Diljeet Bhachu in conversation with Kevin Leomo

Episode Notes:

This episode is a conversation between Essential Blends host, Kevin Leomo, and musician, performer, researcher, and activist, Diljeet Bhachu.

Diljeet Bio:

Diljeet Bhachu is is an improvising flute player from Glasgow, Scotland. She is currently engaged in a long-term process of unlearning some of the limitations of her training, leaning into imperfection and process.  Her improvised playing has been described as “Stunning, transporting to dream realms of music and restfulness…” (Bell Lungs). Diljeet completed her PhD at the University of Edinburgh in 2019. It was during her doctoral research that she gained clarity on how race and colonialism are embedded in her life and her working contexts, following years of informal work and activism to address inequalities.

Diljeet has been writing music on and off since childhood, largely informally before being introduced to ‘composition’ as a concept in high school.  She is now engaging with this more pro-actively and formally, most recently writing pieces for the new Trinity College London Graded Exam Flute Syllabus for Exams from 2023 onwards.  She has plans to record an improvised EP in 2023, and is also developing a more composed concept album. Diljeet enjoys collaborating, and in particular working with poets both in live and recorded settings. She also performs regularly in Kapil Seshasayee’s live band, and features on both of his albums.

Diljeet has been a trade union activist for over a decade, alongside a portfolio career that has included freelance research, teaching in higher education, and being an arts producer. She co-founded the Scottish-Asian Creative Artists’ Network in 2017, to create space for Scottish artists with Asian heritage whose practices do not explicitly or directly draw on Asian artistic traditions, alongside those who do work within heritage traditions. Shortly after recording this podcast, Diljeet started working for the Musicians’ Union, where she is an Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Officer.

Mark Vernon's special mix for Essential Blends. A deep dive into his immersive audio world. 

Mark Vernon in conversation with Adriana Minu

Episode notes

Mark is a fascinating sound artist based in Glasgow with a artistic sensitivity uniquely attuned to archival and found recordings. In conversation with Adriana, Mark generously unfolded the journey of his practice, meandering through his visual arts background, art school training, pirate broadcasts, hospital residencies, the value of giving new lifes to lost voices, how music recordings sometimes end up in the most unexpected contexts and much more.

Mark Bio

In his sound works Mark explores concepts of audio archaeology, magnetic memory and nostalgia. At the core of his practice lies a fascination with the intimacy of the radio voice, environmental sound, obsolete media and the re-appropriation of found sounds. A rich collection of domestic tape recordings; audio letters, dictated notes, answer-phone messages and other lost voices often find their way into his unorthodox soundworlds. These diverse elements are distilled into radiophonic compositions for broadcast, fixed media, installations and live performances.

A keen advocate of radio as an art form, he co-runs and curates Glasgow’s art radio station, Radiophrenia. He is an award winning radio producer who has produced programmes internationally for stations including Resonance FM, VPRO, Sound Art Radio, Radio Revolten, Deutschland Radio Kultur, Radio Cona, Kunstradio, Wavefarm, Radio Art Zone, RADIA and the BBC.

His solo music projects have been published through labels including Kye, Glistening Examples, Canti Magnetici, Flaming Pines, Misanthropic Agenda, Entr’acte, Gagarin, Calling Cards Publishing, Psyché Tropes, Granny, Persistence of Sound, 3Leaves and his own meagre resource imprint.

He performs regularly at venues and galleries in the UK, Europe and beyond including festival appearances at Full of Noises, Hideous Porta, Apologies in Advance, Delaware Road, Tectonics, Counterflows, Supernormal (UK), Radio Revolten (Germany), LUFF, SONOHR (Switzerland), Untape Me (Austria) Sonikas (Spain), Longueur d’ondes (France) and Soundtiago (Chile).

