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Seek Refuge pokes its nose around various corners of contemporary composition, uniting sounds both familiar and peculiar. This episode keeps it slow and steady, drawing from the second movement of Saariaho's 'Maan Varjot - Dome (lento, calmo)' Bits of organ, a little ambience, scattered drums, a gaku-biwa, field recordings and more aim to nurture some December calm.

Otto Willberg presents Bootleg Spatial Recall, a broadcast exploring physical and virtual space, murky telepathy, improvisation over the internet and magical channels. Viewing threshold spaces as sites of potential and negotiating spaces during periods of sheltering in place. This programme also documents work that Otto has undertaken as a participant of Sound and Music’s New Voices programme 2019/2020

Laura Yuile and The Museum of Modern Shopping presents - The Retail Therapist -an exploration of consumerist tales of woe , with guest, artist Lindsey Mendick.

Have you found yourself shopping during the pandemic just to feel alive? Have you ever realised you've got 20 tabs open and you've been looking at Latvian cardigans for 3 hours? Have you felt deep-seated shame at your consumerist behaviour? Have you drunkenly purchased a pair of KFC sweatpants with the Colonel's face on the crotch?

The Retail Therapist a consumerist agony aunt offers retail therapy for a world obsessed with shopping. Impulse buying, compulsive buying, comfort buying, susceptibility to advertising and scams, shoplifting addiction …

A live-looped collage of storytelling w/ sung elements and something non-alcoholic, by London-based artist Ellen King

Body of Pieces is an abstract fiction by artist Joanne Masding, presented as an artwork, a set of sculptures, and a book. Translated now into a live event, Joanne will performs a reading of extracts from the book activated with props and lo-fi staging. ⁠ ⁠ In this choreographed arrangement, Joanne test out ways of animating the voices and registers of the characters, objects and materials that speak through the text. ⁠

air sign by NO attempts to ‘speak the world’. It is a feral spell and work of vandalism against the moral imposition of logic, order and virtue held in the worldly crucible of the loving relation and the body as a vessel of the state. Taking place between two departed individuals it examines the locus of the impossibilities and crime of loving. Exploring the line where physical violence is justified, the piece wilfully reenacts harm against real or imagined oppressors where voices are dually victim and perpetrator. It gives voice to mutual longing, objects of nature, and emotions of the unknown.

Asking performers to risk betrayal, it disrupts the license of gendered power roles, the language of access and refusal, the totem of what we are able and unwilling to find permissible. Where do we find beauty, safety and recovery? In times of extremity and catastrophe, what are we willing to transgress or sacrifice for love, for grief, for injustice?

air sign was commissioned by TACO! through Blurt - an experimental platform supporting artists to develop text-based works for live reading and performance, and synchronous live-to-air broadcast

NO is an experimental research project, spoken-word choir and theatre group run by artist and writer Jamie Lee. They employ polyphony, gendered speech and exhaustion to explore the personal and political implications of silence and rage, and the relationship between legality, morality and the sacred. NO is composed of bella aleksandrova, bhāvinī j, dan rhys wakefield, sidney jones, sydney radclyffe, svetlana rakočević, hal hockney and jamie lee.

runway by Alan Fielden is a performance for choral voices and one musician, exploring human communication during catastrophe. Structured yet improvised, runway makes use of overlapping choral narratives and live music to consider alternative treatments of text, voice, and storytelling. With words and phrases diverging, converging, repeating, and iterating in a procession of characters and images, runway uses polyphony to evoke networks of tenderness, overwhelm, and hysteria.

runway was commissioned by TACO! through Blurt - an experimental platform supporting artists to develop text-based works for live reading and performance, and synchronous live-to-air broadcast

runway was performed by Alan Fielden, Jemima Yong, Ben Kulvichit, Clara Potter-Sweet, and Nat Norland,

Alan Fielden is a Korean-British writer, performance maker, and poet. Winner of the Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award for Marathon, with JAMS, co-produced by the Barbican. His writing has been published by Prototype, If A Leaf Falls, Monitor Books, Minor Literatures, Broken Sleep Press. Associate lecturer at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, UAL, and Worcester University. He co-runs event series 'Feature' at Cafe Oto.

