Raumdeuter Radio: Glasgow
Raumdeuter Radio couples audio artworks with public transport routes to reinterpret the social and physical space of the city.
> 87 - [Buchanan Bus Station > Springburn Park] - Swim Bladder - Alkmini Gkousiari
> CCL - [Central Station > Central Station] - Punarāvartanam - Nakul Krishnamurthy
> SUB - [Govan > Govan] - Ouroboros - Moema Meade/LADY NEPTUNE
> X19 - [Queens Street > The Lochs Shopping Center] - Who's Time? - Robert Thomas James Mills
Artists and Routes:
87 - [Buchanan Bus Station > Springburn Park] - Alkmini Gkousiari
We entered the belly of the big fish.
The landscape changes as the fish slides with its slippery ways to the motorway and exits the city centre.
The murmuring of the voices that have also been swallowed whole by the fish are soothing.
The rolling of tongues and clapping of lips is making me feel at home.
Cemetery on the left now
The universal hand gestures of signalling the bus driver come and go.
The Campsie in front of us now.
I ring the gentlest of bells and go down the digestive system until I am out.
getting off
An empty shell, a carcass, the bones of a chicken left on a plate.
Everyone full bellied to the point of explosion.
A big feast!
Old lost empires.
Long travelled plants and
old
men walking their small erratic dogs, dragging their feet.
Plants confused, not confused,
just tired of this land, its weather, its people.
But this place has no trace of the long-travelled ones.
I wash the fishy smell off my hands,
grow gills and surrender to my intuitions.
This accumulation and assembly of sounds is an attempt to encapsulate a journey of drifting, distracted with thoughts of disconnect with this country, this journey, this land. This work is full of sounds both familiar and strange to my ear. I wish the audience to be carried by this meditative work and let their mind drift to lands that make them feel fuller.
Swim Bladder
Mastering, text, recordings, instruments and voice: Alkmini Gkousiari
Bio: Alkmini Gkousiari lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland. Her practice attempts to encapsulate the myth of creation or coming-into-being through engagement with the conflicts that arise from multiple cultural identities. As a Greek artist living in Scotland, she explores her country’s ancient gods, rural and orthodox rituals and family traditions to create new understanding of these dualities and multiplicitous identities. Alkmini also uses her playful sense of storytelling in collaborations, performances and site specific works to interrogate whichever landscape she finds herself in through the process of myth-making. Alkmini’s practice spans drawing, sculpture, writing, sound and performance.
Website: alkminigkousiari.cargo.site instagram: @alkminigousiari
CCL - [Central Station > Central Station] - Nakul Krishnamurthy
My first encounter with the Cathcart Circle was on a winter morning in 2019. I had recently moved to Glasgow, and was at the Queens Park station waiting for a train to Glasgow Central. Right on time two trains arrived—both to Glasgow Central, on platforms 1 and 2, but in opposite directions. And while I was standing in the middle of these two platforms, wondering how the same Glasgow Central can be in two diametrically opposite directions, a kind stranger saw my confusion and gently told me it was the one on platform 1. People indeed make Glasgow!
But as I got on the train, the confusion turned to wonder, contemplation. The irony and contradiction that makes the Cathcart Circle was fascinating.
The railway is a ubiquitous yet monumental symbol of Western imperialism, instrumental to and enabled by centuries of colonial exploitation. It has also come to symbolise European modernity and emerged as a compulsory tool to access the West’s “emancipatory” potential. Glasgow continues to occupy a central space in that history having immensely benefitted from slave trade and colonialism to have become the “second city of the Empire”. Ironically it has also been colonised by the same power that enabled its wealth.
Yet right here, in the heart of Glasgow, is a 29-minute loop of railway that emphatically subverts the Western idea of linearity and its notions of progress, development, temporality. It is an artery that runs through the immigrant heart of the city, folding into itself to bring about a singularity of its extremities, enclosing and embracing rather than dividing and separating. Built on the backs and the wealths of those deemed different and uncivilised, it positions itself today as their emancipator, making them new promises of the same old modernity and civilisation. The cycle of colonialism repeats itself in endless loops, ferrying the peoples across the Clyde and back, towards promises that lie at the ever elusive end of the circle. It shines as an emblem of Western superiority yet subverts it in every instance of its endless daily repetition.
What does the Cathcart Circle mean? It means everything, yet nothing. It embraces, yet constrains. It is movement, yet stasis. It is different, yet the same. It is Punarāvartanam — a re-repetition: of history, of promise, of life.
Āvartanam : repetition, cycle
Punar : Again, re-
Puṇar : embrace
Music: Nakul Krishnamurthy
Mastering: Oliver Barrett.
