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Tse Tse Fly Middle East was a nonprofit arts and activist organisation that existed from 2015 until 2023. Throughout that time, it presented a monthly two-hour radio programme showcasing sound art and experimental music from the Middle East, India and North Africa.

In this edition, Edwina Attlee’s Book of Days.

“Garlands for the working conditions that underpin everything.”

A weathervane for New Year’s Day, a reading of the opening chapter from Edwina Attlee’s debut collection—A great shaking (Tenement Press, 2024)—as read by the poet. A suite of twelve poems written to (and from) the months of a year.

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A table can be overturned and a window can be smashed. However, those who believe that the state is also a thing or a fetish that can be overturned or smashed are sophists and believers in the Word. The state is a social relationship; a certain way of people relating to one another. It can be destroyed by creating new social relationships; i.e., by people relating to one another differently.

Gustav Landauer

Attlee’s debut collection, a great shaking, is a triptych of works—a gathering of songs, days, and hours—that detail the ways in which ‘a table can be overturned,’ an idea can be tilled, an hour can turn from something germinal to a quiet object of attention, an oblique artifact, a talisman for change. 

Gustav Landauer wrote that ‘the State is not something which can be destroyed by a revolution, but is a condition’—something impacted by the weather of our moods, by the small winds of our behaviour, by way of human contact and a romance of interrelation. In these poems, Attlee antagonises our consent to be governed, our will to be moved (in terms either emotive, temporal, or meteorological) to consider our ‘condition.’ ‘I want to tell you about the time conversations started to happen / and how it was the beginning of the room,’ Attlee writes.

Caught within an architecture wherein chance and design go bet on the horses, where we lose step with the gamble of a metaphor, Attlee segues her way through these collated hours and days to distil a poetry that is not about (or of) revolution, but about conditions. Hers is a poetry about steam; about diction; about how, to depict ‘the beginning of the room,’ you need question the porousness of its boundaries.

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Attlee’s Book of Days was recorded and produced for radio by Tenement’s Dominic J. Jaeckle and Resonance’s Milo Thesiger-Meacham.

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This profoundly exciting debut explores the complicated embodiments, politics and emotions of domestic life through the prism of the turning year. Attlee draws subtly luminous images from mundane, ordinary life—“I pat her gloves with apricot foam / blow bubbles in the dusk / with liquid from the pound shop”—allowing us to see the vivid, electric power of moments to which familiarity usually blinds us. At the same time, she is always aware of the vexed inequalities of family, time, class and gender—“joy unfurls from coupledom and a shared bank account / watch out or the big horse trudges on your head.” Her writing about childrearing is painfully tender yet radical: “they pack him differently at the nursery … am I letting them snuff it out / the little yellow flame.” In this beautiful, funny and innovative book, an important new poetic voice has emerged.

Rebecca Tamás, The Guardian

Echoing the tales and mysteries that were once our way of apprehending the world, Attlee's a great shaking allows one to feel close to the earth and the rhythms that govern it. It envelops you in its world with the steady confidence of a poet in full use of her powers. Both intimate and vast, A great shaking is like a skyline touched only by trees, land, and the stillness of forgotten time.

Vanessa Onwuemezi

A great shaking is such a rich gathering: endlessly surprising, bold and inventive. ‘Book of Days’ offers a fascinating riddle and rhyme of the seasons; the ‘Nursery Songs’ are full of secrets and vibrant flashes; while the ‘Archive Songs’ are curiously alluring. All together, they show undoubtable imagination and skill.

Lavinia Singer

In mediaeval manuscripts, engravings of the steps of life from birth to death often omitted women completely. In this fascinating collection, Attlee talks to them directly, making them entirely visible as she explores the legacies of indentured labour, the toils of women and the mythologies of motherhood, all in real time: “the crows eat up the corn / the baby is back / and the women open their legs to the stove / pushing soft porridge into his mouth / like companionable silence.” This empathy and companionship are the backdrop to her own negotiations of work, family and political activity, and expose how impossibly intermingled these are.

She weighs the magical thinking of folktale and childhood against the real world to expose the gap between there and here, while continuing the ancient task of trying to find a way to make it all work. Her language is present and exact, and razor sharp: “my mother is here / laughing like a broken plate.” Throughout, there is love and wry humour: “You are the word I will use to call the cows home at night” (‘Old English love song, Traditional’). This is a deeply affecting collection; these poems come from a very genuine sense of communion with all those semi-visible individuals who labour and have always laboured for love, family and fairness. “Forgive us this standing. Forgive us in strength. / Unforgive if forgiving undoes sorrow. Do not unstep your step.

Lesley Harrison

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Edwina Attlee is the author of two pamphlets, Roasting Baby (if a leaf falls press, 2016) and the cream (Clinic, 2016). She teaches history to students of architecture in London.

A roving, ongoing & growing catalogue of works for the radio from the Tenement Press wheelhouse, in collaboration with Prototype Publishing. Recorded and produced for radio by Tenement’s Dominic J. Jaeckle and Resonance’s Milo Thesiger-Meacham.

