‘(All We Need is) Radio Ga Ga'

Don't forget the listeners Matthew

Oh Yes,
......Hi Mum

Incommunicado FM beams out across Sheffield from a makeshift MDF radio

shack inside Site Gallery; its frequency pervades Sheffield’s streets, homes,
work places, and settles on the surrounding dales. A potential community of
hundreds of thousands - or just Ross's mum - tune in to make their requests
and listen to Incommunicado's mix of light-hearted DJ banter, assortment of
retro music and chats with Sheffield-based guests. The classic vinyl crackles
loudly. At times guests misbehave and break equipment. At others, the
transmission fails, fragments of words sung and spoken can be caught amid
the interference SSSSSSSSSSS. The occasional periods of radio silence are
interspersed with blips, wobbles, jagged record changes and tracks played at
the wrong speed.

Inside the radio shack, with its egg-box lined (soundproofed) interior, Matt &
Ross are live on air. They wear headphones and matching Incommunicado FM
T-shirts. A scribbled note is stuck to Matt's computer 'Remember to check
your speed!' Around them are old, tattered vinyl records that have been
salvaged from Sheffield’s charity shops over the last week. They fiddle with
computers and recording equipment in-between playing music from their
charity shop collection and chatting to listeners. Next door in the smaller
gallery is the Incommunicado FM production room. Various helpers sort
through lots more boxes of charity shop music, cataloguing, stamping and
filing each record. Signs of industriousness are laid bare; draft music playlists,
gallery memo's, purchase orders, coffee mugs, food. Classified adverts and
headline clippings from the local rag The Sheffield Post are taped into
scrapbooks and pinned on boards. An ad hoc shrine to the gallery's location,
postcode S1 2BS is mounted on the wall. It contains a Ploughman’s sandwich,
a large oak leaf and a half a guitar.

SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

In 'The Practice of Everyday Life' theorist Michel De Certeau locates a productive gap
between a city's residents and how those residents 'use', enunciate or 'speak'
the systems and landscape in which they live. His is a city in which residents
have an agency, or autonomy, over and above the preordained systems of
control, consumerism, exchange, and utility in which they live; everyday actions
such as shopping and reading are transformed into socio-political performatives. For
instance, for De Certeau, to read is not to simply receive an author’s written
product or meaning. Rather, the reader physically manipulates the text she
reads: she productively scripts her own meaning, her own writing - in and by
the act of reading. In that moment of improvisation and exchange the writing
becomes porous: a space the reader can inhabit, manipulate and occupy. It is a
space in which the reader is equally productive as the writer. Also, in De
Certeau's city, the consumer is not merely a passive receptor of existing or finished
consumer products. The consumer’s act of shopping improvises with and upon the
system of exchange, as well as the products themselves, all in the moment of
purchase. Crucially, this kind of reading and shopping is for De Certeau
‘silently productive’ – production that does not control, stockpile or
commodify.

The agency of this art or practice of the everyday, for De Certeau, relies upon,
'a distinction between the forms used in a system and the ways of using this
system'.i In other words, it relies upon a definition of the performative; the
gap between words and 'what words do'; the difference between speaking and
speech act. It is this performative separation or autonomy of form and its utility that
enables De Certeau to unpick the problematic binary of passive/ active in the
normative consumer/producer or reader/writer equation. It is within and by this
separation that De Certeau’s reader, shopper and user of the city radicalises utility
and consumption.

That was great. I actually got up and had a bit of a boogie woogie in the
studio...

....Back in Sheffield, Matt & Ross's buying back of the city's unwanted music, is
productive, moreover performative. Their consumption performs a space of
enunciation, of relations to commodity and exchange systems as well as social
relations to the city itself, to the people who live in it. It is an acting out of the same
performative separation that De Certeau articulates between the system and how that
system is used: a purchase that is distinct from, and skews, the same exchange
system that Matt & Ross engage in at their moment of purchase. The records
are also productively impacted upon in this scenario. Matt & Ross's reappropriation
of, and investment in, the abandoned, technologically and economically unviable vinyl is
one that is over and above the records’ accepted exchange value; it is exorbitant. And in being
given the artists un-due attention, the records themselves become exorbitant; they manifest a
surplus, or exceed themselves. They (once again) become collectibles.

............I know I'm going to regret saying boogie woogie

This is how Matt & Ross practice the art of everyday life, to use De Certeau's phrase.
It is a practice that operates from and on the level of the city's general public: the
silent majority or anonymous public that constitute the city as such. Incommunicado FM
speaks this silent public majority by asking residents to select tracks from Sheffield's
unwanted music, then playing it back into the homes whence the records came. The
transmission signals aspects of Sheffield that are forgotten, unseen or otherwise
unheard. It creates a landscape that speaks of and to the people of Sheffield: their lives,
their homes, or more specifically, the soundtrack to them.

