The bodies of children killed in an Israeli strike, lie on the floor at the morgue of the Al-Aqsa hospital in Deir Balah in the central Gaza Strip on October 22, 2023, as battles continue between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas group. (Photo by Mahmud HAMS / AFP) (Photo by MAHMUD HAMS/AFP via Getty Images)
Hello, good evening. It's Sunday night. This is me, Simon Tyszko, and this is Isotopica here on Resonance 104.4 FM.
This week's programme faces towards Gaza, the unspeakable, the unimaginable,but the reality of what's happening day after day, hour after hour, minute after minute.I could approach this programme, reading lists of numbers, statistics, details of horrors,yet I'm sure, at least I hope, you've all heard plenty of these.They are unimaginable.
I could talk about the politics, yet I hope you're aware of the politics of the situation as it stands.
So, today's edition, I've taken a number of audio video live streams which are available online if you care to look.These ones actually come from Al Jazeera, a news source which I find increasingly precise, accurate and genuinewithout any of the ambiguity which we see even in allegedly left leaning papers like The Guardian.Today's programme is made up of a number of these live streams which are fixed point cameraswith microphones capturing live the bombardment of Gaza, a bombardment with some of the most sophisticated and intense weaponry available in the world,and in this instance being deployed against civilians in a very small space in open prison.
All of these things, you know!
I have layered these recordings. And I have used various effects to bring out harmonics and resonant frequencies, which I'm allowing to play against each other, creating sounds within the sounds and to an extent rhythms within the sounds.
I'm not doing this as an entertainment, I'm doing this as a way of presenting or representing the horrors that I'm experiencing.
I could attempt to talk a lot more,I could read off endless lists of numbers,the number of children that die per hour,the number of adults that die per hour,the number of people that die per day.I could quote the estimated numbers of people who are buried under the rubbleand I could detail the estimates of the number of those people that are still alive.
Yet I take it back to my experience of one particular news piece in which I saw a young girl, a child,maybe seven years old, eight years old, who was found by rescuers,possibly just neighbours who lived within or nearby the block which was demolished by extraordinary high explosive weapons, weapons probably provided by Britain or America, and which destroyed her home, killing many and trapping many too.
And as this young girl was found and I had to pause the video, I had to sob.
Faced with the reality of one child trapped in that situation, and with knowledge that adults across the world had joined in some kind of consensus and decided to do this to that one child, an act that can be multiplied and extrapolated over time,over decades, can be projected into the future, and as it goes on hopefully I will continue to sob, whenever I come across a reality that I cannot escape from, that I can't step to one side of…. I feel calmed knowing that I am still capable of Compassion, that it is reality there.
So summing up….. for the next hour we're going to be listening to a composition made of live streamed audio recordings from Gazaduring the Israeli bombardment of the civilian population.Multiple streams, creating multiple sounds, building to a crescendo, fading out into some musicby the experimental musician, sound artist Pauline Oliveros,
