commissioned radio productions
Jim Colquhoun & Jamie McNeill – “On Cannibalism considered as one of the Fine Arts”
TX: Saturday, 2nd September, 6pm – 6.30pm + Sunday, 3rd September, midday – 12.30pm
Colquhoun & McNeill found themselves locked in an airless cellar in Rotterdam for what seemed like an eternity. Surrounded by a bewildering array of vintage synths that neither artist had any idea how to switch on never mind play and as their incessant bickering lurched ever closer to the daily fistfight Colquhoun babbled gibberish into a broken cassette recorder whilst McNeill attempted to electrolyse his frontal lobe and not for the last time.
The trick seemed to be to record everything all the time as every five hours or so a dying synthesiser would vomit a few seconds of barely salvageable audio, its circuits fried by a decrepit power cable or the overzealous application of some Space Echo. From these fragments they were able to construct a gnostic grammar from which to mimic the machines they consistently tried to destroy. Colquhoun had become particularly skilled in apeing the high end screech of a badly patched ARP 2600.
A guitar lead coils itself slowly into a gordian knot like a snake that can’t quite stomach eating its own head, the calcified circuit board reroutes itself as self-immolating electro-pictograms and in the over-defined flicker and glare of the studio lighting Colquhoun mistakes a toaster for a vintage mic spending yet another wasted afternoon whispering enochian incantations into the heating element.
https://www.instagram.com/colquhoun_mcneill/
Produced as part of a co-commissioning residency exchange with WORM, Rotterdam.