← Saturday 23rd September 2023 →

Commissioned new work from contemporary sound practitioners and other audio choices from experimental electronic collective The Spirit of Gravity.

Hedonist and wannabe playwright Olga Adessi, 19, is struggling along the prom to get to her morning shift at the chippy with a monstrous hangover, trying to remember exactly what happened with Rachel Watkins, 19, a strange and fragile girl she had an encounter with the night before.

Former gymnast and teenage mum Treesa Reynolds, 19, is off to the Sandcastle Waterpark with her mum Lou and daughter Lulu, looking forward to a sausage and egg McMuffin on the way. Pleasure Beach breathes and exhales the unique sea air, fish and chips, donuts and candyfloss scents of Blackpool, bringing to life everything the town is famous for, portraying the gritty magic and sheer unadulterated fun of the city and its people across a spectrum of sensory experiences and emotions.

Palmer’s readings are accompanied by found sounds and samples – noise and ambience borrowed from Blackpool’s beaches, streets, and ballrooms – and features refrains drawn from Benedict Drew’s Music for Bookshops.

"A book as mind-bending as the town itself" – Jeremy Deller

Helen Palmer is a writer from Blackpool. She is the author of Deleuze and Futurism: A Manifesto for Nonsense (London: Bloomsbury, 2014) and Queer Defamiliarisation: Writing, Mattering, Making Strange (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). She is a 2023 Interdisciplinary Resident at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, Virginia, USA. She currently lives in Vienna. Pleasure Beach is her first novel.

Published by Prototype, Helen Palmer’s Pleasure Beach is a queer love story from the North West’s saucy seaside paradise, Blackpool, on one day: 16th June 1999. Written in multiple voices and styles, Pleasure Beach follows the interconnecting journeys and thoughts of three young women over the course of 24 hours and over 18 chapters which are structured and themed in the same way as James Joyce’s Ulysses. Serialised in four instalments (to conclude with its publication on June 16th 2023, “Bloomsday”), and read by the author, Pleasure Beach (Cochlearical) was produced by Dominic Jaeckle and Milo Thesiger-Meacham for Resonance Extra as a part of a rolling series of collaborative broadcasts from Tenement Press and Prototype Publishing, Railroad Flat Radio.

Conceived as a diffused oratorio that crosses over between the city and the domain of radio broadcasts, Zoom conversations and the space of the book, The End of the World Service sees the body of the choir endure a modern-day tarantism of colour and sound in the streets and open spaces of the old town.

First, composer Neil Luck (UK) taps into the double trope of the city as a film set and traditional locus of mystery plays with three short tableaus populated by props, choral extras, a wind band and onlookers who happen across the scene at night, pining for a view of the surreal action playing out in the yellow light of Taranto’s street lanterns.

Then, Joseph Kohlmaier (UK/AT) takes the audience on a slow-moving choral procession that ambulated through the narrow streets of the old city, a remorseful, humming and mumbling crowd carried along by the sound of the drums and steel instruments of the Complesso Bandistico Città di Crispiano, culminating in a choral and communal recital of a libretto written for the occasion by members of the ensemble.

The End of the World Service is part of Bodies as Infrastructures – a season of events and performances staged in the city of Taranto by curatorial platform Post Disaster Rooftops. With new works by Aga Beaupré (PL), Mela Boev (IT), Marie Hamilton (UK), Joseph Kohlmaier (AT/UK), Neil Luck (UK), Sara Rodrigues (PT).

Musarc is one of the UK’s most progressive choral collectives. Founded by Joseph Kohlmaier at the School of Art, Architecture and Design, London Metropolitan University in 2008. The choir has collaborated with Jennifer Walshe, Lin Chiwei, Laure Provost, Ed Atkins, Jenny Moore, Lina Lapelytė, Sam Belinfante, Fritz Hauser, Neil Luck and many others.

It has worked with numerous festivals and arts organisations in the UK and abroad – including the BBC Proms, London Contemporary Music Festival, Palais de Tokyo (Paris), the Royal Academy, CCA Goldsmiths, Museum of London, Extra City (Antwerp), Serpentine Gallery, MK Gallery, Wysing Polyphonic, STUK (Leuwen) Cafe OTO, Bold Tendencies and Whitechapel Gallery.

