This monthly program features highlights and commissions from Glasgow art radio station Radiophrenia Presented in today's episode is Time is a sliding door by Gabi Schaffner and HOW TO by MME dUO.

“Time is a Sliding Door” is a variation of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s saying that “Reality is a Sliding Door”. As if that wasn’t tricky enough, substituting ‘reality’ with the noun ‘time’ unravels a kaleidoscope of meanings and implications that turns the ground of our presumptuous existence into a wobbly pudding. If Time is a Sliding Door, and we push it aside, what happens beyond the threshold? The act of sliding means that the other side is only slowly revealed. As well as with a thud, thunder and roll. As radio is a medium which transgresses our notion of time and space, both naturally and effortlessly, how does it come into the picture? If the door opens onto a 5th dimension, and/or still others, how could this be ‘enlistened’ into a radiophonic scape? To be honest, the author of these lines doesn’t actually know, and how could she?

As humans we continue to be tethered to time as a condition of our communication, our perception, our being. It just seemed fit to start with a speedy panorama of the “Swabian-Alemannic Fasnet”. Fasnet (or “Fastnacht”) is also called the “fifth season of the year”, and is recorded in central Europe at least since the 13th century. Its presentation of an inverted world, the parades of Jesters, Fools and Witches, the almost deafening onrush of drums, ‘Fools Cries’, trombones, trumpets and bells truly create a different time horizon.Other acoustic inhabitants of this composition are the cuckoo-clock and clocks in general, as this region of Germany is famous for its clock-makers since the 17th century. And after all, it is not just the shamans of the Northern Tunguska who believe that the cuckoo’s call presages the number of years one has left to live…

Time is a Sliding Door sticks to the human dimension, playing with the acts of acceleration and deceleration, with the notion of journeying (we shall be travelling from the Black Forest to New Mexico and from there to Slovenia – at least), spellbound by folk tunes, with the whisperings of shortwaves captured in open and discreet places. Hidden stories keep on drifting through radio space, sites and signals keep travelling, and wherever they may go, eventually an alien molecule, touched by radio might spark off the impulse for that door to open up into the unforeseeable. Meanwhile, we’ll keep hanging around this auditory doorstep.

Credits: Accordion: Olsen auf Aldebaran, Musical Saw: Mimosa Pale, Singers: Sanne Drouhin-Kok, Ulrike Stoehring and Lilli Moors, Fernando (guest appearing for “Adopta una planta”/Datscha Radio, Madrid). Drums: Paddi (Patrick Guderitz), Toni Brokoli (Pascal Dinser aka Kalle Dinsko) & Junk (Thomas Jank) Special thanks to: Global Forest e. V., Black Forest! Commissioned for Radiophrenia 2020 with the support of Creative Scotland. schaffnerin.net

MME dUO are ping pong Eden, warm up total, turnablists, leaf theorists and factual DADA. With partly invented instruments, voice and electronics, MME dUO undertake field research into fragmented language and sound collage. Set pieces of spoken words become signals, atactic accents form repetitive rhythms. A continuous run in dis and harmony with connections to 'Musique concrete'. MME dUO are Patricia Koellges and Tamara Lorenz.

HOW TO is a concrete sound poem that is heading for an exaggerated climax. It asks questions in a very reduced manner and does not give answers within an abstract imagination of an acting human in a globally oriented scenery. How can one deal with something like this, how can one feel in a ‘condizione of façon de parler’? 

mme-duo.de

Presented on an annual basis, Radiophrenia is a temporary art radio station – a two-week exploration into current trends in sound and transmission arts. Broadcasting live from Glasgow’s Centre for Contemporary Arts, the station promoted radio as an art form, encouraging challenging and radical new approaches to the medium. Each year, the broadcast schedule includes a series of newly commissioned radio works, live shows, pre-recorded features and 12 Live-to-Air performances. The majority of the program is made up from selections submitted to an international open call for sound art and radio works. Radiophrenia is managed by Mark Vernon and Barry Burns and is funded through Creative Scotland’s Open Project Funding with additional support from CCA Glasgow.