In 2019 I made a radio show to be broadcast on a fictitious village green on the middle of Goonhilly Downs on the Lizard in Cornwall. I also did some field recording of listening to the radio on the downs to lay down some bed tracks for the show. We listened to Irish sport on LW and French Radio on FM.
Here is the blurb I wrote for the project.
Pouring out of four FM radios, buried on site, looped, strapped to pillars and posts, hidden beneath umbrellas, safe from sun and rain, strapped to a scaffold pole hung from the sky, the happidrome, the bold consort of Trail Mix[ED] X Bram Thomas Arnold is an appropriated prose poem, dragged from a Neolithic bog and beamed into space, allowed to tumble back to earth through clouds of pissing mizzle, the common-place forgotten tones of a century falling in on itself, fragments of pop, beamed back amongst the quagmire, an imaginary voiceover artist vaguely attempts to impersonate a village green orator, announcing the winners and losers in a game of thresholds and conduits, time and space, exit plans and lost rocks, living, loving, and learning, trying to tie us all together, before we fall apart.
Cardinal Points are taken as constant in a world of change, whose magnetic end points flip and flop along a timeline that extends beyond our present frame of reference. That’s north over there, that’s south, all perspective, from Neolithic standing stones, rebalanced by Victorian visitors, to Napoleonic crofters who became English through a sheer determination and an unwillingness to leave; from appropriated scientific technology for nostalgic whimsy’s and misinterpretation, everything we have ever beamed from the surface of the earth is still going, sucked into a black hole on the furthest edges of a universe we can now confirm looks exactly like you expected, and nothing like you imagined.
Cardinal Points is a radio show where teleportations are made, and visions questioned, amongst the brush and the bog, and the sweeping rain, where you’ll hear fragments of pilot projects, of thrills and outlandish suggestions, strange endeavours scantly recorded, and hidden amongst the quagmire for your pleasure.
Alternatively, tune in after the fact on Source, or on Resonance, or online, but the finding of some thing, of a radio, strapped to a pallet, pinned down with rock, along the cardinal points as drawn from the centre of the green, to undertake the adventure of that seeking, is to comprehend a part of all that which is incomprehensible, the radio, the internet, the live stream, and the loss between you and me, memory and interpretation, thought and understanding. But don’t worry, Cardinal Points is just a radio show, recorded as though it were a conversation, a conversation between Hope, and Futility, notated by Contradiction, an art work for metamodern times, made for the edge of a country, in the slow process of falling off a continent and noisily into extinction.