A Mixtape Radio #3 - Urgently and Violently

A monthly programme which blends textured audio from cassette recordings by Joe Wilson & Chanelle Collier with tonal imagery by Bruna Volpi and Jake Terrey. Sound engineering by Ollie Brown.

Joe and Chanelle’s audio recordings encompass ambient sounds, conversation, experimental composition and improvised instrumental response. Cassette drones, loop pedals, voice and guitar are used to echo, mimic or bend over bird calls, thunderstorms, night sounds, indistinguishable chatter, museum reverberations and urban movement. These moments captured to tape are presented in two halves as an A-side/B-side format.

Enriched by visual counterpoints for each episode, Bruna’s critical eye forms an ambiguous tonal narrative from Jake's method of stumbling into excellence. Mountain, valley, glacier, and urban horizon are presented in stereo format, to parallel the A-side/B-side format.

This program has been made on the stolen lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, we pay respect to the Elders both past and present.

Project lead and sound by Joe Wilson and Chanelle Collier. Creative direction by Bruna Volpi. Photography by Jake Terrey.

Supported by Higher Ground Studios, Annandale.

Field Notes

Side A - Urgently

Field recording of European museum with morning birds and amplifier feedback from guitar; complaints from Mum about washing clothes in the copper; undulating chords with vocal and crickets from Bundanon; pitch alteration on octave pedal; drone and feedback over museum sounds and harmonics in E major followed by a riff in E minor, ‘Heart Starts Beating Too Fast’.

Free Love: “A language that demands, urgently and violently: care. A generative exchange and agency in labour. A criticality through care, using play. A position that can be both active in participation and maintain the potential to deactivate, become divested. Doing something nice, flying a kite, or having a picnic. Just looking to be invited to converse, an extension of love to collapse two worlds; work and life.

Catered for by massive failure as a means of opening. Doing over making to relocate the work to the action. Relocating the site of art to the body and the use of time. A revolutionary release of time through play as resistance. Constructed relationships, situations, with an emphasis to act freely; to resist the positions of interest. A domain of emancipation and kinship for a subjective body." - Joe

Side B - Violently

Field recording of a visit to Palais Tokyo followed by a drone melody malady in G major with lead guitar; feedback with studio improvements such as making a shelf using a timber router, with museum crowd both clean and distorted; continuing drone sounds; crowds under compressed guitar handling and amp noise followed by chords with feedback; storm outside the studio and gallery opening night crowds.

A Lover’s Cheekbone: “A play that happens to be naturally abrasive to the system. It scratches against the sides on its way past. Maybe doing a bit of damage in the process of making contact. Not adversarial. It just doesn’t stay in its lane or conform to the right shape. Joyful and harsh. Always making a play for a kind of loving 'fuck you', full of intimacy and without concern for any consequence but enjoyment, kinship, friendship, comradery, the gang, the good life, the game.

A hypothetical but actually used playing field not made of spite or hate or jealousy. There are no sour grapes growing here. Just the things we do that happen to be antithetical to the status quo: hard work. The lazy artist. The drinking artist. The joker. The lark. All resistant. Revolutionaries even, if given enough purpose, and against the machine simply for not being welcome in its workings.

Not in protest, just not still enough to remain squarely in an assigned place. That place, comfortable to others, that is easily read. Forever willing to deploy a playful elbow to a ‘lover’s’ cheekbone to guard that sensitive spot, to avoid the grabbing of an unsuspecting nerve, a flinch in defense of submission, sometimes leaving a bruise, a wound, but necessary just the same. 'I will not show my belly if you will not show yours'. Not even for the promise of a kiss.” – Chanelle

Sounds (guitar, vocals, samples and pedals) by Joe and Chanelle. Oral storytelling by Jenny Magrath. Router sounds by Oliver Wagner

This episode was a cassette recording presented as 1 of 10 tapes for the Visual Arts Emerging Fellowship (VAEF), with Artspace, Sydney. Presented in partnership with National Art School Gallery, curated by Scott Elliot, Alexie Glass-Kantor and Elyse Goldfinch.