TTF RADIO

Water Chronicles ON AIR

19:00 BST on Friday 24th until 22:00 BST on Saturday 

Live on the Spree, Berlin.

Blanc Sceol & Insola

https://www.blancsceol.co.uk/Water-Chronicles-ON-AIR

The LIVE program on Insola is curated as a series of gifts to the Spree, given through the particular resonance of the floating platform, and inviting local audiences and passers-by into connection and conversation with the river.

Considering the existing cultural dynamic of the Insola and the river as a public space, we approach it as a dream space that sits outside the constraints of consumer culture. Through a program embracing a film screening, talk, performances and workshops the Insola is celebrated as a stage, a gallery, and an intimate space.

The broadcast will be a mix of a live environmental streams over and under the Spree river, via Sound Camp stream box and the Locus Sonus platform, new artist commissions happening live across the weekend on the floating platform Insola, and a curated feed of sound works related to the Channel sea and the Thames from contributors and friends of the project. The broadcast connects the river systems in Berlin and London inviting audiences in to listen with these rivers as sites of creative dialogue.

CURATED PROGRAMME – On the Spree, Berlin

LIVE STREAM BOX: Insola on the Spree (live from 19.00 BST 23rd July – 22.00 BST 24th July)
Birds, passers-by, water swell from wind and boat traffic, the particular resonance of the large open dock.
Using a Sound Camp live stream box and the Locus Sonus platform.

SOUND WORKS FROM FEATURED ARTISTS & COLLABORATORS:
A curated feed of audio works involving the River Thames and it’s tributary the Channelsea River, from artists and friends of the project.

Intertidal Anomaly: conversations from ‘A Slice of Reality’
A bi-monthly show recorded throughout 2025 on board Richard Wilson’s millennium sculpture ‘A Slice of Reality’, with artist duo and guardians of the ship Blanc Sceol (Stephen Shiell and Hannah White).
Curated and produced by Stephen Shiell.

FRIDAY 24th JULY
20.00 – 22.00 (CET)

The Order of Anura (listening piece)
by Jol Thoms

Anuras’ (Frogs/Toads/Salamanders) are the vertebrates hardest hit by climate devastation. This hour-long program of other than human sacred music and history is in response and dedicated to those most endangered by extinction: the amphibians. We resonante our ritual recordings into the Spree re-activating it as a planetary scale amplifier for our shared cross-species messages of urgency, care and concern. The Order of Anura attune and develop new sensibilities to the imperatives and sympoetics of beyond-the-human worlds and our mutual embeddedness, as global health plummets with direct ties to the loss of so many species of amphibian.

Roars, Rolls, rumbles and salvos (artist talk)
with Richard Wilson (RA)

Richard Wilson will dip a toe into talking about his 8 years working as a co-founder of the radical sound group, Bow Gamelan Ensemble. He will also focus on collaborations made with others, post gamelan, making performances on water and shorelines.. These include huge steam whistle blows using steam ships to drum and cymbal works with Anne Bean and “others”. Films and static image will be used to illustrate the scale of these events.

Bow Gamelan Ensemble: Maps of Other Possibilities (Film Screening – 19 mins)

When the Bow Gamelan Ensemble finished in 1991 it had amassed many suitcases of its documented archival past. Using a DACS “Recollect” archive award Anne Bean and Richard Wilson worked with archivists to make sense of the Ensembles 11 year history within audio-visual performance. As part of this “making sense”, Anne and Richard worked on a 15 mins film with Alex Eisman, a film maker, to create a new work that was to run in tandem with the amassed physical material. The chosen set for the film was Wilson’s studio being a sliced section of an ocean going dredger. The film attempts to conjure a work from the promotional material, posters, invitation cards, programmes, press, reviews, notebooks, sketches, scores, AV items, VHS tapes, correspondences and research material.

SATURDAY 26th JULY

11.00 – 15.00 (CET)
(Drop in any time and stay for as long as you want)

Signs of conviviality:
making the future in the present (workshop)
with transdisciplinary archeologist Lara Band

Flag making for convivial water relations. Code flags, for international ship to ship or ship to shore signalling, were formalised over the late 1700s – early 1800s. Though the wider context was of course capitalism and (British) imperialism, it was also prompted by a desire for better communication through shared language. In this workshop we will be making flags that speak of friendly relations, of the desire to reposition our relationship(s) with water and the fellow beings we share that space with. These will be displayed on the Insola floating platform during the weekend.

Scrap fabric, hand sewing, gluing and printing supplies will be provided. You are also welcome to bring any fabric and craft supplies that you would like to use, or share with others.

After the weekend the flags will travel back to England to be installed on ‘A Slice of Reality’ for the LIVE London program.

15.00 – 16.00
Fluvial Chorus (workshop)
exploring the voice as a portal to ecosystem collaboration
facilitated by Hannah White

Resonate the Insola in chorus; sounding through, and with, the waters of your own body, crossing the threshold of skin and water surface to send song to the river, the water a threshold between worlds, our voices the messenger between realms.

No previous experience necessary, just a willingness to participate. All voices welcome.

