificial intelligent entities.  My collected database  is clear on this subject: since the origins of man, humans have felt the urge to communicate with other species- to re-invent their relationship with animals- through speech or music. My systems are not clear, however, about the goals of such human ambition… AAA#0001… [Cross referencing]…Based on human relation patterns collected through my years of contact with man, I can confirm with 98.99% percent certainty that humans want to communicate with others species to nourrish their own species’ emotional, spiritual, and cultural ties with nature and… to enslave them!

TO SPEAK IS A STRUGGLE!

[reboot]………………..

Interspecies Communication

1# – Human and Turkeys

Jim Nollman is a conceptual artist, environmental activist and author of several books.  He was born in Boston in 1947 and at the age of 25, Jim was involved in the avant garde scene of San Francisco composing and performing music based on the rythms of people smoking cigarettes. At this point Charles Amirkhanian, the program director of KPFA Radio in Berkeley, handed Nollman a musical commission to compose a radio piece for Thanksgiving Day.

Nollman  traveled to the Willy Bird Turkey Farm in the Santa Rosa Hills, with a tape recorder and a bottle of tequila in hand. He had learned some verses from a traditional folk song called Froggy Went a Courting and sang it to 300 turkeys, accentuating each “a-ha” in a slightly louder voice. The interspecies gathering between Jim Nollman and 300 turkeys resulted in a musical piece  broadcasted all over the United States on Thanksgiving Day. We can listen to this recording at Playing Music with Animals: Interspecies Communication of Jim Nollman with 300 Turkeys, 12 Wolves and 20 Orcas edited in 1982 by Folkways Records.

2# – Human and Whales

In 1971, the journal Science published a surprising description of singing whales for the first time in the article Songs of Humpback Whales by Roger Payne and Scott McVay. These two biologists found that Humpback whales produce a series of beautiful and varied sounds for a period of 7 to 30 minutes and then repeat the same series with considerable precision. They called this performance “singing”, referring to each repeated series of sounds as a “song”. Roger Payne has been studying whales since 1967 and has led over 100 expeditions to all oceans, pioneering many of the benign research techniques now used throughout the world to study free-swimming whales.  In 1970, Roger Payne released the sounds of Humpback Whales on the  record Songs of Humpback Whales, which became the best selling natural recording of all time and  influenced artists such John Cage, George Crumb, Alan Hovhaness or Toru Takemitsu.

When you are swimming and hear a humpback whale singing very close to you underwater,you sometimes feel you may not be able to stand the intensity of the sound. It is as though someone put their palms firmly against your chest and vibrated you until your whole skeleton was humming. Roger Payne

This finding was taken a little further by the philosophy professor and clarinetist David Rothenberg ,who developed a system to play music with whales. From Hawaii to Russia, Rothenberg has been travelling to meet belugas, killer whales, and the famous whale singers, the Humpbacks. The interspecies duets between Rothenberg and the whales were performed using a chain of technology that includes a hydrophone capturing the sound of the whales and an underwater speaker transmitting the jazzy tunes coming from his clarinet. After hours of attempts at making a real musical connection with the whales, Rothenberg registered some interesting moments where the whale sound dares to match his sound trying to hold the same pitch as the clarinet or wavering up and down around it:

These recordings can be found in the album Whale Music [Terra Nova, 2007].

More information about the work of David Rothenberg can be read in this article:  David Rothenberg – To Wail With a Whale: Anatomy of an Interspecies Duet.

Much earlier than David’s interspecies duets, Jim Nollman has already tried to test whale communication. Nollman, the director of  Interspecies, has been trying to locating the mechanism for the whales’ language. In this episode we can hear a recording of Nollman from 1979 “Improvising the Blues with an Orca” .

3# – Human and Elephants

In this episode we also explore interspecies music with elephants.  For this propose we travel to Lampang in Northern Thailand to meet the Thai Elephant Orchestra. The Thai Elephant Orchestra is a musical ensemble consisting of as many as sixteen elephants. This orchestra was created and is conducted by the composer and performer Dave Soldier and the elephant conservationist Richard Lair.

The elephants play music – essentially as conducted improvisations – on enormous specially designed musical instruments. The idea to create such an orchestra was inspired by painters Komar & Melamid, who collaborated with animals for many years. They started painting with elephants in the Thai Elephant Conservation Center, and then the Center suggested that Dave and Richard see if elephants could play music. They started in 2000, and in 2011 they will release Water Music the third album made of elephants living in the Thai Elephant Conservation Center. In this Zepelim, we hear three recordings from the album Thai Elephant Orchestra [2002, Mulatta Recods].

4# – Human and Unknown Intelligent Species from Outer Space

11:16 pm, August 15, 1977.  The receiver of the Big Ear Radio Telescope of Ohio State University Radio Observatory detected a powerful radio signal coming from Outer Space during the shift of volunteer Dr. Jerry R. Ehman. The signal lasted for 72 seconds.

… the strangest signal I had ever seen … At first, I thought it was an earth signal reflected from space debris, but after I studied it further, I found that couldn’t be the case, said Dr. Jerry R. Ehman.

When Dr. Jerry R. Ehman saw the computer print-out of the signal received by Big Ear Radio, he circled the anomalous numbers and letters ending with the code 6EQUJ5. Dr. Ehman wrote WOW! on the left side.  This comment became the name of the signal.

Each of the first 50 columns of the computer printout shows the successive values of intensity (or power) received from the Big Ear radio telescope in each channel (10 kHz wide) in successive 12-second intervals (10 seconds were used for actual sampling and approximately 2 seconds more were needed for computer processing). Thus, the “6EQUJ5” code in channel 2 means successive intensities as follows:

6 –> the range 6.0 – 6.999…
E –> the range 14.0 – 14.999…
Q –> the range 26.0 – 26.999…
U –> the range 30.0 – 30.999…
J –> the range 19.0 – 19.999…
5 –> the range 5.0 – 5.999…

Could this have been man’s first contact with extraterrestrial intelligence? Ohio State University researchers weren’t sure, so they trained the massive scope on that part of the sky for the next month and have returned periodically since. The signal hasn’t been recorded again. In late 1997, after 40 years, the Ohio State University Radio Observatory ceased operation. The telescope was destroyed in early 1998.  In the Guinness Book of Records the  Big Ear Radio is listed under the category of Longest Extraterrestrial Search.

In this Zepelim, we present a symbolic sound representation of the Wow! Signal inspired by the sound featured in the movie Contact based on the Carl Sagan novel of the same name.

5#- Human and Computer

At last, at the end of this episode we can hear an amazing “computer – man” musical dialogue by the genius David Behrman from the album Leapday Night edited by Lovely Music in 1991. There we can find a set of compositions called Interspecies Smalltalk.

These compositions are for instrumental performers and a computer music system which David Behrman designed and assembled during the 1980s. The system consists of pitch sensors (“ears” with which it listens to the performing musicians), various music synthesizers (some homemade), a computer graphics color video display and a personal computer. Each composition is built upon a computer program governing interaction between performers and the system and creates situations rather than set pieces. The performers have options rather than instructions, and the exploration of each situation as it unfolds is up to them.

Interspecies Smalltalk was commissioned by John Cage and Merce Cunningham as music for the 1984 Cunningham Dance Company repertory work “Pictures,” and was made for performance by Takehisa Kosugi.

Hello……………. It’s  Z.I.R.A,  Zepelim’s Intelligent Radio Application. I hope you are more enlightened about your role in the new tomorrow. You are a vibrating body.  Each body is a vibrating body.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NJ2oXwWEvw&fs=1&hl=pt_PT]

Signing off.

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Carlo Patrão

Na primeira emissão de Zepelim da Grelha de Inverno da Ruc, viajámos até às zonas mais frias do planeta para escutarmos um dos maiores instrumentos musicais – o gelo. Escutámos os sons produzidos pelos mantos de gelo e pela vida sonora que o rodeia em diferentes habitats. Os primeiros sons que ouvimos nascem da epopeia climatérica de 10,000 anos de formação de gelo que deram origem ao glaciar islandês Vatnajokull. Uma composição sonora gravada por Chris Watson presente no disco Weather Report [Touch, 2003], fruto de vários anos de gravação e diversas visitas ao glaciar, retratando a passagem do tempo e o espectro dos seus estados sonoros. É uma gravação dominada pelo timbre profundo do vento entre o gelo, o som de rios subterrâneos, o ranger do gelo ou o movimento lento do glaciar que vai desaguando no mar da Noruega. Na continuação do inóspito e gelado, ouvimos gravações de Douglas Quin realizadas na Antárctica aquando a sua estadia nas residências de McMurdo Station (entre Outubro e Dezembro de 1996) e de Palmer Station (entre Novembro, 1999 a Janeiro de 2000), a partir do programa Antarctic Artists and Writers financiado pela National Science Foundation.

