Framing Statement for 'See What I'm Saying' (radio works)

A Series of Radio Works

The 'Chiaroscuro' readings are intended to challenge the medium, the performer and the listener. Broadcasting the same text at the same time every day for 8 days I felt would be an appropriate challenge to a medium in which we are used to hearing fresh content everyday.

The text itself feels awkward as a script as it was first written for the page. I found the combination of leaving the text in its original form to be read by 'non-performers' an interesting dichotomy in terms of the medium. Once again the content concentrates on an form of auto-biography and thus reflects the aims of the 'sonic self portrait' half of the project. Indeed of my work as a whole.

The fumblings for words, the pauses while each performer reads ahead on screen/page is difficult to listen to and here these silences are intended as an example of the notion of 'ear-strains' in spoken word that Steven Connor suggests. Challenging the accepted 'cleansing of the body in sound recording' within the medium as Novarina observed in his 'Critique of Radio' and of listener expectations, each piece asks the listener to embrace Weiss' notion of the “teratology of the voice, whose monsters arise by means of liberating all those vocal 'accidents' that hitherto blemished the pure sounds of bel canto” which he speaks of in 'Phonic Gaps and Gasps' however they manifest within each reading.

Each piece remained unchanged from whichever rudimentary form of recording device/software it was created in until this week where my first interventions on the audio appear. This week I have chosen to broadcast the only sonic self portrait I have been given permission for alongside a combination a chorus of voices echoing the aptly named 'Chiaroscuro' (a further reflection of the project's other half) piece. This has hopefully set up listener expectations for the final pieces which are to be broadcast on the final day of this series.

Final Piece

The cut and paste nature of the 'See What I'm Saying' piece reflects the work of both Gregory Whitehead and William S Burroughs work while utilising both the various voices and spoken word pieces I have worked with over the course of this MA, creating an even more 'difficult' piece for broadcast. Having not changed anything about the materials that constitute the entire project from voice pieces to dirty frames for display in the Soundart reception up until this point, I feel that this piece represents a reflective assemblage of all that has made up the overall project. The soundscape it creates is my final contesting to the medium under this umbrella and uses all of the voices which I spoken through or have spoken to me over the course of this project. Hopefully it takes on some of what Whitehead is looking for in this form when he states in his 'Speleology' essay,

“The goal of radio text is not to distort or impress, but to bring deeply buried desires and insights back into the light”.