No Internal Thing by Flo Ray is a feverish collision of sound and voice that performs what is known as ‘inner speech.’ It’s a solo headscape, a play for one, a mental score as lithe as language itself. When speaking of the ‘inner voice’, our limited vocabulary is also misleading: Thought, says Denise Riley, is no internal thing. Just as authorship is plagiarism and speech is ventriloquy, our thinking derives from elsewhere — so that what is most ‘inner’ is actually outer: social and impersonal. The disparate parts that populate No Internal Thing wonder as they wander, navigating topics as familiar and diverse as self-loathing, aimless desire and eternal damnation. They chatter and clash and chase after narrative, troubling distinctions between inside and outside. What keeps them afloat is what threatens to capsize them: cultural myths, accusations, quotes, wisecracks, song lyrics, moral injunctions, uninvited memories, the pervasive detritus of advertising. Will it never cease?

No Internal Thing was commissioned by TACO! through Blurt - an experimental platform supporting artists to develop text-based works for live reading and performance, and synchronous live-to-air broadcast

Flo Ray is an artist whose work is broadly concerned with expressions of multiplicity: fragmentations in thought and feeling that complicate dominant cultural narratives of the singular, cohering subject. Through video, sculpture, writing, drawing and audio, she explores everyday antagonisms within, and between, what we call selves.

Double Entry by Hugo Hagger & Evelyn Wh-ell is a love story. Two protagonists play out two parallel storylines of self-alienation and dislocation in a tale about the queer joke that is life and its never-ending. Caught in the misfiring of causation, our protagonists face personal tragedy, missed sexual encounters, failed self-actualisation, and a scam phone call which drives them round in melodramatic circles until they lose the plot. Against the backdrop of a cast of 2-D characters, Double Entry’s duet form is a closed loop of interiority where only transformation is possible, not exit. Images and objects come back around to serve new functions in the narrative economy in which they work, changing substance but not appearance, or appearance but not substance, as they circle. In Double Entry, death is a life sentence.

Double Entry was commissioned by TACO! through Blurt - an experimental platform supporting artists to develop text-based works for live reading and performance, and synchronous live-to-air broadcast

Hugo Hagger is an artist and writer living in London. He writes about narrative, assemblage, and the politics of legibility. His work has been published in Pilot Press, Sticky Fingers, Coven Magazine - Berlin, and Deleuzine, he has exhibited at Alice Black Gallery, and Arusha Collection, London.

Evelyn Wh-ell is a writer and artist. They write about disappearing acts, doom, the empty promise of self-actualisation, and deferred endings. Their work has been presented at Kaunas Artists' House, Auto Italia, Kupfer Project Space, and Kingsgate Project Space. They are the author of Memoirs of a Child Plot Hole: How to Escape Yourself Without Even Trying, published in 2022 by Sticky Fingers Publishing, and their criticism has been published by Art Monthly, World Picture Journal, and Cambridge Literary Review amongst others.

Performed by Evelyn Wh-ell & Hugo Hagger. Music by Haroun Yamou.

River Yuhao Cao is a moving image and performance artist based in London. Their practice reimagines the performative act of lamentation in regional Chinese cultures through a queer lens, revealing the possibilities of a fluid subject that can explore the landscapes of the past.

Hot Snakes is a devotional performance project conceived by artist Chloe Langlois. It takes as its starting point the artist's attempt to interact and communicate with a Holy Guardian Angel from her childhood - the eponymous ‘Hot Snakes’. Chloe’s attempts take the form of monthly broadcasts, live-to-air performance events, and bar takeovers undertaken as part of an ongoing residency at TACO!

Hot Snakes is a devotional performance project conceived by artist Chloe Langlois. It takes as its starting point the artist's attempt to interact and communicate with a Holy Guardian Angel from her childhood - the eponymous ‘Hot Snakes’. Chloe’s attempts take the form of monthly broadcasts, live-to-air performance events, and bar takeovers undertaken as part of an ongoing residency at TACO!

Hot Snakes is a devotional performance project conceived by artist Chloe Langlois. It takes as its starting point the artist's attempt to interact and communicate with a Holy Guardian Angel from her childhood - the eponymous ‘Hot Snakes’. Chloe’s attempts take the form of monthly broadcasts, live-to-air performance events, and bar takeovers undertaken as part of an ongoing residency at TACO!