Quin é um artista sonoro norte-americano doutorado em Ecologia Acústica que tem arquivado, durante mais de 20 anos, paisagens sonoras em torno de todo o mundo. Foi recentemente colaborador do realizador alemão Werner Herzog no documentário Encounters at the End of the World (2007), sendo responsável pela captação sonora dos chamamentos sub-aquáticos de focas. Neste Zepelim, ouvimos gravações idênticas de Quin que contêm sons de focas-de-weddell, focas-leopardo e orcas.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlrcbKlW4Tw&fs=1&hl=pt_PT&rel=0]

Explorámos ainda algumas das propriedades sonoras do gelo, quer a partir de formações maciças como glaciares, quer a partir de lagos gelados. O gelo dos lagos durante os períodos de grande flutuação de temperatura (ao início e fim do dia)  apresentam movimentos de expansão e contracção cuja a tensão acumulada provoca fissuras no gelo dando origem a  fenómenos acústicos. Estes mantos de gelo funcionam como grandes membranas através das quais o som se propaga; as frequências mais altas viajam mais rapidamente através do manto de gelo do que as frequências mais baixas, como resultado são produzidas explosões sonoras onde domina um som sintético que parece artificial.

Este é um excerto da dispersão de som no gelo de um lago, na zona de Berlin no Inverno de 2005/2006, gravada pelo compositor e artista sonoro Andreas Bick. Esta gravação faz parte de um conjunto de duas composições (frost pattern, 2006 e fire pattern, 2007) inicialmente transmitidas pela rádio alemã Deutschlandradio Kultur, vencedoras do Phonurgia-Nova-Prize 2008 e que serão editadas brevemente pela label alemã Gruenrekorder. Desta editora seleccionámos alguns dos field recordings presentes na compilação The sound of snow and ice (2007) [zip], de onde se destacou a gravação Lake Ice Booming de Curt Olson.

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Carlo Patrão

As emissões de Zepelim regressam à antena da Rádio Universidade de Coimbra com novo formato. Na grelha de Inverno 2010/2011 da RUC, o Zepelim passa a ser emitido quinzenalmente à quarta-feira pelas 22h, intercalando com o programa Associação Metafísica Cósmica de José Afonso Biscaia.

O Zepelim de hoje conduziu-nos pelo melodramatismo do continente onde os amores são mais intensos, a América do Sul. Para isso, ouvimos vários temas de Jose Enrique “Chelique” Sarabia, um poeta, músico, compositor, publicista, produtor musical e assessor político Venezuelano, cujo maior êxito foi a canção Ansiedad, que deu origem a mais de 200 versões, em várias línguas, algumas das quais ouvimos nesta emissão, juntamente com as músicas de “Su Musica y su Nuevo Estilo”, de 1960. Ouvimos também vários field recordings  de insectos de todo o mundo, especialmente grilos e cigarras,  numa edição de Jean Roche e Jean Thevenet de 1995, apropriadamente chamada “Cicadas and Crickets”

Ansiedad
De tenerte en mis brazos
Musitando palabras de amor
Ansiedad
De sentir tus encantos
Y en la boca volverte a besar.

Ansiedad
De tenerte en mis brazos
Musitando palabras de amor
Ansiedad
De sentir tus encantos
Y en la boca volverte a besar.

Y a veces que llorando
Mis pensamientos
Mis lágrimas son perlas
Que caen al mar.

Y el eco adormecido
De este lamento
Hace que estes presente
En mi soñar.

Tal vez estes llorando
Al recordarme
Y estreches mi retrato
Con frenesi.

Y hasta tu oido llegue
La melodía salvaje
Y el eco de la pena
De estar sin ti.

Tal vez este llorando
Al recordarme
Y estreches mi retrato
Con frenesi.

Y hasta tu oido llegue
La melodía salvaje
Y el eco de la pena
De estar sin ti.

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José Afonso Biscaia

Na emissão desta semana o Zepelim convidou a artista sonora australiana Melanie Velarde, para criar uma peça de rádio original (36:22”) a partir de field recordings e fragmentos musicais que guarda nas suas inúmeras cassetes.  A segunda parte do programa foi criada a partir de uma improvisação baseada no material sonoro que Melanie disponibiliza no seu website em 34 pequenos players…

“Melanie Velarde’s practice comprises sound, improvisation, field recordings, found objects, and the site specific residues of physical and emotional environments. She uses methods that constitute an aleatorical process across geographic, physical and emotional boarders. Her compositional approach is informed by the participating object and sound’s location and heritage, bringing time and place as modulating elements into play. Interested in the spatial and semiotic properties of accidental and found sounds, she uses field recordings and low fi recording methods to produce sonic textures that can be experienced within a defined space usually in form of documentation, installation and improvisation…”

Her podcast for Radio Zepelim is a small selection of multiple cassette tape recordings consisting of musical fragments and field recordings, taped across locations in Berlin and Melbourne (Australia).

