EPISODE 06 — Psyché Tropes

Psyché Tropes Episode 6
11pm, 26 September 2022 on Resonance 104.4FM

Psyché Tropes Episode 6, presented by Steven McInerney, features a selection of sound and musical works from experimental films, installation, performance art and sculpture.

Michel Redolfi's Pacific Tubular Waves kicks off the programme. Commissioned by Group De Researches Musicales, this piece was composed on the first digital Synclavier synthesizer. The original LP released in 1980 came packaged with stereoscopic photography and 3D glasses.

Recorded Delivery by Janek Schaefer is a sound-activated tape recording of a parcel travelling through the Post Office system from Exhibition Road, to the room of the installation in the Acorn Self Storage centre, Wembley, London.

The sound reactive dictaphone automatically edited the 15 hour journey to a 72 minute recording, capturing only the most sonically interesting elements of the journey from the 28th to 29th March 1995.

Following on is a piece titled Do You See What I Hear by Poeple like Us aka Vicki Bennet, a british artist working in the field of audio-visual collage, sampling, appropriation and cutting up of found footage and archives. Ages by Ross Blake is an original sountrack was originally composed for the film Pretty On Rose which never saw the light of day featuring Dirvla Minogue and Natalie Sharp.

Standing Mandala by Oren Ambarchi and Robin Fox, composed for the dance and kinetic installation Connected by Reuben Margolin and Gideon Obarzanek from 2011. This perfomance explores the connections between the human and the machine, the body and sculpture. Margolin’s startlingly live sculptural works – constructed from wood, re-cycled plastic, paper and steel – transcend their concrete forms once set into motion, appearing as natural waveforms in a weightless kinetic flow. Suspended by hundreds of fine strings receiving information from multiple camshafts and wheels, his sculptures reveal in articulate detail the impulses of agile dancers twisting and hurtling through space.

Thrones by Black To Comm is a soundtrack to a film called EARTH by Singaporean contemporary artist Hotzu Nyen. Following on is a piece by fellow Hamburg artist Nika Son called Echoes of Insomnia. This is a commissioned work for the artist Annika Kahrs' exhibition How to live in the echo of other places. For Echoes of Insomnia, Nika Son spoke to people who live between day and night, including an engine driver and a freight coordinator who both serve as shift workers at the port as well as friends and a DoP who worked extensively with night images. They report on their memories and notions of sleep, wakefulness and the moments in between. Her piece dissolves the boundaries between body and mind and thoughts repeatedly elude their grasp.

Finishing off Episode 6 is Mark Vernon's original soundtrack the award-winning Tape Letters from the Waiting Room
(dir. Steven McInerney). An existential drama exploring the universal themes of death and rebirth Tape Letters from the Waiting Room is an experiment in film archaeology and magnetic memory as it navigates past life experiences. Shifting in succession from the mundane to the metaphysical, the film is composed of extant 16mm found footage from the past century with an original soundtrack by Mark Vernon culled from his collection of domestic tape recordings, audio letters, found sounds and other lost voices.

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