#827: 2022.12.18

well, this is it folks, the end of another year of framework broadcasting. we’ll be starting our annual winter break now, a few weeks off to shovel snow and clean out our ears. but fear not, we’ll be back for another year of sound starting with edition #828 on sunday, january 15th. in the meantime, you have this slightly dark and brooding edition (we didn’t do it on purpose, it just happened that way) to peruse, and then our copious archives to tide you over until we get back.

you could also go on over to our patreon page and wish us happy holidays in a more concrete way: by signing up to be a framework patron! we gave it a little push on the old social medias recently and generated a lot of hearts and thumbs, but very few actual commitments (thanks mom!) – isn’t that always the way? framework is almost, or at least could or should be, a full-time job, and we (and i think you all know that we is really just i) absolutely can not afford to do it without financial support. this project is 100% funded by listener support – no advertising, no broadcast stipends, no station payments, just listeners like you who think this radio show makes the world a better place. do you agree with them? if so, and if you can afford to do so (you can commit as little as 1€/$/£ per month) please consider helping us to continue our labor of love!

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#826: 2022.12.11 [polakvanbekkum]

this edition of framework:afield has been produced on curaçao by the netherlands based artist-duo polakvanbekkum and is entitled the sound sails, episode beach grote knip. for more information, go to the artist website at http://www.polakvanbekkum.com. producers’ notes:

In the sparkling waves, children scream. Parents stand with cocktails up to their knees in the surf. We walk slowly up and down beach Grote Knip. In the distance, jet ski’s race by. On the beach people are barbecuing, playing, chatting, maybe kissing/making out. Each person has their specific music, sometimes someone brings music for the whole beach. Rufous-collared Sparrow, black mockingbird, oriole and Bananaquit prey on the abandoned potato chips or French fries. At some distance from the waves, you can hear the birds better. Then it starts raining, briefly but heavily. We take shelter, all of us, under the sparse gazebo’s. After five minutes, the sun dries everything up.

Sound plays an important role in the artworks of Esther Polak and Ivar van Bekkum. For the third year in a row they produced the podcast The Sound Sails (Het Geluid Vaart) for the Oerol Festival; a theatre festival on the small island Terschelling in the north of the Netherlands.The podcast brings listeners to five spots on the tropical Caribbean island Curaçao, and twelve on Terschelling itself. Both islands are part of the so called “Dutch Kingdom”.  Each episode consist of one hour of an undisturbed recording of a unique location. For framework radio they chose the  edition that was recorded on the popular Curacao beach Grote Knip.

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#825: 2022.12.04

a sparser mix this week, at least relatively. 15 individual pieces in the show – as opposed to over 20 in our last several regular editions – coming to us from canada, the united states, the united kingdom, belgium, croatia, france and rwanda. winter is settling in here, so perhaps the mixes are becoming more wintry. we’ve got sounds of demolition, aeolian harps, water, wind, frogs and plenty more.

a few more shows coming to you before our annual winter break. one more framework:afield next week (#826), and a final regular edition in two weeks time (#827) before we hunker down for a little hibernation. we’ll come back to you with edition #828, premiering on january 15th (not january 9th, as i mistakenly said in the show), and soon after that we hope to be able to announce the first issue of framework:seasonal, our fund-raising compilation series, since #11 in the spring of 2020. stay tuned for more info about that!

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#824: 2022.11.27 [CENSE]

You are listening to the fourth episode of CENSE bimonthly mixtapes series. CENSE – Central European Network for Sonic Ecologies – is a decentralised organisation, gathering artists, educators, writers and researchers, whose aim is to gather and interconnect the community behind the field of acoustic ecology. Members are united by the determination to develop a strategy allowing an impact on the current situation dealing with sound and environment. This is the second episode focusing on one of the four basic elements. This episode: Earth.

Symptoms of Evidence mixtape series is focused on bringing the field of acoustic ecology closer to the local listeners and interested individuals, introducing field-recordings as a sonic tool for examining our sound environment and enabling us to gain a deeper knowledge on the consequences of environmental processes, together with possible solutions retrieval. further info on the network can be found on the webpage https://cense.earth/.

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#823: 2022.11.20

i’ll tell you a secret: sometimes these shows make themselves. i feel like i’m cheating taking any credit for them – the works i somewhat randomly select to use in an edition sometimes slot themselves together so gloriously and holistically that i feel like i’m in the audience myself. this is one of those weeks – amazing antarctic sounds by cheryl e. leonard, environmental recordings and malfunctioning mixers by keith de mendonca & howard dodd, the spectacular sounds of ukrainian and argentinian steppes reworked by anla courtis & edward sol, the long-distance concrete collaborations between porya hatami in iran & monologue (marie rose) in france, the rubbish sounds of rubbish music (kate carr & iain chambers) from the uk, aporee map sounds from germany, vanuatu, ghana, and bhutan, and a framework introduction recorded for us on the beach in hong kong. hope you enjoy this whirlpool as much as i do.

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#822: 2022.11.13 [iris garrelfs]

This one hour composition is the result of a workshop exploring the relationship between field recordings and the voice. It was conducted remotely by Iris Garrelfs, for the International Field Recording Meeting (EIGC) based in Mexico in summer 2022.

Coming from a range of Latin American countries, some of the participants were new to the practice, others were more experienced. Locations included large cities and smaller places as well as indoor and outdoor settings, populated by street vendors, musicians, cars, birds, dogs. You can hear markets, a university campus, sounds drifting into a basement.