Carlo Patrão

Emissão dedicada às comunicações telefónicas. O telefone é uma invenção atribuída a Alexander Graham Bell após longa disputa jurídica relativa à patente do produto, terminada no ano de 1876, 32 anos depois de Innocenzo Manzetti ter enunciado a ideia de um “telégrafo falante”, e 15 anos depois de Johann Phillip Reis ter apresentado um protótipo de um telefone à Sociedade Física de Frankfurt.

Indisputável é a importância que as comunicações telefónicas ganharam durante o séc. XX, quando foram, durante algum tempo, a melhor forma para transmitir pensamentos mundanos através da palavra, de forma instantânea. Porém, não é só esse tipo de informação que circula pelas linhas telefónicas, que albergam também a transmissão de dados por via fax, telex e até de algumas formas de acesso à Internet. No final do século, tornou-se também possível a transmissão telefónica sem fios, que levou à “explosão” dos aparelhos de comunicação móvel, que rapidamente se tornaram também capazes de receber e emitir tanto a voz como outro tipo de suportes para a transmissão de mensagens entre seres humanos,  sendo hoje virtualmente impossível estar-se “sozinho”, onde quer que se esteja.

Alinhamento:

Radio Shack – Faixas 1 (“Jamaican”), 2 (“21st Century Funk”), 3 (“50’s Rock ‘n’ Roll”), 4 (“Rappin'”), e 5 (“Soft Contemporary” [Answering Machine Messages Tape, 1985] [1:03-3:47]

Colagem de Tons Telefónicos 1 [3:45-23:20]

Chrome Wings – Double Fantasy [Time Patterns CS, 2010]  [22:29-27:34]

Nancy Friedman, “The Telephone Doctor” – Telephone Selling Skills Training: “A – ask for time to talk; B – benefits” [2009] [27:20-30:45]

Chrome Wings – Wave Life [Time Patterns CS, 2010] [27:46-30:12]

Chrome Wings – Tumbles [Time Patterns CS, 2010][30:13-35:15]

Nanncy Friedman, “The Telephone Doctor” – Customer Service: “Dealing with a Foreign Accent” [2009] [33:29-36:19]

Chrome Wings – Gateways [Time Patterns CS, 2010] [35:16-39:41]

Colagem de Tons Telefónicos 2 [36:49-57:20]

Anúncio “Páginas Amarelas” (PT) [circa 90] [38:07-38:25]

Anúncio “Pacific Bell: Call Return” [1983] [38:42-39:08]

Chrome Wings – Color Worlds [Time Patterns CS, 2010] [42:41-49:00]

Chrome Wings – Pills Drop [Time Patterns CS, 2010] [52:40-57:09]

Radio Shack – Faixas 6 (“Vaudeville”), 7 (“Country”), 8 (“Jazz”), 9 (“Up-Tempo Contemporary”), e 10 (“Orchestral Pops”) [Answering Machine Messages Tape, 1985] [56:59-59:00]

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José Afonso Biscaia

O locutor avisa: “You are about to enjoy a very pleasant and a beneficial experience. Be sure that you will not be disturbed…” é assim, que damos inicio ao Zepelim desta semana, com a faixa Remain Quiet And Passive retirada do primeiro disco dos The Tape-beatles, A Subtle Buoyancy of Pulse de 1988. Esta é a segunda emissão de Zepelim que dedicamos ao sobrenatural, depois de na semana passada termos escutado uma colagem sonora sobre a primeira parte do disco Mediale Musik: Recordings of Unseen Intelligences 1905-2007. Esta semana voltámos a revisitar o mesmo disco com as manifestações paranormais presentes nas faixas Exploding Cup, Charlton House (1995), Paranormal voice on the answering machine, rec. Germany, 1999, os fenómenos de glossolalia em Sitting with Betty – Ecstatically emotive arificial language in a chronic paranoid, assim como os rituais do famoso mago Aleister Crowley com the call of the second Aethyr, de 1920. Este foi o ponto de partida para emissão de hoje, à qual juntámos uma série de recolhas de elementos sonoros fantasmagóricos presentes em discos como Ghostly Sounds – A Haunting Experience (1974), Johnson Smith Novelty Company Horror Record (1973), Spook Stuff For Hallowe’en (1960), Nightmare (1960) e Spooky Sound Effects (1970s?) e os sons de tortura e prazer do disco: Tortura: The sounds of pleasure and pain (1965).

