Confirmation of a new radio show on Resonance FM to be aired this summer! Produced by Alberto Sanchez Nue and written by Sam Bevitt, the new show can be revealed as a comedy/drama. The plot is in development, but this can be confirmed as a seven episode series over seven months. More about the plot and little snippets of dialogue to follow soon, but remember to tune in to 104.4FM this summer to support this new radio drama!

http://resonancefm.com/

I See The Future Trio: Luciana Bass, Jonny Hill & Russell Callow

Show Produced & Engineered by: Alberto Sanchez Nue

An interview with Shirley Elghanian from Magic of Persia.

Magic of Persia Contemporary Art Prize finalists exhibit in London this month, as do the artists involved in the Iran Unbowed exhibition which Magic of Persia have curated to coincide with the Frieze Art Fair. With luminaries such as Abbas Kiarostami on board and Sheena Wagstaff chief curator of the Tate, Magic of Persia works to promote Iranian arts and culture outside of Iran.

This interview was broadcast live from the Resonance 104.4FM studios on October 5th 2009.

Ocean Algae
by Sarah Jacobs

>>> download .mp3

Tennis impresario Mansour Bahrami at the launch of his DVD, talks about his extraordinary rise to stardom via homelessness in France and singularly harsh treatment as a child on the tennis courts in Iran.

BIBA (The British Iranian Business Association) organised this event in Summer 08 as part of their public service programming. We also hear comments from Fari Taydayon, The Energy Deployment Company and Bez Ghazian at the BIBA event at the Hilton where Bahrami was speaking.

This show also features classical music played by Haydn Dickenson, piano imitates and transcends santoor in the ten minute piece ‘Tariq 1′ from the album ‘East’.

* Hear the Podcast *

Author Rudi Mathee discusses his study of Persian uses for narcotics and other more mundane stimulants throughout history.  Mathee’s book “The Pursuit of Pleasure” has just been released in Iran, and Fari Bradley asks him about Sherry, Shiraz wine and stimulants and opiates in ancient Persia from coffee to opium.

Mathee focusses on the Safavid period (1501-1722) in Persia, when excessive drinking by the Shah was sanctioned by society, as he was seen as the son of Shi’i Imam and therefore exempt from the ban on alcohol. This one example embodies many of the massive paradoxes that existed during this period, and still exist as the tension between public piety and personal freedom.

Like the British, the Persians lived through entire eras of compulsive drinking, yet which were then followed by periods when imbibing became punishable with 40 -80 lashings of the whip due to Islam.

This progamme was originally broadcast from Resonancefm studios in  London on July 28th 2008.

* LISTEN TO THE PODCAST *

When five young men who are a typical modern concoction of traditional Iranian values and MTV play music together what will it sound like?

Simorgh incorporate group chanting and a lyrical poetry that is folk-rap, accompanied by the evocative ney flute, tar strings and the empty bellow of the daf drum in their music, which is as far as our experience shows, at it’s optimum best when seen live.

Fari talks to the five members of the up and coming band ‘Simorgh’ about leaving university, playing football, parents, Bryan Adams and musical instruments as weapons of culture.

Simorgh are running workshops for the BBC on Iranian music and putting on their own concerts around London. With a name taken from a Sufi text, the band stand for something many of us can comprehend: what it’s like to be a cultural cocktail in London now.

This programme was originally broadcast from the Resonance104.4fm studios on July 21st 2008.

Listen to the podcast

Two travel companies explain the ins and outs of travelling to Iran.  From dry sand skiing to Zoroastrian tours, there is a lot on offer!

Persian Voyages and Magic Carpet Travel share anecdotes and histories, as well as tips for those considering leaving.
This programme was originally broadcast on Resonance 104.4fm in London, on July 14th 2008

Podcast

A messthetic anything-goes zone with DJ’s, artists, authors, musicians, non-musicians and anybody out on the margins.

Jonny Mugwump & the exotic Pylon is on at 9:30 pm every Saturday night

Email jonnymugwump@gmail.com about.

6IIIs to Persia on Resonance104.4fm

Photographer Jamshid Bayrami shows his works in ‘Haj’, the opening exhibition at Xerxes Fine Arts Gallery in London, the only permanent gallery dedicated to Iranian art.