Punarāvartanam uses Tom Mudd's Gutter Synthesis.
Bio: Nakul Krishnamurthy is an Indian artist who works with Indian Classical music and explores new ways of conceiving it at the intersection of Western Classical, experimental and electronic music traditions. Using procedural approaches and electronic music making techniques, his work experiments with and attempts to reconfigure the structural foundations of Carnatic and Hindustani musics to generate new interpretations and alternative modes of engagement with the art forms. Through such radical reimaginations, which draw from his extensive study of Carnatic, Hindustani, Western Classical, and Indian Popular music, he attempts to imagine new possibilities for Indian Classical music—possibilities that are sensitive to its history of marginalisation, critically examine and challenge its power and hegemonic status within Indian society, and explore forms of migrant identity formation at the intersection and interstices of cultures.
Website: www.cafeoto.co.uk/shop/nakul-krishnamurthy-tesserae/
SUB - [Govan > Govan] - Moema Meade/LADY NEPTUNE
In Ouroboros, Moema Meade captures both the synchronicity and sonic randomness of the subway. Everything runs on the clock, and everything repeats all day, possibly infinity. But, there's a kind of chaotic rhythm present that seeps in and makes an array of lovely random percussive clunks and drips. People come and go, shout, drink, go to work, make out, fall asleep. The snake keeps smoothly turning its journey, continuing its purpose, guiding us to and from our homes.
Bio: Originally formulated in London as a performing alter-ego for nascent singer-songwriter and fashion student Moema Meade, Lady Neptune has been an ongoing work that has evolved from distorted guitar dirges, bass-heavy synth pop music into its current Hi NRG 4am experimental Gabber nadir. New Gorbals Gabber is monstrous and glorious. Informed by goblinzed cave dwelling nu metal aesthetics, cheap ‘n’ nasty instrumentation but above all, peeking like an elvin proboscis around the corner of your mind, is an unstoppable knack for hooks that elevates these compositions to channels for new planes of ecstasy.
Website: ladyneptune.bandcamp.com instagram: @l4dyn3ptune
X19 - [Queens Street > The Lochs Shopping Center] - Robert Thomas James Mills
What if time was a person? What is your relationship with them then? Sometimes time is seen as a stream, flowing from past to future.A stream of consciousness; A stream of transmissions -- both heard throughout space and time. Who's time anyway?
Bio: Robert Thomas James Mills works mostly with an earnest and humour-filled performance based practice. Utilising chance happenings & encounters around him whilst collecting words, thoughts & feelings, these collections inspire his stories, text work and objects. Robert's work focuses on navigating worlds he finds himself within, his sense of self and place in community.
The output of his work is often a (re)imagining, healing, lovingly wry, sci-fi-esque, (un)poetic, existential declaration that is seasoned with the self-preservation/-destructive tendencies inherited from his parents. Starting with seemingly ordinary situations Robert will transport audiences to absurd and fantastical places through his playful use of language and world building. His work will span time frames of the deep past and the hypothetical future with some of his projects having explored notions such ancient miraculous acts, inter-dimensional octopuses and a walk to which ended up on Mars.
Website: www.robertthomasjamesmills.co.uk instagram: @sllimsemajsamohttrebor
2 - [Partick Bus Station > Clydesbank Railway Station] - Natasha Thembiso Ruwona
The River Clyde’s history of imperialism haunts Glasgow, its presence unavoidable - the hold of the city. Water can be used to heal, but sometimes it requires its own healing. In Lessons in Memory, healing is sought through an underwater meditation that evokes the past into conversation with the present and future.
Made using a Mbira with sounds recorded from The River Clyde, Forth and Clyde Canal, and the Atlantic Ocean.
Audio, text & Mbira: Natasha Thembiso Ruwona
Edited: Clara Hancock
Bio: Natasha Thembiso Ruwona is a Scottish-Zimbabwean artist, researcher and film programmer based in Glasgow. They are interested in Afrofuturist storytelling through the poetics of the landscape, working across various media including; digital performance, film, DJing and writing. Their current project Black Geographies, Ecologies and Spatial Practice is an exploration of space, place and the climate as related to Black identities and histories. They are the current resident for Alchemy Film and Arts where they are researching Tom Jenkins – Britain’s first Black Schoolteacher, and the migratory patterns of salmon through the lens of queer ecologies.
Website: natasharuwona.com instagram: @badgalnt
Curated by Romy Danielewicz & Feronia Wennborg
Collaborators:
Raumdeuter Radio is financially supported by The Hope Scott Trust and Nordic Culture Fund.
Raumdeuter Radio is proud to be collaborating with several institutions and organisations across Glasgow:
