Breathing Rotations in the Imaginary Radio Station

By Stephen Adams with The Music Box Project

Four musicians of The Music Box Project deliver synchronised breath-length phrases to microphones, their presence doubled by the simultaneous lo-fi local broadcast diffusion of their music through the domestic radios they carry. The radios also diffusing field recordings played to air by a fifth performer, composer-producer Stephen Adams, operating the mixing desk of the Imaginary Radio Station. The installation looping in on itself when the musicians shift to using their radios to play the microphone feedback. All five artists interacting within a shared space of improvised sound-making and intense listening.

Breathing Rotations is a framework for improvising within the Imaginary Radio Station - a networked instrument-cum-sound-installation.

The installation enables a kind of live radio-making and hyper local broadcast to the performance venue and its immediate surroundings, with the performers both creating content for the station, and operating its lo-fi sound diffusion for the audience.

Breathing Rotations takes a mediative approach to the potentials of the Imaginary Radio Station. Four musicians are invited to improvise synchronised breath-length phrases to the four microphones at four corners of the room. With long pauses between phrases as the musicians move from one microphone to the next. Their sound-making and their movements are framed and potentially influenced by a fifth performer, the broadcast controller, who sits at a small mixing desk with FM transmitter, looking after the live mix as well as adding low-key field recordings and other audio files to the ‘program’ of live music-making broadcasting to the four radios which the musicians carry.

Over the course of the performance (which might last anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours), as well as rotating around the room in one direction or another (and occasionally choosing to remain at one mic for a while), the musicians gradually shift, one at a time, from playing their chosen musical instruments to playing microphone feedback with their radios, and finally to using their voices. The musicians cannot know what each other will play in each synchronised phrase. They know only what each played previously, and what they know of each other’s musical approaches and inclinations. Plus whatever may be suggested by their ways of moving between microphones, and the atmospheres created by the field recordings and that share the broadcast and acoustic space with them.

I created the Imaginary Radio Station (IRS) for Sydney-based collective The Music Box Project (TMBP), with the intention of composing a concert length work for TMBP, envisaged as built around an imaginary broadcast schedule, with opportunities to respond and incorporate material from the environments and audience members at each venue where it is installed/performed. While that concept is still in development, in March 2025 during a Bundanon artist residency with TMBP and dramaturg Nikki Heywood, an improvisation exercise I introduced proved to be particularly generative and exciting for all of us, emerging through further exploration and dialogue as a fully-formed model for a more abstract structured improvisational work, Breathing Rotations.

This program is a 28-minute radio edit and mix of a 50-minute workshop performance of that work by The Music Box Project and me, Stephen Adams, in the Dorothy Porter Studio at Bundanon to an audience of one - our collaborating dramaturg Nikki Heywood.

The opening field recording is of the sounds of dawn at Bundanon, as recorded on the verandah of the cottage next door to the studio at first waking on the morning of the performance. The final ‘field recording’ is the sounds from outside through the open studio door.

Performed by Elizabeth Jigalin (recorder, radio, voice), Naomi Johnson (flute, radio, voice), Jane Aubourg (violin, radio, voice), Joseph Lisk (trumpet, radio, voice), and Stephen Adams (live mix, field recordings and other pre-recorded material)

Concept developed by Stephen Adams for and in in dialogue with The Music Box Project and collaborating dramaturg Nikki Heywood.

Produced by Stephen Adams