After completion of the workshop participants selected or created a 1-2min long section from their source recordings which were then combined into this 1 hour long piece by Iris Garrelfs. The result superimposes spatially disjointed, but temporally corresponding experiences across the continent, from Guadalajara in Mexico over Trinidad in Bolivia to Buenos Aires in Argentina.

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#821: 2022.11.06

it feels like it’s been a long time since we had such a long playlist – 21 individual tracks by 9 different artists in 7 different countries. several new names, as we have the pleasure of airing the work of both méryll ampe and david brown for the first time this week, along with the return of recent favorites alëna korolëva and pierrot desperes. and our aporee soundmaps segment brings us 3 new names this week (steve bates, rachid sadaoui, and alison fure) along with steadfast regular ian-john hutchinson. all this began with a framework introduction recorded for us in bergen, norway by uk sound artist paul mallatratt.

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#820: 2022.10.30 [jo mongomerie]

this week’s edition of framework:afield has been produced in manchester, uk by jo montgomerie. for more of her work see https://jomontgomerie.com/. producer’s notes:

I love to walk around the city, taking photos and sneaky recordings. I never stop, just keep walking. There’s a constant pulse, between the clubs and the wind and rain. The people and traffic. It’s a musical place.

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#819: 2022.10.23

first off, apologies to shumaila hemani for mispronouncing her name in this week’s show. a good excuse to play her work again and get it right. her acousmatic compositions feature field recordings from pakistan, sufi poetry, spoken word, traditional instruments, and song. they meet across the world with doug haire’s location compositions from the pacific northwest, vanessa massera’s electroacoustic compositions from canada, and siavash amini’s poetry-inspired works from iran. sounds from the aporee maps (from germany, the uk, denmark and the united states) and a framework intro by rob johanssen also from the states cap off this week’s somehow narrative edition.

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#818: 2022.10.16 [david clarke]

This edition of framework:afield, entitled moons of the solar system, has been produced in the uk by david clarke, aka @IAmTheHow. for more information see https://www.iamthehow.com/store/. producer’s notes:

Moons of the Solar System

An acoustic journey through our solar system as we visit ‘other moons’. The sounds of distant chains saws, wind turbines, elastic bands and springs are mixed and treated to convey a sense of wonder as we journey to Enceladus and Io.

Each piece accompanies a handmade print which can be viewed via the link while listening, to provide an experience in both sound and vision: https://www.iamthehow.com/store/. As the compositions are ‘slow’, with periods of silence, the use of headphones is highly recommended.

Not long ago the planets and their moons within our Solar System were thought to be void of activity, but now we know there is active geology and climate throughout. The ice bright Enceladus, a moon of Saturn, would sit in the North Sea; a small moon with a big story waiting to be told: thick ice with massive crevasses ‘The Tiger Stripes’ through which the waters of the hidden ocean erupt into the geysers that reach into space. And then there’s Io, one of the four Galilean satellites that orbits the gas giant Jupiter; it is about the same size as the Earth’s Moon, but it’s subject to intense gravitational warping, which most likely explains the high level of volcanic activity.

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#817: 2022.10.09

several new names to framework this week: the collaboration between sarah ruth and monte espina comprises a series of site-specific open-air environmental improvisations; richard scott’s compositions for field recordings and synthesizers are coincidentally released on arbirary records framework series; marc arsenault’s self-proclaimed “field recordings pop record” features a heavy presence of electro-magnetic interference and inexplicable sounds. meanwhile ingrid plum returns to our airwaves with her vocal experiments intertwined with field recordings, electronics, and a piano interior, drawing on the archive of sound poet lily greenham. andy park starts us off with a framework introduction recorded in cuckmere haven, sussex in the uk, with our introductory text spoken by his daughter wren. and we return as is our wont to the aporee maps for a selection of recent listener chosen favorites, this week from turkey, canada, denmark and the united states.

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#816: 2022.10.02 [mark vernon]

this edition of framework:afield, entitled a world behind this world, has been produced in scotland by regular contributor mark vernon. for more of his work see http://meagreresource.com/. producer’s notes:

A World Behind This World is a composed soundscape created from sounds recorded on location at the Scottish Sculpture Workshop in Lumsden, Aberdeenshire and the surrounding areas.

Depending on how you look at it – this is either an expanded version of the album released on Persistence of Sound earlier this year – or a condensed version of the original two-and-a-half-hour longform broadcast produced for Scottish Sculpture Workshop’s radio station, Lumsden Live in 2021.

In addition to sounds of the rural environment – recordings of various machines, equipment and processes from the workshop feature heavily. ‘Performed’ by technician, Eden Jolly, sound sources include the copper guillotine, extractor fans, electrical saws, drills, the furnace, welding torches, anvils, hydraulic jacks, sanding machines, grinders and electric hoists. The piece also features a recurring refrain made from the eerie sounds of the wood pellet burner that kept me awake for most of the night when I was staying on site.

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#815: 2022.09.25

getting into the autumn flow now, with our second regular edition back since our summer break. we’ve had this mola self-release waiting for airplay for far too long – it’s from 2019. but better late than never!
and we consistently love what comes out of the helen scarsdale agency, and not just because they release our own murmer sounds – our old boston buddies howard stelzer and brendan murray have put together another beautiful slab of tonal residue here. we also have new releases on both the mappa and forms of minutiae labels, both relatively young publishes who have have so far impressed us greatly with the scope of consistent quality of their releases. here we’re exploring works on those labels by alexandra spence and diane barbé, respectively. with these releases we have our latest batch of listener chosen favorites from the aporee soundmaps, and a bouncy framework introduction recorded on a trampoline in ireland by regular contributor william denton, voiced by the jumpers.

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