Nova Waves presents Passers-by - the first episode of the series 'Strange Morals'. In the middle of a busy public space our main character stands listening to the snippets of passers-by desperately seeking the relevance and meaning of strangers words.'

Three short stories exploring life moments and exchanges between people, brought to you by Nova Waves.

This episode features music by Francesca Heart, Kraus, Suzanna Ciani, Tomuttontu, and more.

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

Dronica meets event curators, creative directors and labels owners in 2021.

In this episode, Dronica meets Sine Buyuka, founder and owner of Injazero Records, an independent label based between London and Istanbul.

Sine Buyuka worked as a culture, arts and sports journalist, hosted a radio show and DJ’ed in her hometown Istanbul before moving to London in 2012 to do an MA in Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King’s College. After a placement at FatCat Records, she launched her own experimental and ambient label Injazero Records in 2015.

She kept freelancing for outlets like Dazed, Time Out Istanbul, the Ransom Note, the BBC while running Injazero, which now has a roster of eleven artists. She is currently doing a postgraduate course in electronic music at Guildhall as well as releasing music herself.

In this show, Sine will present in the first hour releases from Injazero Records and in the second hour, music from artists they've worked with so far, either on remixes, compilations or mastering.

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

Music by Bad Comfort, Toxic Chicken, Tita Sister, SL Telles / Glenn Sogge / A.H. Fork, Tecra, Carnivorous Plants, Myopic Ape, Ars Sonor, Virlyn, Tony Blackburn, Langax and Cialyn.

Phantom Circuit is a show of strange and wonderful sound waves - featuring music that is alien, electronic, exotic, essential.

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

Virgilio Oliveira explores the sonic environment in collaboration with Porto's Radio Manabras, presenting an hour of sound art and field recordings.

This episode features DeForrest Brown Jr., an ex-American writer, journalist, theorist, curator and a self-described musician by necessity - releasing music under his Speaker Music moniker. DeForrest Brown Jr. is the author of the book Assembling a Black Counter Culture, where he presents a comprehensive account of techno with a focus on the history of Black experiences in industrialized labor systems—repositioning the genre as a unique form of Black musical and cultural production.

Assembling a Black Counter Culture reframes techno from a Black theoretical perspective distinct from its cultural assimilation within predominantly white, European electronic music contexts and discourse. This talk, given by DeForrest Brown Jr. on the 4th of October 2024 at Barreiro’s Jazz School as part of the programme of OUT.FEST’s 20th edition, is moderated by Margarida Mendes, and gives an overview of key details of his book and expands on its context two years after its publication.

Bi-monthly insights into the activities of the European project tekhnē, which started in 2023. The series showcases a selection of artists who share and discuss their work and listen to recorded material. By putting the focus on the user rather than the developer, this project aims to explore the emancipatory potential of technology in music and sound art. Technology as an art of craft, appropriating and transforming existing tools, to imagine multiple ways of creative misuse. tekhnē is a collaborative project, co-funded by the European Union.

In this edition, get ready to listen to the weirdest and most mind-blowing covers and drifts of Where Is My Mind? by The Pixies. There's no order, no lists, only stilted and exclusive material.

Rumba bands, super special Youtube stars, eminences of bardcore, piano lovers, dutch speakers, Fight Club fans, Misters and misses robots, rocker babies, zoologists, … all are welcome in Shuffle formula radio mode.

This episode features a special guest: Youtuber shonkywonkydonkey. Since 2016, he's been regularly uploading memes, mashups and other quirky content he feels like uploading. Formerly known as "the firefly guy" and "the Onision vocoder guy". Now better known as 'the "but it's all my voice" guy'.

Shuffle by Agnès Pe is a formula radio programme taken to the extreme: repetitive, obscure and humorous. Each episode presents obscure covers of a single song. “Anything that spreads by imitation or spreads by bodily reproduction, like genes, or by viral infection is a meme” - (Richard Dawkins, 2013).

This episode was created for the Winter Solstice of 2024, a time of extreme dark or light in either direction, a hunkering down in the wet earth or a baking out in the hot sun. The piece is composed by Stephen Shiell using original material from NSOTA scholars.

With contributions from Stephen Shiell, Rhona Eve Clews, Chris de Sel,** Sk.ye, **Lu(Lu)Lu, Blanc Sceol (Stephen Shiell & Hannah White), Clare Whistler, Michael Timmerman, and Simon McClelland Morris.

The New School of the Anthropocene is a radical experiment in alternative education, away from marketisation and arcane specialism towards co-sensing systems change through creative practice. This is an ecological transmission of DIY ethics, non-hierarchical structures, radical networks, interconnected sensing through sound, text, voice, spoken word, human and more-than-human collaborative practice, patchwork group thinking, and radio art.

In this episode, we feature two artists pushing back against the tyranny of the machine in electronic music - capturing inputs and processing outputs in ways that rely less directly on spending face time with the laptop screen.

