Resonance104.4fm

We present a retrospective of 2010, Resonance-style. It’s a case of all hands on deck from 10am as a whole bunch of broadcasting regulars offer their highlights of the year.
We kick off today’s pick of the year at 10:00am with the song “Fazell’s Garden” by Kinnie the Explorer, for me (writes Ed Baxter) the best new rock band of 2010 and promising great things to come, surely. Then Henry Scott-Irvine presents excerpts from his series of in-depth interviews – with Glen Matlock, Nigel Planer and Arthur Brown. Melissa Moon is a great radiophonic sketch by Leo Hornak: she was the winner of a race up the Empire State Building and Leo captures the tension, humour and sheer strangeness of her sport with elegance and an ear for detail. Mobile Radio follows with a presentation of the long-form Morsonata, produced for the FON festival in Barrow-in-Furness. With Barrow being home to Europe’s biggest submarine shed and neighbouring Lake District having hosted Kurt Schwitters for the last years of his life, Mobile Radio decided to combine these two influences: Schwitters’s Ursonate performed in Morse Code by one of Barrow’s retired submariners provides the underlying thread to a work that includes live music and field recordings by FON artists-in-residence Haco, Susan Matthews, Sarah Washington and Knut Aufermann.
Then Carole Finer’s “best of” Sound Out comprises a beautiful performance by singer Sam Lee, someone Carole herself inspired. This is followed by brief extracts from the Snowfields Adolescent Unit’s Clear Spot and Annie Lewandowksi’s documentary feature The Open Fire, both addressing our local borough of Southwark. A song from the immortal Peter Blegvad (made for Radio Free Song Club) brings us up to noon.
At 12:00am we have This Music Wins, Peter Lanceley’s review of 2010 from a music-loving student’s viewpoint: ninety minutes of the best of the year’s avant-rock, dream-pop and engaging electronica, heralding a new series on Resonance104.4fm in 2011.
And at 1:30pm we’ve a short live set from and interview from The deXter Bentley Hello GoodBye Show (from Saturday 20th November 2010) with London band Private Trousers who perform four songs: Wonder Horse, Dumps, The Edge & Snow. The two other bands featured here are Zapoppin’ playing Oops, You’re a Racist and Plug playing Man vs Machine. The hosts were Richard Bentley and Michael Garrad. The sound engineer was James Torrence. Free Lab Radio follows with an extract from a large group improvisation featuring Howard Jacques, Dimitri Pieri, Tony Pieri and Chris Weaver. It was broadcast live during the December 11th late-night edition of the show. Then an excerpt from an episode in Resonance104.4fm stalwart Sharon Gal’s series In Search of Inspiration, which was broadcast for twelve episodes from April 2011. Each programme comprised a 30 minute conversation with a different guest about notions and ideas relating to inspiration, its relevance and manifestation. The interviewee is singer Maggie Nicols. Then Gunslingers, a brief radiophonic sketch by me, Ed Baxter, featuring Bob Rafkin (voice) and the late Phil Ochs (voice, music). It is a fragment of a more or less abandoned documentary about Ochs that I hoped to make. It seems I simply don’t have the time, nor ever will.
A little before 3:00pm we’ve a sequence of excerpts from Nick Hamilton’s exploration of diverse aspects of London’s artistic and cultural landscape, Lost Steps (which, be warned, contains adult content), presented by Malcolm Hopkins; followed by Luscombe’s Choice of simply beautiful music. Then Mining For Gold’s “A Psychogeographic Guide to Riga” from 6 August 2010 – a tour of that city with the Restoration Workshop of Unprecedented Feelings, featuring Jonny Mugwump, Cris Lapthorne, Inga Tillere and Johny Brown. Next, Chris Dixon’s excellent footie show Cafe Calcio rubs shoulders with the now venerable African Essence, then it’s all stops out with Ben Waston’s Late Lunch with Out to Lunch: “I’ve decided to select 21 minutes of my readings of “Blake,” an illuminated book I’m writing onscreen using the drawings you saw in the small black book to create a multi-coloured fantasy environment for my words – which I’m writing in pixel by pixel. ”Blake” is an illuminated epic composed on screen using MSPaint. You get to hear plates 1 to 113.” Take a look at the image above for a sense of just what is involved – intricate, astonishing, exquisite.
