29^th May 2015

Radio Relay

DinahBird’s Radio Relay : “It is not a race,” DinahBird explains, “quite the opposite. It is a playful protest against the way sound is propagated in the digital age. The idea is simple. I have made a piece of radio pressed to vinyl, due out on the German label Gruenrekorder on the 15th November (2014). It is the story of a box, a leather box that is over eighty years old and has lived in three different countries, and on two different continents. It contains over fifty 78 rpm recordings of classical music and opera hits of the day. The box and its contents were inherited by my grandmother who was born on the Gulf Islands, British Columbia, in 1910. She grew up on Salt Spring. She took the box with her when she left the island in 1925 and carried it to her various adult homes until her death in 2000. In September 2012 I retraced the box’s long journey and took the records back to the island where they were first played. This is the main piece A Box of 78s = 24 mins, on the other side is a series of locked grooves. I would like the same copy of the record to be relayed between the different partner radio stations, so that no single broadcast sounds the same. The radio station or programme maker therefore has to agree to receive the record, play it within a certain time frame, and then send it on by post to the next radio station. The scratches formed en route will become part of the piece, mirroring the journey my grandmother’s records made.”