Alex White talks about Nadir, his noise collaboration with Ben Byrne, which rejects dark, power noise in favour of a light and bright counterpoint; and jazz musician Jacques Emery discusses the wide range of electronic output on his Sounds Are Sounds label, all of which favour art over craft, and – much like jazz - focus on a constant refinement of improvisational practice.

Hosted by Stu Buchanan, Out From Under dives deep beneath the surface of the Australian music scene, celebrating experimental and eclectic music from the far end of the world.

In the first hour of this midwinter episode, Gravity Waves: tracks from the newest member of the Spirit of Gravity Ascsoms. From his new album Featherteeth, two tracks from a new album by Ghost Flight and finally a lengthy improvisation from Hassni Malik and Nicholas Langley’s digitally re-issued cassette from 10 years ago.

In the second hour, Spectral Transmissions: Rare and Popular Rhymes, Proverbs, Sayings, Prophecies, Slogans and Gathering Cries of the North of England.

In these northern climes midwinter is a time of Inversion and strange magic. It is a time of opposites and anarchies, bright fires and feasts in the darkness and cold. A time of fortunes won and lost, visions seen, prophecies made and battles between elemental forces waged. Day turns to night and The Holly and Oak Kings, once again trade places . Spectral beings prowl the land and the Fool is made King. Midwinter, is the time of the Lord of Misrule, and the Wild Hunt. Some might think these as rude, Rough and Rusty relics of a former age.If they come, they come not: If they come not, they come.

With elements of Being & Doing 1985 by Stuart Brisley and Ken McMullen and original material by Jon Collyer.

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

Seven days in June, seven replicated walks, each walked once, on one of seven consecutive days – seven days in June, each in the ‘same place’ - across Beringia, on Iñupiat land. This episode is Movement 1.

embodiment -:- walking human movement -:- place more-less natural -:- distance time over across -:- field recording -:- poetry -:- composition -:- martin p eccles

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.

In this episode, a triumphant and majestic exploration of the cosmos, through improvised music and noise. Reflecting on the drama and politics of space exploration, and its history during cold war competition to contemporary hyper-capitalist exhibitionism, SubPhonics has created an episode totally out of this world!

Featuring: Helen Tate, Nia Fekri, Timo Koch, Erin Robinson, Toby Edwards, Giulio Dal Lago and Jamie Turner.

Quarterly noise from SubPhonics exploring themes of collaborative sound and performance.

This episode is a documentary about the importance of the "verb", which has a mysterious power because words create things.

The immensity of the orality is one of its fundamental attributes, at least this is the attitude that prevails in most African civilizations.

Radio Picnic is a mobile radio art project by zonoff which invites multi-disciplinary artists to create works inspired by the radio medium.

After last month's episode showcasing Discrepant-only releases from 2022, here is a show featuring the ever reliable Keroxen label – the newest and freshest sister label here in the warm tropical shores of the Canary Islands.

Established as a festival in 2009, Keroxen is the record label born out of the 13-year old multidisciplinary arts festival of the same name based in Tenerife. Like its homonymous annual festival, the label’s aim is to serve as a platform for local experimentation by working with the most genre defying local artists as well as supporting collaborations with well established, like-minded international acts.

This is a wild journey of rock, free jazz, electronica, field recordings and everything else in between.

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.

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 The Renshaws; Higher Ground Studios.

Field Notes

A X-Mas Party at The Renshaws 2022 - Cocktails and impromptu solo exhibition

Side A - Voices

RENSHAWS_2A: Click and crackle of tape deck, train/storm T Renshaws Gallery; recording inside the gallery residency apartment. fade in chords. chanelle vocal. Cockatoos. drone slow down. Storm white noise and museum crowd and oliver on studio workshop timber router. Train running behind gallery with guitar drone and feedback, bird calls and distorted voice. Guitar hook

Side B - Beasts

RENSHAWS_3B: Renshaws Residency Fortitude Valley Brisbane.Bundanon birds. Kookaburras. Guitar high notes. Harmonics. Joe guitar Em slide D, C riff and crickets and lead. Crickets and museum crowd. Train, bird, train, bird. Triangle car pool laughter. 10:00 guitar fade in drones and samples, kookaburra tape slow down.

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.

This episode features music made by Naviar's community inspired by Kobayashi Issa’s poem “Resplendent the kite / soaring up above / the shanty town.”

To have your music featured on the show, participate in the Haiku music challenge.

Thirty minutes of experimental music made in response to a weekly haiku poem, curated by Marco Alessi of Naviar Records and Naviar's international community of composers.

Online music publication Stray Landings invites guests from across the electronic music spectrum to discuss themes and innovations.

Said the sky to the moon, shall we do a dance? I'll wait for you to make the move but please don't wait until you hear - the sound below the atmosphere. Ceylan Göksel and Sami Fitz reach subliminal heights with genre-busting spoken word, ambient textures, sound sculptures, and a different theme every show. We wish you a good night.