commissioned radio productions
Robert Machiri – “Going round and coming again”
TX: Wednesday, 30th August, 6pm – 7pm + Friday, 1st September, Midday – 1pm
![](https://radiophrenia.scot/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Robert-Machiri-twist-1200x800.jpg)
This piece is composed of free improvised music and material from a performance recorded in Recklinghausen, a small town in Germany. As part of an experiential itinerant intervention between the town and Berlin, I attempt to interpret the resonance felt through the town’s labour history as an ex-mining-industrial location. To foreground a dystopian image. The failure for truth to hold capacity when it’s displayed within a cacophonic membrane. When landscape turns into a site for resistance. When time and temporality offer fractality as hope. This composition assembles elements from a personal music collection; biographically compiled with Zimbabwean liberation songs, African music ethnologically extracted and personal compositions of electronic music. I punctuate this cacophonic mix with other found archival materials. A timeless piece of James Baldwin in conversation with Giovanni that foregrounds ideas on the black family and its losses to historical catastrophes such as industrialisation and slavery. A documentary piece on Henry Ford and his close ally Frederick Taylor- except on scientific management and founder of organisational studies- which zooms in on labour exploitation, its benefits to capitalism and the global geopolitical dynamics involved.
![](https://radiophrenia.scot/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Robert-Machiri-1024x682.jpg)
Robert ‘Chi’ Machiri born in 1978, in Zimbabwe is an artist who works primarily through sound mediation. Machiri’s work exists at the juncture of two streams of practice; his intuition and a post-disciplinary production of works that draw on discourses that are presented through embodied critique, learning and unlearning, interweaving sound, music and images. His most notable project PUNGWE is a mutable project that circles pan African soundings with related contemporary arts discourses and spaces.
https://listeningatpungwe.wordpress.com
https://www.hoerspielundfeature.de/hoerstueck-ueber-stimmen-aus-afrika-dzimudzangara-spektrale-100.html