Well done our excellent P.R. friends at Mobius. Here’s a feature about Tuning Out With Radio Z in Wired – they have promised us a shot of the show will replace the current library shot of a radio.
Archive for the ‘Tuning Out With Radio Z’ Category
Radio Z Gets Wired
Friday, July 23rd, 2010Tuning Out With Radio Z Opens
Saturday, May 15th, 2010These have been two quite extraordinary days. This show consumes you.
Pass Cards
Wednesday, May 12th, 2010
Of all the things that are better about mac since its rebuild the one I have been enjoying most since we have been here setting up for Tuning Out With Radio Z is the pass cards. No more trudging around for hours looking for duty managers or technicians to come and let you into the theatre. No nagging anxiety that some crucial door will be left unlocked and all your stuff nicked. No complicated negotiations about which member of the company will hold the dressing room key and take it home with them by mistake that night.
The only upgrade from here would be elasticated lanyards guarding against card-swiper’s back.
Sleeping With Stan’s Cafe
Wednesday, May 5th, 2010
It is rare in the company’s history that we have had a surfit of young women willing to sleep with us. This is probably because in the past we have relied on conventional tactics (having a shower and memorizing some jokes). In fact it turns out advertising on ‘Arts Jobs’ is a far more efficient modus operandi.
The new show requires sleeping figures on stage and whilst the response has been terrific it hasn’t included the demographic spread we were after; so if you are a man of any age of a woman over 35 and fancy playing a key, if recumbent role in Tuning Out With Radio Z then please do get in touch: admin@stanscafe.co.uk
And You May Find Yourself
Thursday, April 22nd, 2010
And you may find yourself looking at Microsoft Windows XP running on your MacBook
And you may say to yourself “My God, what have I done?”
And what you have probably done is found that the VJ software you need for your new show only runs on Windows XP.
And you have found out that you can now run the two operating systems on one computer.
However, like many things in life:
just because it is possible does not mean that it is not wrong.
Same as it ever was.
James
Back To Wriggler
Monday, April 5th, 2010Such are the complications of our Spring Diary that, having taken Tuning Out With Radio Z to the edge of production, we now push it to one side and re-tour Home of the Wriggler. Today was the first of three days rehearsals. Bernadette is back, having been unavailable for last year’s revival. She has done a remarkable job of re-learning the piece and accommodating amendments made to the show since she last did it in 2006.
It has been quite a challenge getting a definitive version of the script together. Amanda is the most punctilious at transcribing changes, but she failed to take her script to Edinburgh, so her changes had to be cross-referenced with mine. Then reading through and again in the first run through it became clear that there are also a host of improvisational additions that have becomes fixed as script but have never written up as such.
Despite all the is we are getting there.
Love List On BBC Radio 3
Monday, March 29th, 2010Love List, one of the pieces from our CD Pieces For The Radio: Volume One was broadcast on Radio 3’s Late Junction last week by Verity Sharp. She last played it in 2006 so thanks to her for digging it out again and giving it an airing. We used it in a rehearsal for Radio Z last week and we also put on a Godspeed You! Black Emperor track who Verity also played on the same night – there must be something going on there mustn’t there …?
PS .. you can buy the CD in our shop – button on the right there
Craig
The First Four Hours
Friday, March 26th, 2010
Tonight for the first time we ran a full live theatre length (four hour) version of Tuning Out With Radio Z, including webcasting and web-writing. It didn’t sink and we learned an enormous amount, which is as much as we could hope for.
Thanks go to our gallant volunteer audience who endured this first effort.
I suspect we will doing this a few more times before 13th May.
Musical Inspiration
Thursday, March 25th, 2010It’s possible to draw inspiration from all quarters and when in the midst of making a new show you are particularly open to being inspired. With these high hopes Craig and I headed to the Adrian Boult Hall.
The headliner was Louis Andriessen, the fantastic Dutch composer whose piece The Republic ‘influenced’ The Hearing Of Susan Tuesday a show we made with Students years ago. We were also lured in by Michael Wolters who we are collaborating with on I See With My Eyes Closed.
It was a great evening with a host of short pieces creating in effect a sampler of contemporary composition. We enjoyed Michael’s piece Pop which performs an outrageous edit of Debussey’s La Mere and made us laugh. We loved Mumiko Miyachi’s C-12, which despite its austere program notes proved delightful. Andriessen’s Hout and Bells For Haarlem were great but the real inspiration came from his extraordinary Workers Union.
The there were interesting formal dimensions to the piece which we may be able to apply cross art form, in the same way that the phasing patterns deployed by Steve Reich once influenced us, an influence most nakedly apparent in Bleak Heart Driver, but subtly embodied in much work elsewhere. In Workers Union our understanding is that the score determines with great precision how the ensemble should mesh rhythmically whist leaving the choice of pitch much more with the players. Craig has subsequently found recordings of the piece with wildly varying instrumentation. The upshot was an extraordinarily powerful piece. We also draw inspiration from the directness and confidence of Andriessen’s compositions, their boldness and luck of fuss– he doesn’t mess around.
Whilst on the subject of musical inspiration, I’m just finishing off Julian Cope’s Japrocksampler and find myself desperate to have Tuning Out With Radio Z powered entirely by the Japanese psychadelic hard-rock bands described in that book and which I’ve never heard (though we did all troop down to an Acid Mothers Temple gig a number of years ago and that doesn’t sound far off). Don’t worry, this won’t happen, but we do currently have custody of Graeme’s CD collection and yesterday good and righteous stuff happened with a monumental slab of Popol-Vuh playing. Maybe I need to get stuck into Krautrocksampler.
Illicit Photo
Sunday, March 21st, 2010
Last week felt like a key week in making our new show Tuning Out With Radio Z. Rehearsing a 6 hour long improvised show is a new challenge for us. It has been tough so far, but at last if feels as if we made a breakthrough.
This blurry photograph has been sneaked out of the rehearsal room.
