So Bring Me Down was commissioned by NOW 98, Nottingham's annual
performance festival for their radio station NOWFM.
Spread over the six days of the station's licence, these short programmes,
many of them only 30 seconds long, combined to tell the astronaut story
from Ocean of Storms. Scattered
unannounced through the station's schedule, the programmes central conceit
was that the NOWFM frequency was occasionally shared by Jo, an astronaut
lost in space and contemplating a suicidal attempt at re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere,
and Al, her mission controller. Working in a fake 'real time' the programs
started to work as their own trailers, building towards Jo's attempt to return home.
The joy of being comissioned by an experimental station was a freedom
to play not just with scheduling, but with static, silence, distortion
and unpredictability. A year or after So Bring Me Down archive recordings
of the first Apollo moon landing were broadcast on British television in a
similar fake 'real time'.
Jo: Sarah Dawson
Al:Amanda Hadingue
Text / Direction: James Yarker
Production: Brian Duffy & Jony Easterby
Music by kind permission: Duffy & Easterby plus Richard Chew.
Commissioned by: Andrew Chetty for Now98