À parte dessa recolha sonora, recorremos a alguns discos que facilmente poderiam ser catalogados na definição criada por Jacques Derrida de Hauntology. Falamos de projectos como o do músico inglês James Leyland Kirby sob o nome de  The Caretaker. Projecto que iniciou nos finais do ano de 1996 e que se materializaria com o disco Selected Memories From The Haunted Ballroom. Um disco que nasce com inspiração no ambiente da cena do salão de baile presente no filme The Shinning de Stanley Kubrick, transformando temas de salão dos anos 20 e 30 em peças sonoras difusas e espectrais como se se tratasse de uma baile de fantasmas. Em 2008, The Caretaker edita o disco Persistent Repetition of Phrases pela Install numa edição limitada de 500 cópias e que teve no passado mês de Abril uma nova reedição pela sua recém criada editora – History always favours the winners. Foi desse disco que retirámos a faixa Long Term (remote) que podemos ouvir ao minuto 5:37. Num espectro muito semelhante ao de The Caretaker, musicámos o nosso programa com o disco Plays Wagner do músico Pat Maherr, que se apresenta sob o nome de Indignant Senility. Plays Wagner teve em 2009 uma edição em cassete pela pequena editora de Pat Maherr, e foi recuperada no passado dia 11 de Maio pela Type Records, fazendo desta edição uma das mais interessantes do seu catálogo. Neste disco, Indigant Senility manipula e distorce temas do compositor Wagner, criando atmosferas negras de ruído difuso onde a ondulação dos seus drones nos lembrará vagamente uma sinfonia a dissipar-se no tempo.

Ouvimos ainda excertos da faixa Guillotine Licker/Present Tense Returning/Smelling In Stereo do músico de Chicago Kevin Drumm, presente na cassete Horror of Birth (2005); a faixa Memento Mori (expressão latina para “lembra-te que morrerás um dia“) de Matmos, tocada inteiramente a partir de sons obtidos do crânio humano, de coluna vertebral de cabra , de tecidos conjuntivos e dentes artificiais; Thistlalia uma composição do trompetista Greg Kelley presente na compilação Music Overheard e ainda o tema Premier tableau – Capture de l’oiseau de feu par Ivan Tsarévitch do compositor clássico russo Igor Stravinsky.

Num programa dedicado ao terror e ao fantástico, quisemos que o espaço onírico estivesse representado pela presença de relatos de pesadelos, assim, escolhemos ouvir uma das composições de Dreams. Dreams é um conjunto de temas realizados para uma série de quatro programas de rádio sob o nome de Inventions for Radio, numa criação de Delia Derbyshire com a colaboração de Barry Bermange a partir da qual se recolheram testemunhos de sonhos, sendo divididos pelas temáticas Running, Falling, Sea, Land e  Colours. Nesta emissão escutámos a faixa Running, que à semelhança das outras é musicada pelos drones fantasmagóricos e musique concrète de Derbyshire.

É possível ainda escutar nesta emissão o excerto de um poema sonoro do arquitecto e poeta Vito Acconci, de nome The Bristol Project realizado em

2001, em que mergulha numa visão futurista do homem na cidade e da cidade na Natureza, transmitindo uma sensação labiríntica pela intercepção entre este elementos numa atmosfera apocalíptica – The city ends. The city is dead. Long live the city (um poema que poderá ter um equivalente visual no vídeo Skew Gardens [2008] de People Like Us). Podemos ouvir The Bristol Project na integra aqui:

Presença ainda neste  Zepelim do carismático entertainer ítalo-americano Jerry Colonna, conhecido não só pela forma de cantar/gritar mas também pela sua figura burlesca de olhos esbugalhados. Ouvimos o tema Your My Everything encontrado em Music? For Screaming!!!

Encerramos o programa com o som do equivalente electrónico do pulsar de ondas cerebrais Theta, normalmente associadas a estados de sono profundo, esta gravação encontra-se na série de cassetes Spiral (1989) realizadas por Willem De Ridder e Andrew Mckenzie (The Hafler Trio), editadas mensalmente em Amesterdão em forma de audio-zine, cada edição era dedicada a um tema específico. Na edição de Spiral #2 dedicada ao paranormal, a faixa que encerra a cassete são as pulsações Theta, os autores descrevem o seu propósito da seguinte forma:   We sugest that you copy this pulse onto an endless cassete and play it back whilst  lying in the dark. It is possible to travel out of the body at third attempt, at the very least… Experiment!!!. Por fim, as ondas Theta são interrompidas pela voz de Arch Obole, locutor e argumentista do programa de rádio Lights Out, espaço onde eram dramatizados contos de horror e suspense…

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Carlo Patrão