Bayrami has worked successfully as a photo journalist and is known for his picture of a bloodied hand print on a T-shirt during student protests that appeared on the front of The Economist magazine.

Here Fari Bradley talks to gallery owner and curator Ali Bagherzadeh, who is himself a collector, about the show and its pieces.

This show was originally broadcast from the Resonancefm studios on July 7th 2008

…Listen to the interview…

Nima Tehranchi singer from Hush the Many Heed the Few visits the studio and talks to Fari Bradley about his success with Hush the Many and with his own solo project “Sliding Rule“.

Nima plays live in the studio.

Hush the Many are known for their finely balanced vocal interplays and innovative songwriting.

Listen to the interview

Most Iranian parents want their children to be lawyers or doctors, so how do aspiring musicians fare with their parents when making out-of-the-ordinary career choices and what does contemporary music mean to most young Iranians?

Fari Bradley reports from the Contemporary Iranian Music event at the Camden Underworld and interviews artist Maria Kheirkhah live in the studio about her career choice to become an artist, collecting air in the Iranian desert for her projects and her current exhibition the Psychology of Fear. Featured are Farinaz Entegham, Ali Charmi on hip hop and faith, and the father of one of the members of Simorgh.

This show was originally broadcast from Resonancefm studios in London on June 16th 2008, produced and presented by Fari Bradley

Listen to the audio

Sote is a composer and sound designer living in America. On a chance visit to Iran her heard a sound he had never heard before which led to a long relationship with Alireza Mashayekhi with whom he recently released a double CD on Sub Rosa records. With roots in Germany, he has developed a trademark process for audio that gives his work it’s unique shape and signature sound. After a release of drum and bass on WARP records, Sote has moved into experimental music on Sub Rosa.

Fari talks with him about those processes and the moment he first heard Mashayekhi’s music, and we hear two of these experimental tracks from the album Persian Electronic Music Yesterday and Today 1966-2006. Many thanks to Sub Rosa Records for allowing us to podcast these tracks.

This show was broadcast live from Resonancefm studios in London April 7th 2008.

New Iranian National Ballet with Lady Jamila Kharrazi, the Toos Foundation, and Nima Kiann of Les Ballets Persans, Sweden, prior to the gala performance at Logan Hall to mark Les Ballets Persans’ 6th anniversary.

In a country where dance and performance is highly restricted, ballet seems something left over from the days of the Shas, a testimony to the effects of the identity of countries the west has sought to dominate. Meanwhile we may be familiar with classical scores that have sought to capture the spirit of the middle east with endemic melodies on violin or the standardisation of a sound from the Middle East on the string section, creating a kind of platitude in music for treatment of subjects during the launch of the era of technicolour film (Ala’ad-Din, Sinbad etc).

In an ambitious move, Nima Khiann presents not only the ballet but an entire history of the importance of dance in Persian history, simultaneously dictated in English and Farsi at the gala performance with some sufi dancing by his ballet company, where the girls exchange their trademark buns for the loose, wild hair of a mystic seeker. The sufi tradition, we are told encourages dancing, an irony not lost on an audience comprised of many seeking artistic and spiritual freedom here in the UK.

Lady Jamileh Kharazi discusses the ins and outs of offering events of this size for free and her own extensive background in ballet and performance.

shelectronica: remembering the women behind the BBC radiophonic workshop

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and we’ve seen an array of events springing up across the country to commemorate this, most recently this past weekend’s ‘Doctor Who’-themed Proms. Amid all the celebrations it’s easy to forget that, were it not for the efforts of pioneer Daphne Oram, the Workshop might never have existed. Despite being regarded as a beacon of standards in the 1950s, the BBC did not think the developing movement of electronic music in Europe merited any attention, deeming it fad. With hundreds of musicians and an orchestra they thought they did not need ’synthetic music’. Oram, who worked in classical music, had to spend her own evenings setting up the Workshop despite the opposition from the BBC, campaigning relentlessly with her colleague Desmond Briscoe from the radio drama department for the provision of funds and equipment.

