Live-to-Air: Áine O'Dwyer/Alexandra Spence/MP Hopkins

Áine O’Dwyer – Court Music

Court Music will explore the multi-dimensional reality of the CCA. Microphones will be positioned in different places around the room; underneath the audience, from underneath the stage or from inside an instrument...

Áine O’Dwyer is an multi-disciplinary artist whose work is informed by both the conceptual concerns of sound-art and traditional compositional techniques, embracing the broader aesthetics of sound and its relationship to environment, time, audience and structure. She has created works for large-scale and intimate settings which allow for both planned and chance events to co-exist. Often she listens out for the sonic touchstones of time and place to instruct or accompany her. Poems for Daedalus (2018), was a series of site-specific performances which O’Dwyer developed in Athens. The piece was based on the exploration of a building, its intimacies and the surrounding neighbourhood. Her book 'Poems for play' pays homage to the specificity of time and place. Similarly, the notion of the “holding space as extension-of-instrument” can be seen in O'Dwyer's realisation Accompaniment for Captives (Open Ear Festival, 2019) at Horseshoe bay, Sherkin Island, Ireland. The performance was centred around the intentional choreography of two local fishing boats whose horn signals heralded an “environmental sonic tapestry of land, sea, man and animal.

Alexandra Spence - Hall, shell, mall, bell.

A pitch trembles, not quite here nor there. Thick air shimmering. A note encased, small worlds, subtle rhythms. Resonant space – a saucepan, a hall, inside a shell, tambourine body, a reflective mall: shiny and bouncy, the inside of a wooden clarinet bell. Hall, shell, mall, bell. A twig gets caught between my shoe and the earth. A compositional element came through the exchange. Water boiling two eggs, egg bodies tapping out a rhythm together.

I’ve been keeping short descriptive notes on environmental sounds that pique my interest. Keeping these notes allows me to examine what it is I enjoy in each sound encountered. Using my text descriptions as a kind of score for miniatures, I attempt to reimagine and recreate these sounds using various, unrelated sources; allowing these descriptions to re-compose sonic memory.

Alexandra Spence is a sound artist and musician living on unceded Wangal land in Sydney. Through her practice Alex attempts to reimagine the intricate relationships between the listener, the object, and the surrounding environment as a kind of communion or conversation. Her aesthetic favours field recordings, analogue technologies and object interventions.

MP Hopkins – “Creases”

Encoded extras. Concentrating on the almost of saying. A tissue-thin memory that balances one's tongue. Close voice touching. The infeasible inside. Slipping into the upkeep of the word. Debilitated. Mother. Transcription is the most ideal approach to imprint the basic distance. Wrinkles. Doubt in sharp words. Holes. Hexed words are your singular satisfaction. What has been said can't be replayed. Stammering and sense. Creases in the copyist. Taped recollections mumbling endlessly on the loss of home. Entering the record as gas. Reflected words proposing systems for excusing themselves. Liquidation. A recorder that doesn't have the foggiest idea about how to remain in the pained space around productive language. You hear a song in yourself that steers you clear of yourself. Inscription as a testimony to ejection.

MP Hopkins is a sound artist and musician working on Gadigal and Wangal land in Sydney, Australia. He uses voice, feedback, recording/playback devices, and text scores within different acoustic environments, which are deconstructed and presented to the listener in delicate and degraded ways.

Commissioned as part of Radiophrenia’s two week long radio broadcasts, brought to you live from their studio at CCA Glasgow. Funded through Creative Scotland’s Open Project Funding.