No Event
Jon Tjhia • 25 March 2022
Hello! Welcome to this week’s turn of The Circular. With a little needling, most of us would probably admit that our lives are over-narrated. As a rejoinder to that charming but insistent inner voice of yours, I’ve brought together some non-fiction audio works that invite you to shut up and listen!
'I’m reminded of that old adage that life is long stretches of boredom punctuated by sheer moments of panic.' (Miyuki Jokiranta, 'No Event')
I’m reminded, whenever I listen to something – especially whenever I choose what to listen to, or choose to keep listening – that attention is a resource. It has its limit in the body. Actually, this is true of reading, of TV and games and art and conversation and sex and chess and eating, of working and sleeping and walking and getting drunk and scrolling email newsletters, too. The difference between them is in what attention demands and offers or allows in return.
'He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words.' (Elbert Hubbard)
A full experience isn’t always an attention-dominating one. What I love about some of these works is the magnetic character of the spaces they contain or invoke. An audio piece is a vessel for time, sometimes layers of it, and if we’re lucky we’re not simply taken to a place, but held there. As you'll see, this can be an unexpectedly active experience.
Okay – you’ve heard enough from me. Fetch your headphones?
'Silence is the best response to a fool.'
:)
No Event
In a piece that glides through waiting rooms, appointments, diagnostic equipment and flesh, Jokiranta says she was interested in parallel universes of time – the 'incongruity with how our medical systems count time in half-hour increments, pitted up against the human experience of time and the body’s experience of time, which is much more expansive.'
(See also: Let silent contemplation be your offering)
Energy Grids
Radio maker Sherre DeLys and musician Chris Abrahams visit Walter De Maria’s work The Lightning Field, an installation of 400 stainless steel poles set in a grid formation in remote New Mexico. As with other pieces by DeLys that portray striking environments – maybe most prominently, 'Jarman’s Garden' (2001) – it demonstrates how visual sound can be. 'Energy Grids' hums with energy. I’d almost dare to describe it as non-fiction music.
where are you today
Through the month of August 2020, six men (Farhad Bandesh, Farhad Rahmati, Samad Abdul, Shamindan Kanapathi, Thanush Selvraj and Yasin Abdallah) produced daily ten-minute recordings from the hotels and detention centres in Port Moresby, Naarm and Meanjin where they’d been imprisoned after the closure of 'Manus Regional Processing Centre', which for years housed men who had once sought asylum in Australia by boat. These recordings were texted to subscribers, and also displayed each detainee’s distance from the recipient.
Sometimes, the men spoke to each other or directly addressed listeners. Sometimes, they said nothing. Sometimes they recorded themselves listening to music, news, birds. Six days a week, listeners were invited to spend ten minutes with the men (many from within their own encounters with a so-called 'lockdown', often casually compared to prison), to listen with or without expectation and to experience the implication of their proximity. This archive of the recordings will continue to expose your distance from their place of creation, within a broader predicament that remains unresolved and, for many, unending.
Six Walks
Birthed at the height of the adaptive arts institutional outreach to a COVID-absent public, Six Walks invited six Naarm-based writers to host pre-recorded walking tours around the city. The resulting tours have a lot to offer the immobile listener too.
Tony Birch’s walk with the Birrarung, seasoned with anecdotes, stories and poems, brims with a familial intimacy: the river is unmistakably precious to him. He describes its former path leading all the way to Lutruwita, its bed now submerged by Port Phillip Bay and Bass Strait. Idil Ali’s walk around the Carlton Housing Estate bubbles with childhood mischief, but also with a loss of innocence caused by pervasive experiences of racism and class prejudice.
Take these walks for embodied encounters with disembodied company; they are infused with the ambling pace and rambling attention of a classic stroll. The best app? Why, it’s reality!
No Comment
Utopia is much easier to achieve when you stop worrying about it temporally. When it's just something you can kind of, like, reach out and grab for a second, except that, yeah, it needs to pass…watch for the next moment when you can grab it again.
In the wake of a COVID-cancelled exhibition, artist and organiser Bridget Chappell appeared in Liquid Architecture’s podcast to talk about their work, which explores sonic phase cancellation of police sirens and long-range acoustic devices (aka LRADs: acoustic weapons increasingly used in crowd control). They talk about what creating 'active silence' can mean in an activist context, and are candid about its utopian potential and significant risks and limitations.
Wheelwork of Nature: Tesla & the 21st century
We’ll flip from silence to its other, now, because you’ll probably never hear a biography that sounds anything like this one. Inventor Nikola Tesla’s life, and his inner world, are broached through a kitschy Australian TV quiz show, sketchy reenactments, monologues and readings that are constantly interrupting each other. It’s a simple but effective tactic that, like songs which fade out slowly, gesture toward omissions and excesses – the remainders of a story that exist beyond the bounds of the allotted time.
Clam and Jackie Bam: Ep #3, with Chanel, Flippy’s, Didion, Babitz and Swamp Monster (MA15+)
From Twitter Spaces to the zillions of streaming music stations in Melbourne alone, live radio has been quietly clawing its way back one tech platform and DJ mix at a time. In a pandemic context, it’s unsurprising; anything offering the chance for synchronous shared experiences has been given a bump (ahem). What sets Clam and Jackie Bam apart is what always feels fleeting and precarious in the careerist arts: they casually dispense hilarious, blunt critiques that more power-proximate Media Personas wouldn’t touch, and have a genuine sense of absurdity in their arsenal. Do you need more proof? Find the mock John Safran NGV audio tour around twenty minutes in.
How long can this last?
This audio edition of The Circular has been brought to you by Jon Tjhia.
Jon Tjhia is a radio maker, musician, artist and writer from Naarm. His recent work has been published in Un Magazine, LIMINAL, Going Down Swinging and Institute of Modern Art and shown at the Barbican Centre, Ian Potter Museum of Art, City Gallery and Avantwhatever. He’s a member of the Manus Recording Project Collective.
Perhaps this very cool issue has inspired you to think about what you would include in your own audio edition, if you had the chance to curate one. Good news! We're still accepting applications for our open call. Some details below. Full details on our website.
Open Call: Seeking Guest Editors for The Circular
The Circular is a weekly newsletter that rounds up surprising, useful and interesting online nonfiction by and about Australian writers. We seek three guest editors to curate the following editions for first weeks of September, October and November 2022.
- An audio edition that brings together compelling non-fiction audio recordings according to an organising principle of the guest editor’s choice.
- A graphic edition that brings together compelling graphic non-fiction according to an organising principle of the guest editor’s choice.
- An open edition, curated according to any organising principle of the guest editor’s choice.
Guest editors will be paid $400 for their work.