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C o m p i l a t i o n s

Letters for Monica Pidgeon

Su Rogers, Barbara Goldstein, Dargan Bullivant, Kenneth Frampton, and Peter Murray join the AA Radio to share stories of their professional and personal relationships with the late Monica Pidgeon, editor of Architectural Design magazine from 1946-1975, who passed away in September 2009 at the age of 95. Asked by the Radio to each bring 5 letters of the alphabet, each standing for a word and story about Monica, the anecdotes and memories journey from Bloomsbury to Buckminster Fuller to Berlin, Lunches at L'Escargot, St. Anne's Close, Walter Segal, Jacobsen stools, Saturday afternoon Talks in the garden, Team X and CIAM, Pidgeon Audio Visual, and Monica's Independence, Dedication, Passion, and Loyalty.

This conversation was recorded on Saturday, November 21, 2009 at the AA, 36 Bedford Square, London. Visit the Pidgeon Digital archive at www.pidgeondigital.com

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Play 63:28 min, Ema Bonifacic 21/11/2009

Headphones: Sound Without Space

Curated for Architectural Association Independent Radio by Charles Stankievech. Part of 1 of 3 in the series Sound + Space: Headphones | Architecture | Transmission -------->   LISTEN TO THE COMPILATION  <--------- Headphones are the norm.  The new addiction replacing smoking, headphones frame the head and the perception of most urbanites today in some form or other. Whether commuting with an iPod, exercising to the radio, talking on a hands-free cellphone… or actually listening to music, headphones create a mobile and continually changing architecture that follows the listener, wrapping them in a private bubble.  As the world rapidly interfaces, overlaps and confronts the boundaries of Private and Public through technologies and legislation, headphones become a quiet and invisible site of investigation.  The audio tracks in this collection attempt to define a body of work that is fundamentally connected to the phenomenon of headphone listening.  Some work was made specifically for headphones such as Bernhard Leitner or Janet Cardiff, other work was not originally composed for headphones, but when played over headphones a unique experience of the work is created—sometimes against the original intention of the artist or at least as a surprising by-product.  While the most common thread between the works is the unique spatialisation of headphones, other attributes of headphone listening—such as intimacy and privacy—are also explored and included. Headphones: Sound Without Space stems from the research consolidated in “From Stethoscopes to Headphones: An Acoustic Spatialization of Subjectivity” in Leonardo Music Journal (MIT Press). Vol. 17. 2007. Image: Sezione di orecchio, Ex Optimis Neotreriocrum Operibus  1804.  Archivi di San Servolo. This compilation should be listened to with headphones. #

Play UNKNOWN min, Charles Stankievech 18/4/2009

No Such Thing as a Quiet Hammer

DIN The noisy neighbours and the noise musicians UPROAR The producers, the protesters and the polluters CLAMOUR The instigators and the investigators TUMULT             Vernon & Burns, thinking aloud, offer a quiet meditation on noise. Extracts from interviews with noise pollution officers from Dundee City Council's Environmental Health Department are combined with found sounds, songs, field recordings and other voices to create this experimental live radio piece. Part audio collage, part documentary this is an unorthodox investigation into attitudes towards extraneous noise and noise pollution. --- Performed and produced by Barry Burns & Mark Vernon. Website: www.meagreresource.com   Myspace:www.myspace.com/vernonandburns   e-mail:meagreresource@hotmail.com           ‘Play’CD:http://www.kormplastics.nl/Audiotoop.html --- Commissioned by Extrapool (NL) in 2005 for ‘Audiotoop' - an evening of live, performed radio plays and Hörspiel. The full programme was aired on Resonance FM in June 2008. A condensed version appears on ‘Play', a CD and publication produced by Extrapool, 2006. #

Play 28:06 min, Mark Vernon 18/3/2009

Non-Members Night Out

A number of years ago I suffered from a bout of prolonged back pain. Bad reactions to the high doses of pain killers meant social drinking was out of the question and combined with the inability to stand for longer than 10 minutes without excruciating pain this began to seriously curtail my social life. On the odd occasion I did go to the pub I would invariably leave after an hour or so. The pubs, karaoke bars and clubs became symbols of my exclusion. It was around this time that I began making recordings of the outdoor night life on my weekly shadowy walks. I was drawn to the back doors of clubs, deserted alleys behind bars, non-places where the filtered bass of the discotheque made the sense of isolation more palpable.//This soundscape, created with sounds familiar to anyone used to prowling the streets of a big city late at night, features surreptitious recordings made outside Glasgow nightclubs, skulking around back doors and fire exits in the early hours of the morning.  Despite the obvious presence of others these sounds are strangely isolating. They document only the exterior, the periphery. The listener is excluded from the exciting and lively atmospheres that can be heard at a distance through the barriers of closed doors, brick walls and back alleys. You can hear the party going on but you haven’t been invited.//These recordings also document the effects that high volumes of music and the city’s club culture have on the surrounding architecture and acoustic environment. A door frame rattles in time, but at a slight delay, to the music within. A closely miked recording of a broken but intact windowpane at the rear of one club makes the grinding together of the shards of glass audible as they vibrate in time to the bass. Microphones inserted into drainpipes amplify the audible white noise content creating warm drones; filtered higher frequencies from the music and sounds from outside are still just audible. Windows rattle in their frames under an assault of bass heavy music.//All of the acoustic effects in this piece are natural; this is a simple edit and arrangement of the untreated field recordings. --- Produced by Mark Vernon / Website: www.meagreresource.com / e-mail: meagreresource@hotmail.com --- Abridged versions of this piece have been presented at ‘Carte Blanche’, Vollevox, Brussels and ‘The Audible Picture Show’, on ‘Framework’ (Resonance 104.4FM) and Radio Deutschland. It also appears on the Vernon & Burns LP, ‘The Tune the Old Cow Died of’ (Gagarin Records). #

Play 21:50 min, Mark Vernon 7/3/2009

Trance Mission by Dean Magraw

Acoustic improvisational track over minor blues chord progression. Contributed by Sarah Ho, AA student. #

Play 4:26 min, Sarah Ho 28/2/2009