A series of live performances in Taranto, Italy, on the 27th May 2022 by choral collective, Musarc. Featuring Neil Luck and Joseph Kohlmaier in collaboration with Post Disaster Rooftops.

Andy Backhouse presents a two hour show of new and unusual music and sounds - playing everything from Free Jazz to Field Recordings. This is an open-format show with a difference.

Discrepancies is a global showcase of disparate music with a focus on earthly field recordings and international sounds, curated by the Discrepant record label, presented by Gonçalo F Cardoso.

This episode opens with a special introduction by Greek composer Savvas Metaxas who chats about his new album For How Read Now which explores the creative and conceptual possibilities in errors. We also take a closer listen to two other error-inspired albums: Kamran Arashnia's Bounds Elimination and Jonathan Higgins' Good Thanks, You? composed via glitching CD DJs.

We also dive into Rubbish Music's forthcoming debut album via a composition based on a field recording of a recycling centre as well as Australian composer Alexandra Spence's new oceanic release on mappa, a mysterious album by Michigan's Lalén Ríos Luna and we celebrate the arrival of agri-ambient with Michael Lightbourne's Slí na Fírinne.

This is the Flaming Pines radio show featuring new releases, mixes and experiments in field recording, sound art and experimental music, hosted by Kate Carr and guests.

New music with The Wire Magazine.

Celebrating exclusively boundary pushing artists, this episode spans previous guests and featured artists of Connections to Sound.

Background music: Your Echoes by Kayla Painter.

A monthly show exploring our innate connection to sound, and how we express that through music, showcasing work that connects to our body and minds through rich compositional choices, through intricate processes in the studio, or music that is inspired by the way we interact with the outside world. Connections to Sound journeys through downtempo, electronic, ambient and beat driven music, featuring tracks from artists all around the world. Presented by Kayla Painter.

This episode features two independent labels, Calling Cards Publishing and Italian cassette Canti Magnetici, first Sebastian Melmoth LP out on Artificial Dance and Stephen Shiell 'Sonance' on Linear Obsessional Recordings.

Nicola Serra, founder of East London's experimental music festival Dronica, presents new and archival material.

Cosmic, transcendent sounds and exploratory electronics with f.ampism.

Explorations of the inner city sounds of Athens and surrounding areas through lucid soundscapes and site-specific transmissions.

Sound collage, record spinning, havering, ear wonk and general head scratch with Dylan Nyoukis of the Chocolate Monk label.

The first episode of AA+ Drone Operatør Radiø starts with a collage of Drone Operatør oeuvre material, contemporary and un-contemporary hand made music, Scifi debri and Ost-Block free jazz. This very first show features an exclusive midi-guitar controlled 30 min guest live set by electro-folk visionary GAJEK.

Monthly experimen†al kleptomaniac post digital free jazz spam channel operated by artists Tilman Hornig and Paul Barsch aka DRONE OPERATØR.

This inaugural episode runs the gamut from early electronic composition to algorithmic rave experiments.

Tracks from across the spectrum of electronic and computer music, with Calum Gunn of Conditional.

In the first half of this episode, unperson traces Sheffield's experimental music from the DIY post-punk scene of the 1980s, through the pirate radio days of the 1990s, to the city's contemporary boundary pushers. In his words: "lots of bleeps, lots of bass".

In the second half, Elif Gülin Soğuksu weaves a path through the hum of Istanbul, a mix which she describes as "a glimpse into the sound world of stray dogs howling to the morning prayer in rural areas, street musicians playing traditional instruments, street vendors selling simit, fish, meat, and fruits in Beyoğlu ... Turkish classical music playing in the silversmith shop in Sultanahmet ... the micro sounds of rocks, dirt, and bushes near the historic Orthodox Orphanage in Princes' Island".

Each month, First Light Records invites two artists to take an unplanned journey with a microphone around their city to curate an hour-long mix. Each show captures the unique atmosphere of a city from each artist's perspective, through music and found sound.