Damn! I missed it! On May 6, New York University Professor Sukhdev Sandhu organized a listening event featuring “Static in the Attic”, a loony, urbane radio broadcast of self-indulgent wisdom by two sides (the divided halves) of artist/cartoonist/illustrator/musician/composer/monologist/parachutist/parapsychologist/variantologist, UK based Peter Blegvad, my favorite ex-pat polymath. In an empty recording studio on Mercer Street, New York, an audience was treated to Blegvad’s jaunty audio duets — what he’s titled Hörspiels & Eartoons — in total (sensory deprived) darkness.
More about Blegvad: He likes palindromes and is obsessed with milk. He welcomes mumbo-jumbo as essential to discourse. “I have encyclopedic tendencies and am drawn to impossible projects,” he says. “I am to my bones a flippant individual.” (Be sure to listen to each double witted blast of chatter).
He wasn’t on Mercer Street in person, but offered the following comments from across the pond, where he resides in peace and tranquility:
“Listening to a radio play is a bit like watching a film, but it’s maybe more akin to reading. The Surrealists thought film was the perfect medium for achieving their revolution of everyday life, blurring the boundary between reality and dream. And you can see their point. An audience sitting in a dark cinema, in a receptive state, dreaming a collective dream. But radio is a more intimate medium, and, like reading, we can consume it at home alone, in bed even. Radio gives you less to work with than film does, so you, the consumer, are more involved in the creation of the experience. If you really attend to it, radio conduces to a deeply immersive ‘waking dream’ state.
“When I think of ‘radio’ I think ‘interior,’ something taking place in one’s head, in one’s ‘attic.’ ‘Static in the Attic’—the series of ‘eartoons’ I created from 2002–2010 for BBC Radio 3—was in fact mostly recorded in my attic in West London, at night to minimize street noise. I was usually pretty static—sedentary—up there recording, but ‘static’ is also the hiss of interference, of white noise, which the show employs in lieu of a theme tune. (I think of people who claim to receive radio signals through the fillings in their teeth or through a piece of shrapnel embedded in their skull. And of Constantin Raudive, the Latvian mystic, who claimed to hear the voices of the dead in the hiss he heard when he played back factory-fresh recording tape.)
“When I was doing comic strips I spent a lot of time and effort drawing backgrounds. One of the beauties of working in radio is the way a whole setting can be richly evoked simply by the addition to the track of a little birdsong, say, and a distant church bell. ‘Writing on air,’ Gregory Whitehead called it.
“Radio—receiving disembodied voices and sounds from the ether. There’s something mysterious and magical about the medium, which no explanation of frequencies or wavelengths can dispel.
“In his poem ‘Kevin,’ Bill Manhire writes:
“There are mothers and fathers … whom we barely know.
“They lift us. Eventually we all shall go
“into the dark furniture of the radio.”
I asked Blegvad whether he is doing new episodes of”Static in the Attic”; alas there are no dedicated websites where these recordings are kept. “I haven’t done any new ones for many years” he volunteered. “I’ve retired from pretty much everything except painting – due to illness. (Luckily, I love painting!)”
Eureka! Responding to the gratifying response to the initial morning’s offering of “Static In The Attic” the Daily Heller has uncovered (actually received via We Transfer) the following additions to our Blegvads’s playlist. Enjoy the spielfest below . . .
The post The Daily Heller: Peter Blegvad’s Gumbo of Mumbo Jumbo appeared first on PRINT Magazine.