Kate Mahoney creates and curates live performance and moving image works that embrace ‘DIY’ ways of making. Mahoney also delivers workshops that consider how to perform or 'un-sing' with a 'Hysterical Voice'.

Hot Snakes is a devotional performance project conceived by artist Chloe Langlois. It takes as its starting point the artist's attempt to interact and communicate with a Holy Guardian Angel from her childhood - the eponymous ‘Hot Snakes’. Chloe’s attempts take the form of monthly broadcasts, live-to-air performance events, and bar takeovers undertaken as part of an ongoing residency at TACO!

Hot snakes is curated by Dinosaur Kilby in collaboration with TACO!

With the invention of recorded music, machines which played the instruments themselves - such as fairground organs, player pianos, music boxes and barrel organs - went quickly out of fashion. Through the 20th century as music had the opportunity to become avant garde, the music machines were left behind. Where gramophones, tape recorders and turntables had an important role to play in the development of experimental music, there are fewer examples from the world of the fairground organ. This mix brings together various flavours of unusual mechanical music from the last 100 or so years up to today.

On Touching is a radio show about both touch (the tactile, or the haptic) and that which touches (affects or moves us). Typically, our most tender moments are those when vision is obscured and contact is obstructed, if not forbidden entirely. Fingering through his (mostly digital) collection Sam Belinfante has pulled out a selection of music that is connected through different strategies of making contact across seemingly impassable divides and within impossible situations

In these unsettling times of ‘social distancing’ and self-isolating, technology again promises to put us in touch with each other. The reality, however, is that these very apparatuses can operate to differently distance us and amplify the problems of both ‘sense’ and sensing. Perhaps If anything can restore contact, it is music and particularly the human voice; phenomena that are radically communicable, dislocated, even disembodied but somehow attuned, harmonious.

Split into two parts, On Touching reaches out across two adjacent weekends in the ‘lockdown’, summer of 2020.

Track Listing Part 2:

Miserere, with additional embellishments by Deborah Roberts (Excerpt),Gregorio Allegri, c.1630. Performed The Tallis Scholars & Peter Phillips

E.T., the extra-terrestrial (Main Title), John Williams, 1982

2 Men Meet, Each Presuming the Other to Be from a Distant Planet (Opening), James Wood, 1995. Performed by Steven Schick, Critical Band & James Wood, 2012

Heptapod B, Jóhann Jóhannsson & Joan La Barbara, 2016

The Harmonics of Real Strings (I), John Lely. 2006/2013. Performed by Anton Lukoszevieze, 2014

Játékok (Games), Harangok (bells), Hoquetis (hocquets) and Sirató (weeping), György Kurtág, 1973. Performed by Márta & György Kurtág. 1997

Toccata in G Minor, BMV 915, Johann Sebastian Bach, 1710. Performed by Glenn Gould, 1980

Clapping Music, Steve Reich, 1972. Performed live by Collin Currie & Steve Reich, 2019

Living for the City, Stevie Wonder, 1973

On Touching Part 1 is a radio show about both touch (the tactile, or the haptic) and that which touches (affects or moves us). Typically, our most tender moments are those when vision is obscured and contact is obstructed, if not forbidden entirely. Fingering through his (mostly digital) collection Sam Belinfante has pulled out a selection of music that is connected through different strategies of making contact across seemingly impassable divides and within impossible situations

In these unsettling times of ‘social distancing’ and self-isolating, technology again promises to put us in touch with each other. The reality, however, is that these very apparatuses can operate to differently distance us and amplify the problems of both ‘sense’ and sensing. Perhaps If anything can restore contact, it is music and particularly the human voice; phenomena that are radically communicable, dislocated, even disembodied but somehow attuned, harmonious.

Split into two parts, On Touching reaches out across two adjacent weekends in the ‘lockdown’, summer of 2020.

