Listen With Others No.7 – February 6th 2026
1. DRONEwhirling (high tide) from Water Line / Estuary Almanac by Absolute Value of Noise and Anna Friz
Originally commissioned as a 365 day never-ending radio piece, Water Line / Estuary Almanac has been re-conceived as a 10 sided record album. It follows the rhythms of tidal waters at the river’s edge. “After 14 months of accumulating new sounds and compositional segments, the piece became Estuary Almanac, a compilation of river-times, documented and imagined, with our ears attuned to the waterline.”
https://absolutevalueofnoise.bandcamp.com/album/water-line-estuary-almanac
2. A Year of Radio Silence by Steve Bates 35’00”
“From November 10, 2012 to November 10, 2013, artist Steve Bates transmitted a 25 micro-Watt signal at the lower bound of the FM band from his apartment in Montreal. The content of this signal was the same all year: silence. In part an experimental injection of calm into a crowded broadcast spectrum, the project also took inspiration from the ritual-like process in which pirate radio operators first find their transmitter’s frequency. As Bates puts it, “To find this broadcast signal, one scans the radio dial until the static gives way to a quiet, open space of stillness.” Like other silent works, notably John Cage’s 4’33”, the project also inevitably became a reminder of the impossibility of pure silence — in this case, how transmitters drift in and out of perfect alignment while other electromagnetic signals trespass into the broadcast band. To produce this recorded version of A Year of Radio Silence, Bates collected samples from an earlier iteration of the work, which the Austrian national broadcaster ORF hosted. Working with engineer Martin Leitner, Bates allowed the disruptions to silence that these recordings captured to resonate a grand piano in an ORF studio. The resulting half-hour piece, which first aired on the ORF’s Kunstradio program, re-sonifies Bates’s silent installation by bringing its unquiet edges to the foreground.”
https://wavefarm.org/wf/archive/s5ke3w
3. Mass Observation (Expanded) by Scanner 53’30”
“There were three performers and one witness. I can remember this day so well, even though it was some twenty-four years ago. Standing up before a mixing desk in a dark room in an apartment in South London, Jim O’Rourke, Robert Hampson and myself, literally all hands-on deck as we each took responsibility for the faders on the desk. Introducing sounds to the mix, unexpected, unpredictable, where the accident reigned supreme. Sometimes the high frequency of cellular noise would pervade the atmosphere, at other junctures it would erupt into words and melt down to radio hiss. Mike Harding from the Touch label stood silently, listening intently.” (Scanner Aka Robin Rimbaud)
https://scanner.bandcamp.com/album/mass-observation-expanded
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