In 1959, having finally been able to persuade the BBC of the Workshop’s worth, Oram left the organisation after just one year to work independently on her own music. It was in fact Delia Derbyshire whose name would become synonymous with the Workshop; responsible for the genesis of the ‘Doctor Who’ theme tune she became the Workshop’s brightest star. Other sci-fi soundtracks, for example, ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’, as well as sounds for programmes with low music budgets were also borne out of the Workshop, all of it done with spliced tape using musique concrète techniques. 

This year’s anniversary of the Workshop, which officially closed its doors in 1998, has seen a surge of interest in both women. The discovery of over 250 lost tapes of Derbyshire’s work and the Southbank Centre’s celebration of Daphne Oram, with some recently discovered works by Oram performed for the first time, has resulted in a wave of articles, radio programmes and concerts. Radio 4’s ‘Woman’s Hour’ rang me several times to pick my brains about how Delia in particular inspired me, and what it was like being a woman in circuitry at the moment.

My interest in the Workshop is natural as I create my own circuits, sounds and effects boxes. What I’m doing is not new, it has a history, so the history not only deserves a nod but we need to touch base from time to time so as not to lose direction and maintain authenticity. Like the ladies of the Radiophonic Workshop, I work in radio art, with the Resonancefm Radio Orchestra amongst others. Despite half a century having gone by, the quality of sound still generates disbelief (“is that music?”) and scorn (“learn to play an instrument!”). Yet what other sounds befit a live speech by Lembit Öpik in the Camden Roundhouse as part of their Space Soon events? It has to be electronics because they are the very sounds of advancing science itself, fusing the latest technology with modern creativity for its own soundtrack.

Much of the equipment used by the BBC Workshop came from the military, from found objects and materials. Now with military research calling for smaller and smaller circuitry, a 1lb secondhand keyboard of ubiquitous design can do the work of an entire studio from the 1950s. With some circuit bending on the same keyboard, we can create sounds that not only mirror those of the Workshop, but go much further. Thanks to a free workshop set up by Chris Weaver from Resonancefm, I’ve learned to circuit bend existing instruments and solder new circuits. Much of the fun is to play with randomness and noise generators. As we move into an era of the possibility of thinking machines, what better than a computer that makes its own music in a seemingly random way, to mark this latest scientific frontier?

We women in circuitry will find it hard to match the innovation and tenacity of Oram, though. When she was finally given two rooms at BBC Maida Vale in which to base the Workshop, Oram stuck a defiant note to the doors, quoting Francis Bacon’s 1626 utopian novel ‘The New Atlantis’.

"We have also sound-houses..." Francis Bacon, 'The New Atlantis' (1626)

It is a delight to find yourself part of a legacy like this. For example, feeling shy about having sampled my own cat because it might be deemed too ‘girly’ by the male-heavy electronics community, it was fabulous to later hear Oram sampling her own cats and playing with the possibility of sound and arrangement. 

Current speculation on the legacy of the Workshop makes interesting reading, suggesting that female electronics performers are the fruits of Oram’s labours. What they miss, though, is the cornerstone of innovation that the Workshop represented, and the fact that the sounds and techniques were entirely created on found/recycled materials left over from other BBC departments. Computer programmes and effects now are now ubiquitous, yet few women are really taking control of the sound they make from its very generation. I remember discussing a term I’d come up with for the feminine in electronics as shelectronica with performance artist and Throbbing Gristle co-founder Cosi Fanni Tutti. “I’ve read your thoughts on this,” she said, “and I agree, men also make this kind of electronic sound which you categorise as shelectronica.”

Fari Bradley with her oriental circuit box: "Women love it because all the other equipment is grey or black, functional, and very masculine"

Even now, the sometimes abrasive effects of sound art and electronics is something of a rebellion from conventional music, especially as music becomes more and more commercial. There is also a tomboyish rebellion in following this path in sound. Certainly for me there was. At 18 I wasn’t allowed to join a local mechanics course by my parents, who said I’d break my nails on the course and it wasn’t for girls. So now I’m doing another type of mechanics and I can even remember a comment from one of the performers of the vocal piece I wrote for my GCSE Music portfolio: “It’s like nothing I’ve ever heard,” they said, and I was satisfied.

Fari Bradley
Fari is a composer and radio artist who has produced commissioned film soundtracks and performs with the group Oscillatorial Binnage. For more information visit her website.