Brenda Diskin, local psychic and member of Sheffield Paranormal

Investigations, thanks for coming on the show to talk to us about Sheffield's
paranormal landscape. Your first choice is Crystal Gayle's 1978 Why have you
left the one you left me for? from St Vincent’s charity shop on Abbeydale
Road. Why this particular track?

Why have you left the one you left me for? Has she heard, like me, that
slammin' door? Did you leave for good or just get bored? Why have you left
the one you left me for? Is she what…You wanted? Or has time…Changed
your mind? Has your dream…Love gone crazy? And what brings…You here
tonight?

The worn album cover with its dated typeface and the jet black shiny vinyl
inside, reverberate past owners; past collections, past lives. Tracks that echo
changes in circumstances, a lover’s spat or a separation. An ex- partner’s
possessions waiting to be taken away; once shared and treasured vinyl now in
boxes labelled 'charity shop'.

Why have you left the one you left me for? Has she heard, like me, that
slammin' door? Did you leave for good or just get bored? Why have you left
the one you left me for? I can see…You're hurting. But I'm not sure…If it's
real! How can I…Really hold you? When I don't…When I don't know how
you feel?

Matt & Ross's re-appropriation of, and DJ'ing with, the city's unwanted
charity shop records is improvisatory; a jazz-like riff with Sheffield's existing
musical ready-mades that plays, re and de-forms the city's old unwanted
albums. It is a critical improvisation that, according to artist and theorist John
Seth, is 'a subject-forming that is constituted by the very weave of the
moment, place and circumstances of enunciation.'ii Matt & Ross's
improvisation then, is performative: a subversive riffing or 'speaking' of an
existing structure or object in the moment of utterance that occupies the
separation between the act of improvisation and that which is being
improvised upon. It is improvisation that performs the same gap articulated in
and by De Certeau's 'silently productive' acts of reading, or shopping; it
enacts, and simultaneously manipulates, existing products (albums) and
'speaks' wider social conditions.

....And in its ‘in progress’ moment of live transmission, as the original records
are re-animated and re-played out across the city, the old music is re-worked
and stretched in scope and affect; something else is produced on this
frequency, something new, something that is distinctly British and 'speaks' the
city of Sheffield.

This is Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic by the Police, it’s dedicated
to ‘the attractive girl in my dissertation group’ by Rob from student band
Clamp.

Every little thing she does is magic. Everything she do just turns me on. Even
though my life before was tragic. Now I know my love for her goes on. I
resolve to call her up a thousand times a day. And ask her if she’ll marry me
in some old fashioned way. But my silent fears have gripped me. Long before
I reach the phone. Long before my tongue has tripped me. Must I always be
alone?

To listen is to partake in the intimacy of radio; an intimacy feigned at yet once

rejected. The broadcast enters your home; simultaneously just for you and for
everyone else. Listeners are part of, and interact with, a listening community
but at the same time can remain anonymous, unseen and unheard. This
unique mix makes Incommunicado FM's listeners brave. They air secrets,
insecurities and loves. ....Did Rob from Clamp get his girl?

What was that? My earphones went funny.

So did mine.

SSSSSSSSSSSSS. This is the backbeat; the unheard or slipped part of the

rhythm, the beat that is always there, even when not beaten or played. We are
the silent part of the music, the supplemental or always already that makes
the rhythm, the city, what it is. SSSSSSSS We are the background or 'white
noise' of Sheffield, the anonymous masses that constitute the city as such.
Incommunicado in our homes, our bedrooms, our studies. We produce and
use - silently, productively - we improvise upon the transmission, insert our
own memories, imagine our own music. Our own childhood recollections or
misspent youth break through the fabric of the frequency. We occupy it, rework
it, deform it to our own purpose and create new meanings with the
music. SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS. Our histories simultaneously performed, emitted,
transmitted and heard. We are the real sound of the city, no longer
incommunicado, still out there, in progress, speaking volumes.

SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

Rachel Lois Clapham

i MichelDe Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Translated by Steven Rendall, University of
California press, 1984. p xxi
ii Jon
Seth ‘Improvisations: From 'My Favorite Things' to an 'agency of night' ' in After Criticism; new
responses to Art and Performance' Blackwell, Ed. Gavin Butt, 2005. p 147

This essay was commissioned by Site Gallery for Site Platform 2008 and includes excerpts of
live broadcast material from Incommunicado FM spoken by Matt and Ross. Also original lyrics
by the Police ‘Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic’ and Crystal Gayle ‘Why have you left
the one you left me for?’
Site Platform offers an opportunity for artists to develop new durational and experimental work
in a gallery setting whilst also allowing audiences to engage with the process.

Matt & Ross’ are a collaborative art duo who live and work in the East End of London. Matt &
Ross studied on the Arts and Media BA (Hon.) at The Surrey Institute of Art and Design,
Farnham, Surrey and graduated in July 2003. Recent exhibitions include ‘ArtFutures‘08’
(CAS/Bloomberg) and ‘Hopetown’, their first UK Solo Exhibition. Their work has recently been
acquired by Channel 4’s Art4 Collection and the Permanent collection at The New Art Gallery
Walsall.