By Peter Gartside
A small group of people step into the cavernous space of a disused electrical facility. In its centre, surrounded by complete darkness, is a circle of 70 vintage radio sets, their valves and dials glowing yellow. For the next 40 minutes the intrepid visitors will experience a series of uncanny animal sounds punctuated by gnomic utterances in broken English.
Welcome to The Enormous Radio, a new piece showing at Newport’s The Substation. The piece is a collaboration between documentarian and theatre-maker Roslyn Oades and sound designer, soundtrack artist, musician and self-confessed sound obsessive Bob Scott.
The Enormous Radio – titled after a John Cheever short story about a radio that captures the voices of unhappy neighbours in a New York apartment block – is part seance, part eco-acoustic experiment, all theatre.
Roslyn and Bob have collaborated before, but Bob reckons this is their most abstract and mysterious project yet. They both talk excitedly of being fascinated by radio: by the medium and by this almost obsolete piece of domestic technology.
Roslyn sees radios as weirdly alive. She points out that they’ve lived with us for a hundred years, and seems to imply that they haven’t been idle, playfully suggesting “maybe they know us better than we realise”. Bob describes radio as a sort of “voodoo” that “pulls stuff out of the air, and it translates it into sound. It’s magic.” Echoing Roslyn, he insists that “each radio has its own sonic personality”.
The piece draws on currents of what the creators term ‘techno-spiritualism’, in particular EVP or electronic voice phenomena, an obscure area of 60s and 70s scientific research into the incidental ‘voices’ picked up by field recordings of birdsong or in the hiss of tape recorders left running.
These recordings could be listened to again and again until they yielded voices, sometimes speaking in Russian, or Latvian or Spanish, that were thought to be delivering messages from the other side. Often the investigators seemed personally invested in the existence of messages, in the same way that, after the First World War, people were ready to read double-exposure accidents in photography as evidence of contact with the ghosts of the war dead.
Another of Roslyn’s longstanding interests is wildlife field recordings: whalesong picked up by recording devices sunk deep in the Antarctic Ocean; dingoes calling across remote gorges; the cries of red-tailed black cockatoos. She began to wonder if perhaps these tapes could also contain messages.
To try to unlock these voices, she turned to voice-enhancement software, running her field recordings through a program that ‘expected’ to find language, perhaps rather like we humans are prone to do. Audiences will encounter ‘what the machines heard the animals say’, messages from the more-than-human world.
The piece also plays, as Roslyn says, with “ideas of electricity surges and all the unstable things that also come with that technology and interference” which makes The Substation the perfect venue.
There are several sessions a day of The Enormous Radio, running from 30 September to 10 October. Tickets from: thesubstation.org.au.
