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Matt Harding's Slow Radio Sunday

Matt Harding is
a musician and sound artist who has released albums with Heavenly and Moshi Moshi Records. Most recently he has been working with performances based around deconstructing 'The Cabinet of Dr Caligari' including pieces at the Klingt Gut Festival, Hamburg and a residency at Gordon House, Margate. He has also written the soundtrack to British film High Tide and exhibited at Hackney Wicked festival and the Freud Museum. He is due to release his new album later this year
 
 
The pieces included explore themes that are recurrent in my work repetition, texture , intimacy and that which is hidden.  I also like to explore dynamics and tension between the visual and the sonic and use them to push and extract different vantage points.
Amongst the works are a radio piece made for inattentive audiences , a soundtrack to The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari, tests layering different pitches of water , a project that uses throwing to explore materials and our relationship to them as well as many other projects and musical compositions.
 
 
From the inside work outwards
 
“an uneventful day, no beauty touched my eyes, I didn’t gaze on blossomed boughs against march skies, nor feel the warmth of winter sun , nor even talk to anyone. But late that evening as I sat reading I heard a daffodil break it’s skin”

ivor cutler
 
Henri Lefebvre states in his essay Clearing The Ground that the everyday is “the intersection of the sectors man controls with the sectors he does not .”  he also cites it  as the potentialities of actions yet to take place . 
 
 
 
 Few components many variations 
 
 
Each new piece of music I write is a reaction to the last one. Spending time with the last one 
The next song often begins by using an element from the last one , manipulated , transformed , given a new identity to set the direction 
 
Congolese group Orchestra de Polyrhythm de Contonou recorded in the studio with just one microphone in the centre of the room, they positioned themselves physically in relation to it to create the desired mix, near or far for desired volume and depth, moving forward during recording was akin to moving a fader up to increase the level. The body as mixer and the microphone as witness, a technique born from limitation in the early days of recording music where just one microphone may have been available 
 
 
 
 form me something that can hold us for long enough,  that can hold us is strong enough
 
 
 
 
Half listening
 
 

This programme is based around the idea of audience who use the radio for background content and who are essentially half listening, it’s not a critique more an exploration of how we might imagine making a programme specifically for such an audience. What does it mean to view a part , the programme and our divided intention as incomplete but also something essential and complete within itself.

 

 

 
A handful of coins  are thrown from the top of a stairwell, they cascade downwards creating a dynamic reverberance,  this sound is recorded and then re played back within the same space on various hand held radios AND at different pitches and tempos on a loop which also includes the original pitch. The number of radios corresponding to the number of floors within the stairwell.
 
 
 
The radios are suspended by a single cotton thread , from the top floor to bottom  intertwined and hanging from where the coins were released,  each is interconnected physically and sonically, they hang tenuously supported only by the thread, fragile yet taught within the structure. They transmit the same signal but each through their own particular qualities and voice, separate yet unified elements to a common structure. They are a physical representation to echo the differing versions of the recording we are hearing.
 
 
The piece is concerned by the different facets contained within a single act 
that on first encounter may be unapparent, the multiple identities contained within the single piece of information, like the hidden faces of a many sided coin. 
 
It also seeks to engage with notions of presence and absence as the space is inhabited by a former event, a former narrative being retold and layered upon the same dimensions, a previous performance playing out. 
It also engages in separating the material from it's primary function and back to it's own materiality. 
 
The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari 
 
I have been working and re working the Cabinet Of Dr Caligari for the last 5 years, looking for the details , using the film as a raw material. I Began initially writing and performing my own soundtrack and subsequently it has developed into a re imagined performative piece with foley and installation where the image and soundtrack are deconstructed and fragmented in parallel

 

Throwing project / a radio play about throwing (with Esmeralda Valencia Lindström)

 

The act of throwing materials back and forth is an on going  method of research exploring intersubjectivity and agency in materials both through sound recordings and performance with artist Esmeralda Valencia Lindström 

 

The current focus is a radio play about throwing , using everyday materials as characters and set within the framework and language of the radio play the piece reflects on our relationship with materials and objects and what it means to be continuously involved in and with matter.

The sound piece takes the form of a radio play where the main action is the throwing of objects, back and forth between two people. Using the cross fade as a device to suggest a narrative structure, a range of recordings of people throwing objects in different contexts and settings are edited together. 

 
 
Coin stairwell Installation
 
A handful of coins  are thrown from the top of a stairwell, they cascade downwards creating a dynamic reverberance,  this sound is recorded and then re played back within the same space on various hand held radios AND at different pitches and tempos on a loop which also includes the original pitch. The number of radios corresponding to the number of floors within the stairwell.
 
The radios are suspended by a single cotton thread , from the top floor to bottom  intertwined and hanging from where the coins were released,  each is interconnected physically and sonically, they hang tenuously supported only by the thread, fragile yet taught within the structure. They transmit the same signal but each through their own particular qualities and voice, separate yet unified elements to a common structure. They are a physical representation to echo the differing versions of the recording we are hearing.
 
The piece is concerned by the different facets contained within a single act 
that on first encounter may be unapparent, the multiple identities contained within the single piece of information, like the hidden faces of a many sided coin. 
 
It also seeks to engage with notions of presence and absence as the space is inhabited by a former event, a former narrative being retold and layered upon the same dimensions, a previous performance playing out. 
It also engages in separating the material from it's primary function and back to it's own materiality.
 
 
 
Prize - By Tom Harding
 
I took you from bright water 
slipping through parked cars between meetings
 
 
 
High Tide
 
High Tide is the British independent debut feature film by Longarm Films , released in 2015 set on the Gower Peninsula In Wales. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4439872/. Directed by Jimmy Hay and Written by James Gillingham .

 

 
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