Track Listing:

Hocket

Meredith Monk, 1992

Performed by Meredith Monk and Robert Een, 1992

Penumbra

Sam Belinfante, 2010-11

Performed by Lore Lixenberg, 2011

L’Orfeo (excerpts)

Claudio Monteverdi, 1607

Performed by Anthony Rolfe Johnson (Orpheus), Julianne Baird (Euridice), John Eliot Gardiner & English Baroque Soloists, 1987

Difficulties putting it into practice, for 2 musicians

Simon Steen-Andersen, 2007

Performed by HYPER DUO (Gilles Grimaître & Julien Mégroz) for YouTube, 2018

Counting Duet #1

Tom Johnson, 1982

Performed by Sam Belinfante & Joseph Kohlmaier on Zoom, 2020

Love Song (two violins)

Alvin Lucier, 2016

Performed by String Noise (Conrad Harris & Pauline Kim), 2020

A Midsummer Night's Dream (excerpt)

Benjamin Britten, 1960

Performed by Mark Tucker (The Wall), Sir Colin Davis & London Symphony Orchestra, 1996

Ursonate (excerpt)

Kurt Schwitters, 1935

Performed by Adam de la Cour & Neil Luck, 2018/20

A Midsummer Night's Dream (excerpts) Benjamin Britten, 1960

Performed by Robert Lloyd (Pyramus) & Ian Bostridge (Thisbe)

Touch,

Little Mix, 2017

Performed by Little Mix as part of One World: Together at Home, 2020

A show about friendships, creative collaboration, investment, loss, sort-of-endings, and the joy of maintaining a beloved side-hustle by artist Holly Graham. Don't Freak Out - It's Only a Side Hustle is a sneak peek into the sweaty rehearsal rooms, crowded into with others over the years, and an opportunity to sample some of what these people have been doing and making independently outside of those spaces. Artist Holly Graham invites band-mates from two collaborative musical projects that talk and share their many talents.

With special thanks to Joe Bedell-Brill, George Cooke, Selali Fiamanya, Lois Graham, Natasha Heliotis, Anna Ploszajski, Ajay Ratan, Raj Savjani, and Barnaby Wynter for their contributions.

Performed and recorded live on the 24th Nov 2019 for Constructions #3 - an ongoing series of experimental music performance events curated Kate Carr and Mat Jenner. Encompassing a range of musical styles and genres, Constructions events are presented at TACO! or offsite in locations around Thamesmead.

Pouya Ehsaei is an Iranian musician, producer and artist currently residing in London. Beside his solo experimental sound projects, he is involved in various collaborations with dancers, performers and other musicians. He is the founder and the leader of the band "Ariwo" and founder of "Parasang" where he collaborates with musicians from around the world to perform spontaneous, dark and hypnotic live shows. He has performed at Barbican Centre, Southbank Centre, Village Underground and the Royal Academy of Arts in London as well as several festivals of music and performance including Womex, Womad, Line Check, Boomtown and SPILL.

Artist Aura Satz presents an hour-long music mix

At a time that many are affected by imposed isolation and solitude, artist Fay Zmija Nicolson presents a radio show on love, lust, longing and lockdown. Readings by the artist are interspersed with musical tracks explore objects of desire via memory and fantasy. Texts and music create an abstract narrative on loneliness and eroticism drawing from popular culture, memoire, fiction and philosophy.

Vocalist and sound artist Yifeat Ziv presents a show dedicated to music that explores the encounter between the human voice and technology. From early vocal tape music, through digitally processed voices and up to recent releases created by AI entities. Sonic treats for quarantine days of mediated voice communication

War Dr is Luke McCreadie & Paul Becker. Their first album ‘Jeer at Industry, Scorn Facility’ was recorded and released in 2019. Kate Bush released her debut album ‘The Kick Inside’ in 1978. It was produced by Andrew Powell.

A series of fictional interviews with Bush and Powell about the production of the album. The imagined responses are based on what Clarice Lispector described as the most desirable state of invention, ‘to be intelligent and to not understand’. Interjections of semi-sculptural texts revealing cavernous internal spaces, an outside within an inside, a travelogue of not knowing. Taking the listener through the album ‘Jeer at Industry, Scorn Facility’ via the centre of the earth back to the surface.

‘How We made ‘The Kick Inside’’ is read by Alice McCreadie

First broadcast on 11/04/2020