Radia season 34, show #518: "Hours after Hours" by Samuel Longmore from Radio One (91-FM) Dunedin, New Zealand. "Radia" is a group of internartional stations, including Wave Farm's WGXC, interested in new and forgotten ways of making radio. Each week, one station makes a show for the others. This week: "This composition was recorded at night in six different rooms and liminal spaces within a certain building in central Auckland, New Zealand. The history, location and daily life of the building itself may or may not be relevant to the piece, but this set of conditions is as follows. This building houses the Audio Foundation, Auckland's most recognisable locational node of sound culture and experimental music. It was, formerly, a tie factory for a local manufacturer which, in an Antipodean bid for faux-continental sophistication, called itself Parisian ties. Now no neckties, and indeed hardly any clothing, are made in New Zealand. But the building is still busy working, nurturing a resolutely self-aware locality in regards to the sonification of place, with rooms containing a sound library, a gallery space, a small performance venue, studios and workshop spaces, an office and small shop housing hens-teeth rare local runs of multi-format limited edition pressings, as well as its own low power FM radio station, AFM. These rooms were entered by the artist at night, with a microphone and a recording device. The gain was set to high and the microphone was left "to do its work", without guidance, the artist immediately leaving the scene, not monitoring the sound. In subsequent takes, the sounds of these room-ambiences, these (near) 'silences', were played back into the rooms, and re-recorded, creating an accumulative and self-referential circuit in which the resonant frequency of each room began to emerge. In editing the piece together from the resulting audio six separate rooms are sequenced together. Listening back to these, their subtle shifts, it is as though witnessing a mysterious formal experiment, the alignment of each room emphasizing the difference within the gesture's repetition, the magnification of the room-tone and the resulting 'presence of absence' undulating like waves. Signaled by no intermediary save the change in resonant frequency, the shifts subtly become a sounding-out of the dimensions of walls, staircases and other architecture, an aural mapping, a blind yet acutely aware material and physical cartography of the space which Sam describes as "an overall picture" of the space.