Cut & Splice: Transmission is a three-day exploration of the avant garde’s use of radio as a dramatic stage and a performance instrument. Radio, powerful mass communication tool and invisible link between innumerable real and imaginary places, has transformed the habits of listening culture, extending the reach of the human ear towards an infinitely distant vanishing point. At first used as a site for broadcast performance, a generation of artists led by John Cage dragged the radio receiver itself on stage and gave it voice as a source of indeterminate electronic noise. The example of this appropriation of the voice of power and the shift from passive reception to active interaction are more relevant than ever in today’s culture of media overload.

Echoing Victorian spectacles of spiritualist mediumship, Wilton’s Music Hall, ‘east London’s most atmospheric gig venue’ (The Guardian), will be filled with voices from the beyond, the sounds and music of the dead and living and severed snippets of broadcast culture transmitted from the non-place of radioland.

Cut & Splice is a celebrated international festival of experimental music and sound art produced by Sound and Music and BBC Radio 3. Annually shifting its thematic focus, Cut & Splice draws connections between the work of the leading figures of the historic avant-garde and the key exponents of today’s radical music and sound. Cut & Splice presents both live and broadcast activity and is set in Wilton’s Music Hall one of London’s most atmospheric spaces and the last surviving and oldest grand music hall in the world.

Date:  Thursday 4 – Saturday 6 November
Venue:  Wilton’s Music Hall, 1 Graces Alley, London, E1 8JB
Produced by:  Sound and Music and BBC Radio 3

Works by:

Karlheinz Stockhausen
John Cage
Earle Brown
Jacob Kirkegaard
Nicolas Collins
Robert Normandeau
Antonin Artaud
Tetsuo Kogawa
Blood Stereo & The Bohman Brothers

Performers include:

Apartment House
Jaap Blonk
Keith Rowe
Lee Patterson
Kjell Bjorgeengen
The Resonance Radio Orchestra
Ma La Pert
and others

Installations by:

Esther Johnson
John Wynne

Watch Cut & Splice 2009

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