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Eyes Rifle by Roy Claire Potter and Kieron Piercy
Roy Claire Potter and Kieron Piercy take up the subject of colourblindness in Eyes Rifle. Originally produced as a three-minute response to an archived conversation on that subject from the Anthony Burgess Foundation, this new extended version similarly remembers eyes tests, but suggests something much darker in the speaker’s omissions or repetitions of information. Potter and Piercy have focused on the archival recording’s environmental indicators, its sonic interference, and on inferences in the archived conversation to inform the recording and synthesis of an audio environment that provides a subtext for the monologue, while drawing out and guiding its delivery. Roy Claire Potter is an artist writer from Merseyside working across performance, publishing, installation and film. They have published two books of experimental fiction and are working on a third. Audio on Chocolate Monk, and FortEvilFruit with Bridget Hayden. Kieron Piercy makes audio composition, improvisation and installation. Piercy has performed widely in the UK and Europe, as a solo artist, and founding member of duo, Spoils and Relics distributed by Chocolate Monk, Harbinger Sound, and Porta. www.clairepotter.net spoilsandrelics.bandcamp.com

Breathless by Hannah Ellul
If I were to tell you how I arrived here, I would have to explain the voicemails. The voicemails have been in the back of my mind for some time. They had accumulated over several years, in fits and starts. A waxing and waning of words spoken into the void. For months, I watched them arrive but I did not listen to them. When I eventually did hear the messages, certain things were immediately clear. The condition of his lungs was deteriorating. His breathing was laboured. The messages had never been easy to follow. They were often slurred, because of the drink. But now when he spoke his words were interrupted by coughing fits, more and more so as time went on. By groans and gasps. Belly-speech. Gurgles of outflow. In The Absent Body, Drew Leder writes that the healthy body is ‘transparent’. In illness, the body loses its transparency by ‘dys-appearing’. In a state of dysfunction, it appears. When I read this, something about the idea of the loss of transparency seems familiar to me. The pregnant body is not transparent, but it’s not dysfunctional either. In fact, the cis female body is perpetually troubling this idea of transparency in health. I am not the first person to point out that the question of the body’s transparency is not as simple as it seems. I try to listen to the groans and gasps between the words as sounds in all their electronically-mediated materiality, perhaps I am being evasive. I am finding it hard to breathe as I listen: the body impinges, despite myself. And they call this ‘reduced’ listening. The absent body, on the other side of the voicemails, of the radio. For something so absent, it weighs heavily. Dissipated, dys-appearing. Hannah Ellul is a Glasgow-based writer and artist working primarily in text and sound. She often works collaboratively, and much of her work starts from an interest in radical political imagination and the affective dimension of collective experience. With Ben Knight she is part of the collaborative project Psykick Dancehall, exploring sound across media: the politics of listening, recording technologies and the voice. She makes music with Human Heads and White Death. Projects have included residencies at Titanik, Turku, FI, the Banff Centre, Alberta, CA; Lothringer_13 Laden, Munich, DE, and CCA Glasgow, UK; and performances and exhibitions at Transmission Gallery, Glasgow; Lydgalleriet, Bergen, NO; Oslo 10, Basel, CH; and Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, UK. Breathless is a co-commission between Radiophrenia and Kunstradio Radiokunst for Ö1, Austria with the support of Creative Scotland.