20.00 – 22.00

The Well of Mothers (listening piece)
by Margarida Mendes

Merging the hidden waters of underground Lisbon — with its sunken rivers and wells of fortune — with the meandering flows of the Spree, this cross-watery broadcast interweaves spatial dimensions and sonic thresholds to establish new liquid horizons. Resonating from a well deep inside Earth’s trenches, it invites the breath of aether to travel across physical space and conduct its own vibratory magic, weaving thus a cartography of the senses.

Kinetic Resonance (live performance)
by Blanc Sceol (Stephen Shiell & Hannah White)

Blanc Sceol will be performing ‘Kinetic Resonance’ with the ‘Orbit’, in a continuation of their collaboration with this self-created instrument. Orbit is a decagon shaped instrument played by the two musicians simultaneously. The body is spun by one set of hands, as the other hands hold a bow to the ten strings. As the two musicians work together the Orbit leads them into a cosmos of dynamic, pitch-shifting drones and harmonic rhythms.

“Between the players and the played there is an attentiveness to being-with that is explicit in ways other playing is not. Through the artists attunement to their instrument, to one another, to the spaces and times of their performances through deep listening practices, we are offered an utterly new sono-social experience that surpasses and/or renews many historical traditions, opening and inspiring new musical and aural possibilities to current and future artists.” Jol Thoms, Radio Amnion

Eris. (Greek Goddess of Chaos) (live performance)
by Richard Wilson

“Sometimes conscious thought can be too slow.” The intention of the performance is to mark out a spacial territory using sounds both loud/soft… fast/slow with intermittent spacing within the composition. The composition will use drums, cymbals and assorted hand made ’stuff” to be performed on water. The sound sources and the musical structures generated are unusual because of the physical relationship between the way the instruments work, where they are played and how they have to be sounded.

Shiell – Thompson – Wilson (live performance)
Old time friends and long-time collaborators, this trio brings a baltering mix of electronics (Stephen Shiell), cello (Ian Thompson) and percussion (Richard Wilson), dynamic, shape shifting and nebulous.

ARTIST BIOS

Blanc Sceol (Stephen Shiell & Hannah White) are an artist duo who compose, perform and record experimental music, and work with ‘Orbit’, a unique, self-made two player instrument. They also instigate participatory gatherings, connecting their sound work with environmental awareness and creative actions on behalf of the more-than-human, and exploring healing modalities as tools for collective transformation. Their work is a spiral within the space-time continuum.
www.blancsceol.co.uk

Richard Wilson RA, calls himself a sculptor, a term he feels accurately describes his primary engagement with the world of materials, objects and space. He has built an international reputation as one of the most inventive sculptors of his generation. His major works are often characterised by concerns with size and structural daring. From 1983 to1991 he was a co-founding member of the Bow Gamelan Ensemble with Anne Bean & Paul Burwell. He continues his collaborations in sound performances…. primarily percussion, sound pyrotechnics and steam whistles… alongside producing major public and gallery sculptures.
www.richardwilsonsculptor.co

Ian Thompson is a sound artist/designer/engineer, musician, researcher and educator. He is Senior Lecturer in Sound for Film and TV at the University of Greenwich, London where he’s currently completing a PhD investigating the perception of soundscape in audiovisual work. His recent works include multi-channel audiovisual work, spatial electroacoustic composition, and performances which incorporate magnetic tape loops and free-improvised ‘cello.

Lara Band is a transdisciplinary archaeologist and creative practitioner focusing on climate change, heritage ecologies, watery places and more than human conviviality. Combining film, sound and making with site-based participatory practice and critical research, she brings the past into dialogue with present environmental change to conjour future imaginaries. She can often be found presenting at international conferences, sits on the editorial board for Living Maps Review and is a member of the arts and heritage collective ButCH.

Margarida Mendes is a research-based artist, curator, and educator, exploring the overlap between critical ecology, experimental film, sound practices, and ecopedagogy. She creates transdisciplinary forums, exhibitions, discursive events, and experiential works where alternative modes of education and sensing practices may catalyse political imagination and restorative action. Margarida Mendes holds a PhD by the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London, and is a tutor at the GEO-Design Masters at Design Academy Eindhoven.

Jol Thoms is a collaboration between elements, forces, bacterias, minerals and other cosmo-planetary bodies and entities. The meso organism responding to this name was born in settler Canada, trained there and in Germany and is now teaching Art & Ecology in the UK at Goldsmiths University. He established the Radio Amnion platform communicating to the Pacific Ocean each full moon in 2020. He has recently presented his work at ELEVATE Festival, Venice and Kochi Beinnale’s, and Haus Der Kunst, among others. He misses when rain was drinkable and rivers swimmable.

TTF RADIO

TTF Radio is maintained by a dedicated community of volunteer engineers and programme-makers. No one at SHIFT TTF Radio is paid to make or support programming. We run the station with zero budget. Our yearly costs to run the station at the moment will be around £1000. This includes licensing, and the radio scheduling and server platform. If you can help support this Community project please donate. All donations collected will only be used to fund TTF Radio’s operating costs