FLO at Reveil – SC8 Off Grid

Soundcamp is an arts cooperative based in London, Crete and The Hague. Their work explores intersections among social, personal and environmental ecologies. Over the years, Soundcamp folks, Grant Smith, Dawn Scarfe and Maria Papadomanolaki (who also plays with FLO), organized a number of amazing events including Reveil, a 24-hour live radio programme, assembled and broadcast from a temporary station at Stave Hill (the UK’s first urban ecology park). Due to the global pandemic, Soundcamp 2020 was presented entirely online and a few of us contributed by streaming soundscapes from different locations. In 2021, Soundcamp resumed the activities at Stave Hill, with an extensive programme of walks, talks, workshops, live and remote performances called SC8 Off Grid and another iteration of Reveil, following the sunrise for one whole ‘earth day’ from 5AM at UTC+1 on 1 May 2021 travelling West and tuning into sounds from around the world, which were being streamed to the Locustream Soundmap.

As big fans of Reveil, Nela, Magda and Maria (Mannone) thought it would be great to create a fully telematic performance in which Nela would use her iPad and Sennheiser AMBEO Smart Headset to stream binaural soundscapes from the Sea Organ in Zadar (Croatia) to Magda playing the cello in Warsaw (Poland) and Maria playing the piano in Venice (Italy) so this improvisation can be mixed and streamed to Locustream Soundmap as part of Reveil 24-hour broadcast. We sent our proposal for Zadar Telematic Sessions: #2 For Cello, Piano and the Sea Organ to Soundcamp team and they scheduled our performance at 7.00am (London UTC+1) in the morning on 1 May 2021 🙂

During the pandemic, FLO started experimenting with different ways of telematic performing using binaural soundscapes (check FLO – Zadar Telematic Sessions – #1 For Cello Piano And The Waves Of Dražanica Bay on FLO SoundCloud), so this was an opportunity to push the format further by streaming the mix of the performance to the global audiences in real-time (instead of simply recording it).

Cue in PureData patch whose quirky nature of ‘sometimes-it-works-sometimes-it-doesn’t-but-at-least-it’s-free’ became less and less appealing as the testing with Locustream Soundmap progressed and the last-minute save by the amazing BCSWomen, who endorsed FLO with 3 licences of Rogue Amoeba’s Loopback and Audio Hijack software (capable of doing the ‘internally patching’ and the ‘externally streaming’ a bit more elegantly and much more reliably!) and invited us to do a talk about FLO at BCS and explain how we used it!

Once we figured out how to do stuff, we thought it would be great to share this with the Reveil listeners, so we created a telematic Workshop & Performance: Collaborative music-making with globally distributed musicians, which Soundcamp folks kindly scheduled at 8.00am (London UTC+1), so it happens after our performance. Then, the most amazing thing happened! Jackie who we haven’t seen since she joined us for the workshop and performance at Hangar in Barcelona in 2019, decided to stay up at 3.00am (NYC time) to join us again! It was so lovely catching up with her and finding out what she’s been up to, (and how New Yorkers were handling the pandemic!) and even more lovely to be able to play together again at the end of the workshop. When we finished playing, Jackie posted to SonoBus chat “This has been fun, thank you I am going to go to bed feeling very peaceful :-)” Awwwww ! Nighty night Jackie, take good care of yourself in NYC!

You can listen to the recordings we did as part of the FLO performance at Reveil – SC8 Off Grid (featuring the famous Sea Organ) on the FLO SoundCloud channel.

The full SC8 Off Grid programme can be found here.