Weblinks:

Website:

http://meagreresource.com

Bandcamp:

https://markvernon.bandcamp.com

Soundcloud:

https://soundcloud.com/markvernon

Collaborations

Hassle Hound, Limelight Cordial, Lucky Bugs Win Prizes - https://staubgold.bandcamp.com/track/lucky-bugs-win-prizes

Run by Mark

With Monica Brown: Lights Out Listening Group

https://lightsoutlisteninggroup.wordpress.com

Radiophrenia

https://radiophrenia.scot

Places mentioned

Sura Medura - Shri Lanka residency place: http://suramedura.com/residencies/

PRIM Montreal: https://primcentre.org/en/our-program

Pieces that have made an impact or that have influenced Mark

Gavin Bryars - Jesus Blood

Negativland - over the edge / dense audio collages

Graham Lambkin - listening to listening

Luc Ferrari - anecdotal sound

Janek Schaefer - recorded delivery - conceptual sound work / audio voyeurism

Pure field recording - Chris Watson / Toshiya Tsunoda

Upcoming projects:

Callback Carousel

A Loop Within a Loop (Glasgow Underground)

Clock Radio

https://radioart.zone/sunday-10-july

Summary:

This episode is a conversation between Essential Blends host Adriana Minu and performer, creator, and singer Lucy Dehgrae, calling in from New York.

Lucy is very vibrant; she takes the reins and launches into the convo. I really enjoyed her energy and breadth of knowledge and experience.

We end up talking about the voice, as expected, different types of performativities and presences and being comfortable with ourselves.

We also talk about patronage of the arts: celebrating that which is precious and cannot be sold; honesty, vulnerability, courage as artistic qualities; pressure that is put on men to work super hard and be with the grind; virtuosity in classical music, looking out externally for validation; the effect the cultures of classical music and rap music have on self-esteem and vocal paresis and healing.

Bio:

Lucy Dhegrae is a singer committed to changing and challenging how vocal music is perceived, performed and programmed. Hailed as an “adventurous mezzo-soprano” and “raconteur” (The New Yorker) known for her “vocal versatility and an omnivorous curiosity” (The New York Times), she moves easily between a broad variety of styles, and can be found “everywhere new music is being sung” (New York Classical Review). Dhegrae is also the founder and director of the boundary-pushing Resonant Bodies Festival (2013-2021), which was praised by The New York Times as “an annual highlight [that] gives some of the world’s most adventurous vocal artists full freedom.”  

Song of an intention

Performed by:

The poetic text score for voice(s) and instrument(s) proposes a lose structure and a situation for exploring through sounds subtle shift of attention and awareness of being one, of being two, of occupying that space between us while eluding to the romantic ideal and impossibility of ever achieving total unity or intimacy with another. The title is a sentence from Luce Irigaray’s book To be Two (Athlone press 2000), a feminist critique of gendered subjectivity, proposing a culture of  ‘between two’ as opposed to the culture of the One.

The text score was inspired by a collaboration with photographer and performance artist Manuel Vason, a commission for Photography and Culture  Volume 11, 2018 – Issue 2: The Theatre of Photography : Becoming One : a duologue in practice, a piece of experimental writing and a series of performative photographs (2017)  in which “We became one in writing and in breathing, in real time and in photographic time.“

Emmanuelle Waeckerlé is a London based academic, artist, composer and improviser interested in the materiality and musicality of language.

Her practice evolves across multiple interconnected work zones – conceptual writing, performance, new musical composition, artist-publishing – and manifests as poetic scores, occasions for their activation (installation, performance, workshop) and resulting image, text or sound works.

Ultimately devising situations to deepen our connection to or play (with) our interior or exterior landscape and each other, through or beyond words.

Summary:

Emmanuelle, Kevin, and Adriana discuss building community; generosity and power relations; self-care; clarity and intention; learning how to resist, stop, not work.

Together, they performed Emmanuelle’s ‘Song of an Intention’, which you can listen to in Episode 1.1.

Notes:

Texts & Links: