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With the invention of recorded music, machines which played the instruments themselves - such as fairground organs, player pianos, music boxes and barrel organs - went quickly out of fashion. Through the 20th century as music had the opportunity to become avant garde, the music machines were left behind. Where gramophones, tape recorders and turntables had an important role to play in the development of experimental music, there are fewer examples from the world of the fairground organ. This mix brings together various flavours of unusual mechanical music from the last 100 or so years up to today.

On Touching is a radio show about both touch (the tactile, or the haptic) and that which touches (affects or moves us). Typically, our most tender moments are those when vision is obscured and contact is obstructed, if not forbidden entirely. Fingering through his (mostly digital) collection Sam Belinfante has pulled out a selection of music that is connected through different strategies of making contact across seemingly impassable divides and within impossible situations

In these unsettling times of ‘social distancing’ and self-isolating, technology again promises to put us in touch with each other. The reality, however, is that these very apparatuses can operate to differently distance us and amplify the problems of both ‘sense’ and sensing. Perhaps If anything can restore contact, it is music and particularly the human voice; phenomena that are radically communicable, dislocated, even disembodied but somehow attuned, harmonious.

Split into two parts, On Touching reaches out across two adjacent weekends in the ‘lockdown’, summer of 2020.

Track Listing Part 2:

Miserere, with additional embellishments by Deborah Roberts (Excerpt),Gregorio Allegri, c.1630. Performed The Tallis Scholars & Peter Phillips

E.T., the extra-terrestrial (Main Title), John Williams, 1982

2 Men Meet, Each Presuming the Other to Be from a Distant Planet (Opening), James Wood, 1995. Performed by Steven Schick, Critical Band & James Wood, 2012

Heptapod B, Jóhann Jóhannsson & Joan La Barbara, 2016

The Harmonics of Real Strings (I), John Lely. 2006/2013. Performed by Anton Lukoszevieze, 2014

Játékok (Games), Harangok (bells), Hoquetis (hocquets) and Sirató (weeping), György Kurtág, 1973. Performed by Márta & György Kurtág. 1997

Toccata in G Minor, BMV 915, Johann Sebastian Bach, 1710. Performed by Glenn Gould, 1980

Clapping Music, Steve Reich, 1972. Performed live by Collin Currie & Steve Reich, 2019

Living for the City, Stevie Wonder, 1973

On Touching Part 1 is a radio show about both touch (the tactile, or the haptic) and that which touches (affects or moves us). Typically, our most tender moments are those when vision is obscured and contact is obstructed, if not forbidden entirely. Fingering through his (mostly digital) collection Sam Belinfante has pulled out a selection of music that is connected through different strategies of making contact across seemingly impassable divides and within impossible situations

In these unsettling times of ‘social distancing’ and self-isolating, technology again promises to put us in touch with each other. The reality, however, is that these very apparatuses can operate to differently distance us and amplify the problems of both ‘sense’ and sensing. Perhaps If anything can restore contact, it is music and particularly the human voice; phenomena that are radically communicable, dislocated, even disembodied but somehow attuned, harmonious.

Split into two parts, On Touching reaches out across two adjacent weekends in the ‘lockdown’, summer of 2020.

Track Listing:

Hocket

Meredith Monk, 1992

Performed by Meredith Monk and Robert Een, 1992

Penumbra

Sam Belinfante, 2010-11

Performed by Lore Lixenberg, 2011

L’Orfeo (excerpts)

Claudio Monteverdi, 1607

Performed by Anthony Rolfe Johnson (Orpheus), Julianne Baird (Euridice), John Eliot Gardiner & English Baroque Soloists, 1987

Difficulties putting it into practice, for 2 musicians

Simon Steen-Andersen, 2007

Performed by HYPER DUO (Gilles Grimaître & Julien Mégroz) for YouTube, 2018

Counting Duet #1

Tom Johnson, 1982

Performed by Sam Belinfante & Joseph Kohlmaier on Zoom, 2020

Love Song (two violins)

Alvin Lucier, 2016

Performed by String Noise (Conrad Harris & Pauline Kim), 2020

A Midsummer Night's Dream (excerpt)

Benjamin Britten, 1960

Performed by Mark Tucker (The Wall), Sir Colin Davis & London Symphony Orchestra, 1996

Ursonate (excerpt)

Kurt Schwitters, 1935

Performed by Adam de la Cour & Neil Luck, 2018/20

A Midsummer Night's Dream (excerpts) Benjamin Britten, 1960

Performed by Robert Lloyd (Pyramus) & Ian Bostridge (Thisbe)

Touch,

Little Mix, 2017

Performed by Little Mix as part of One World: Together at Home, 2020

A show about friendships, creative collaboration, investment, loss, sort-of-endings, and the joy of maintaining a beloved side-hustle by artist Holly Graham. Don't Freak Out - It's Only a Side Hustle is a sneak peek into the sweaty rehearsal rooms, crowded into with others over the years, and an opportunity to sample some of what these people have been doing and making independently outside of those spaces. Artist Holly Graham invites band-mates from two collaborative musical projects that talk and share their many talents.

With special thanks to Joe Bedell-Brill, George Cooke, Selali Fiamanya, Lois Graham, Natasha Heliotis, Anna Ploszajski, Ajay Ratan, Raj Savjani, and Barnaby Wynter for their contributions.

Performed and recorded live on the 24th Nov 2019 for Constructions #3 - an ongoing series of experimental music performance events curated Kate Carr and Mat Jenner. Encompassing a range of musical styles and genres, Constructions events are presented at TACO! or offsite in locations around Thamesmead.

Pouya Ehsaei is an Iranian musician, producer and artist currently residing in London. Beside his solo experimental sound projects, he is involved in various collaborations with dancers, performers and other musicians. He is the founder and the leader of the band "Ariwo" and founder of "Parasang" where he collaborates with musicians from around the world to perform spontaneous, dark and hypnotic live shows. He has performed at Barbican Centre, Southbank Centre, Village Underground and the Royal Academy of Arts in London as well as several festivals of music and performance including Womex, Womad, Line Check, Boomtown and SPILL.

Artist Aura Satz presents an hour-long music mix

At a time that many are affected by imposed isolation and solitude, artist Fay Zmija Nicolson presents a radio show on love, lust, longing and lockdown. Readings by the artist are interspersed with musical tracks explore objects of desire via memory and fantasy. Texts and music create an abstract narrative on loneliness and eroticism drawing from popular culture, memoire, fiction and philosophy.

Vocalist and sound artist Yifeat Ziv presents a show dedicated to music that explores the encounter between the human voice and technology. From early vocal tape music, through digitally processed voices and up to recent releases created by AI entities. Sonic treats for quarantine days of mediated voice communication

War Dr is Luke McCreadie & Paul Becker. Their first album ‘Jeer at Industry, Scorn Facility’ was recorded and released in 2019. Kate Bush released her debut album ‘The Kick Inside’ in 1978. It was produced by Andrew Powell.

A series of fictional interviews with Bush and Powell about the production of the album. The imagined responses are based on what Clarice Lispector described as the most desirable state of invention, ‘to be intelligent and to not understand’. Interjections of semi-sculptural texts revealing cavernous internal spaces, an outside within an inside, a travelogue of not knowing. Taking the listener through the album ‘Jeer at Industry, Scorn Facility’ via the centre of the earth back to the surface.

‘How We made ‘The Kick Inside’’ is read by Alice McCreadie

First broadcast on 11/04/2020