Nooshin Farhid: Hair Salon (video), 2004

Interview with Nooshin Farhid, film-artist. London based Farhid has co-curated a number of exhibitions including “Use this kind of Sky” . Farhid’s videos employ different subjects and scenarios with a connecting thread of agitation, restlessness and a sense of things not being right. We discuss her interest in these and how certain ideas for films have formed, which interestingly harks back to her own experiences as an immigrant to the UK. The unwillingness to settle for what is on offer that is evident in all her work, reflects Farhid’s views on the current state of society, politics and ideology.

Though not overtly political, (for this inevitably enables privileged authority to manipulate the artist into the cul de sac of irrelevance), her work picks away at those daily familiar stabilising forces within the space of the everyday and also within contemporary art itself. Farhid’s work, eclectic and conceptually nomadic, uses the camera as a notebook collecting fragments of encounters, events, chance meetings that collectively question the incessant drive towards normality and conformity. Farhid appropriates that other dumbing form of popular media: soaps, reality TV, Bollywood, MTV. This raw material is welded together in fragments, each one activating and qualifying its predecessor. This process produces a contemporary surreal space that re-presents the familiar in that which is astonishing and invites the viewer to reconsider. Aside from all this, Nooshin turns out to be a quirky and humorous talent, who works as both artists and curator, resident and outsider. Click the play icon to hear the interview in full.

Camila Batmanghelidjh is a psychotherapist and founder/director of Kids Company, a London charity devoted to ‘lone’ children (young people who experience significant psychosocial difficulties because their parent is unable to function as a caring adult). The lack of a functioning adult has a negative impact on their ability to access education, health, housing and meaningful employment.

Born in Tehran to prosperous Iranian and Belgian parents, Batmanghelidjh went to public school in Dorset, England. Her father was Dr. Fereydoon Batmanghelidj.

Severely dyslexic, Batmanghelidjh completed her studies using a tape recorder instead of pen and paper. She completed her degree in theatre and dramatic arts at Warwick Uni gaining First Class Honours. Then she did a Master’s degree on the philosophy of counselling and psychotherapy, two years of child observation and a course in art therapy at Goldsmith’s. For four years, she trained in psychotherapy. She also worked with children as a nanny, and discovered a talent for the work.

Batmanghelidjh used her mortgage repayments to set up “The Place to Be”, offering psychotherapy and counselling to children in schools. It is now a national project and serves in excess of 20,000 children a year.

Camila is Director of “Kids Company” a registered charity. Kids Company supports children with severe behavioural, emotional and social difficulties resulting from significant levels of trauma and neglect. The children often suffer from abuse, mental health problems, substance misuse and homelessness. Kids Company aims to restore their trust and provide an environment in which they can begin the healing process, using a carefully designed support system that includes psychotherapy, counselling, education, arts, sports, hot meals and various other practical interventions.

Kids Company currently delivers services to 11,925 clients through – 33 inner-city schools in London, – a drop-in centre at street-level in Camberwell and – a new, post-fourteen educational institute, the Urban Academy in Southwark.

For ten years Kids Company has survived due to the support of charitable trusts and businesses. It has been a ‘hand to mouth’ existence for the organisation. On two occasions Camila re-mortgaged her flat to see Kids Company through its lack of funding.

Batmanghelidjh won the Social Entrepreneur of the Year Award 2005. She has written Shattered Lives: Children Who Live with Courage and Dignity, ISBN 1-84310-434-2 and other papers. She was also nominated in The Good List 2006, of exceptional people.

She appeared at the 2006 Conservative Party Conference and was awarded the Woman of the year award for 2006 in recognition of her work with Kids Company.

She has curated two major art exhibitions, one called “Shrinking Childhoods” at the Tate Modern in 2005 and “Demons and Angels: Does it have to be this way?” at Shoreditch Town Hall.

She appeared on Desert Island Discs on Sunday 22nd October, 2006 and talks today to Fari Bradley about the company, the children and is accompanied by one of the many kids that Kids Company has helped.

The self-cancellation gigs involved ice, burning harps and tubas slowly filling with sand.

People crammed into the Beasconsfield Gallery to see and hear the fantastic pieces that had been pulled together to celebrate what is the last LMC festival, due to Arts Council cuts (hence the name).