Then the country’s finest radio artist, Martin Williams provides a typically restrained and intelligent gem in an extract from A Good Place to Hide, broadcast in February 2010. It features readings by Polly Frame with words, music and recordings by Martin. James Hodder, nominated for the 2010 Radio Academy Production Awards, speedreads his way through 2010′s Souncheck show – featuring chat from songwriters Jesse Malin, Chuck Prophet, Jace Everett, Grupo Fantasma, Son of Dave and Toots & The Maytals – before Jack Thurston provides his selection from the Bike Show. This is followed by Patrick McGinley’s magnificent foray into field recordings in (lower case) framework, with material from Frogscapes, a broadcast of 11 April 2010 produced by Yannick Dauby, Olivier Namblard and Marc Namblard. Then we leap from the sublime to the ridiculous as hedge fund managers jive and girate under the watchful ear and sharp tongue of the irrepressible Dr. Stu in The Naked Short Club. A sober thoughts come from Tunnel Vision, which features novelist Will Self walking through London’s sewers with subterranean explorer Bruno Rinvolucri.
Shortly before 7pm, Wavelength finds William English talking to Captain Maurice Seddon, Royal Signals (retired), by telephone: “I played some cassette tape recordings he made in the 1980s; all telephone conversations which Maurice would habitually record, perhaps since the 1960s but his memory is not what it was. One such conversation was with Fritz Fend, designer of the Fend Flitzer which developed into the Messerschmitt bubble car. I mentioned theremins to Maurice and he thought I said thermin which reminded him that he had recently bought a thermal hat which he had mislaid.” The broadcast is from 12 November 2010.
Music follows, from Joe Kassman-Tod’s contemporary jazz series Disorder at the Border. He’s selected a session from 14 August 2010, featuring John Russell (guitar), Sabu Toyozumi (erhu) and Akio Suzuki (whisky bottle-in-sock, stones, analapos). Lovely. The best of Mark Aitken’s “sonic horticultural” series I Can Hear The Grass Grow follows. John Eacott, David Lintern, Shetland’s screaming puffins, David Perkins and a Roots and Shoots volunteer all feature.Then an excerpt from The Wire – Adventures In Modern Music show from 17 June 2010, a special tape-only edition where all music was played off two personal stereo cassette players in the studio by Derek Walmsley and Nick Richardson. This is followed by a collage of interviews from Technical Difficulties, presented by Tim Abbott and Timothy Bonham Carter, talking to Marlo Donato, Anna-Lilja Haefele and Max Heidenfelder. A snippet of the Rough Trade Shop’s Counter Culture Radio Show follows, then master of the anomalous Rob Simone grabs the microphone and any idle synapses. Unknown Words explores the word ‘Cliche’. The series is described by writer and producer Mac Dunlop as “a collage of several ideas, a linguistic expedition across the comic landscape where everything has been said before, and usually more than once.” This episode is from 4 July 2010. Rosie Wilby’s thoroughly engaging Out in South London offers some of its Pride Special broadcast of 21 June 2010, looking back at the history of Pride and the Gay Liberation Front with Philip Rescorla. It precedes Fari Bradley’s always informative Six Pillars to Persia in a funky juxtaposition which leads us gradually towards midnight. Atlantic Waves finds Miguel Santos is the mood for dance music – namely, “foot-stompin’, brass-blarin’ and rip snortin’ high energy folk(ish) beats made in the UK” -, while Is Black Music focuses on “Protest” in the light of the police/student riots, with Yinka Oyewole presenting music by Peter Tosh, Bad Brains, Fela Kuti and Public Enemy. Then it’s time for a pause on the radiophonic landing that is Driftshift. Voice On Record is (says producer Sean Williams) “just one long bit of Gerard Hoffnung from a record made of a tape Hoffnung recorded off the radio himself of a broadcast he’d recorded at the BBC in 1954. It sums up the series in that the voice is utterly idiosyncratic, the material is very funny and also genuine and full of real warmth, and the mediation and background noises, especially exemplified by us being able to hear Hoffnung himself tuning his radio to get better reception, perfectly encapsulates the idea of the value of human traces left in the incidental margins of such wonderful recordings.” There follows twenty minutes of mayhem from Jonny Mugwump and the Exotic Pylon. It features a four-way improvisation between Time Attendant, I am a Vowel, Clang Sayne and Mugwump himself, who says: “This excerpt in particular means a lot to me as the show had been moving along fine so I got every one to take a break and when we came back in, we all suddenly magically fell together – it was just a really special moment, particularly unique to that location, place and time and the thing that I value most about being part of Resonance104.4fm – a sudden and unexpected alchemy.” Finally, Neil Denny and pals try to cram the best of the mercurial and wide-ranging Little Atoms into about thirty minutes, with Professor Brian Cox, Ian McEwan, Lynn Barber, Cory Doctorow, Rebecca Skloot, Josie Long and Alan Moore, before time leads us to the close of this broadcast – which is followed after midnight bells by the very beautiful, eminently epic, and yet rather silly Radio Yesterday.