My involvement was to create a way of turning Gustav Metzger’s “Acid Action Painting”  into sound. The piece involves painting hydrochloric acid onto nylon slides which then, rather quickly, were placed into  projector. The image projected then is one of the slowly mutating colours and shapes as the acid eats through the nylon leaving a white screen.

The set up was to create four light to sound converters (basically amplifiers with LDRs as an input) and place the LDRs along the middle of the projector screen. The output of each amplifers was then EQ’d and compressed before being fed into the main P.A system.

The result was very pleasing with the sound being firmly a “product” of the movement on screen. Metzger in later interviews has said [regarding the LMC event]

Yes, it was astonishing because colour came through. When I originally projected acid on nylon, beginning in February 1963, all the images on the screen were black and white — and here, for some reason or other that I could never understand – they had colour on the screen and it was indeed breath-taking and startling and a completely fresh experience for me and for the audience.

I was also lucky to play electronics in a group piece by Rhodri Davies called Palimpsest, which uses overlayed Sodukhu games as a graphic score.

Six Pillars to Persia is today’s critic’s choice in The Independent. Click here for the high def version.

Many thanks to artist Amanda Moss, who texted to let us know.

A wonderfully upbeat and eclectic look at what’s out there by Persian musicians. From Jew’s harp to hip hop, tombak to free form jazz we have searched far and wide to bring you some of the best sounds in alternative Iranian modern music.

Listen out for the distinct Iranian vocal technique employed by Mamak Khadem, pictured here, the experiments with Jew’s harp and the wonderful Sitar piece by Omid.

Thanks too all the artists, who gave permission for this podcast to happen.

With many difficult subjects, animation can depict what film cannot. Maryam has found her metier in animation and even though she only graduated a short while ago, she has already been shown in several international galleries and completed a residency in Austria.

Maryam’s films touch on the innocence of youth, the trivia of everyday life in an Iranian setting of peaceful times at war, amongst other things.

We listen to music by Abjeez (slang for sister in Persian), discuss living away from your home town, animation as a trade, films in general, The Girl With the Short Hair (Maryam’s film) and more.

This show was broadcast on 104.4fm in London and recorded at Resonancefm studios, London on 14th January 2008

Clever boy Lekonik has his finger in several musical pies. He can make beats as well as the next man but uses his film background to create truly singular tracks that make your ears prick up as soon as you hear them.

One of those tracks is played here: “Kitchen” where each screen shot corresponds to the sound it produced until the sounds layer up to make an intriguing and singular piece.

Amir discusses his current project based on his home town Shiraz, his family, Iranian culture and film and we are treated to four of tracks.

Hear the show:

Propelled by the story of Deeyah (aka the Muslim Madonna) and her encouragement of other Muslim girls to make music, Jus1Jam came all the way from Bradford for a discussion on being a Muslim and a musician at the same time, and to read her lyrics as poetry.Deeyah’s career caused a lot of trouble and is subsequently conferred to the fringes of media attention. People working with Deeyah have been known to abandon their projects for unexplained reasons, and she herself has received death threats and been forced underground. This begs the question: how do Muslim girls with a leaning towards the arts balance their beliefs and their talents, in a western setting where other girls are ‘free’ to express themselves and perform without fear?

Jus1Jam recites her poetry for us in the studio, discusses being a muslim liberal and growing up in Muslim-heavy Bradford.

A studio visit by Director of the film company “Storm Creation Ltd“: Clive Collier.

Grandson and great-grandson of two Iranian poet laureates under the Shah, Clive was adamant that he was going to jazz dance the answers to Fari’s questions. However Clive was far too interesting to deviate from his work, his life, his thoughts into some abstract creativity. With only half an hour we managed to brush on his milestone work where he single handedly put together “Sanctuary” the only documentary on Lisa Gerrard of Dead Can Dance, his present project the release “Eureka: The Mind of Edgar Allen Poe“. He also treated us to some early work on the soundtracks to his Poe project, which already capture the Gothic complexities of both the man’s mind and the era he lived in.

Clive is also a technical editor of Showreel magazine and is not above taking the train from Brighton to grace us with his presence. I hope he will return with translations of his forefather’s poetry, more stories and some work about Allen Poe which if I know Clive, will be insightful, intuitive and inspiring.