Absolute Rhythm: Works for Minor Radio

Absolute Rhythm makes a selection of my radiophonic scripts available for production. Most of the scripts printed here were originally commissioned and broadcast by public radio. However, the period of experimental public radio is largely over. Hence Absolute Rhythm has a secondary purpose: to present a trajectory of sound art in a post-radiophonic performance environment. Any dramatic work presented outside the original context of writing, realization and reception presents challenges of interpretation; cultural references lose currency; staging and acting conventions change; in sound art advances in digital technology have significantly altered studio practice. However, the challenge of ensuring the 'main form' of the work survives 'the vicissitudes of performance'1 is clearly greater when the performance space for which the works were written no longer exists - and this within a couple of decades of their original inspiration and circulation. Radio is a medium, not a genre, and a number of the scripts in Absolute Rhythm are similarly adaptable: Cooee Song is a performance piece; What Is Your Name has been adapted for the stage; and a number of other pieces have the minimal action found in stage works by Synge or Beckett. Underworlds of Jean du Chas, although a baroque riff on certain themes in Beckett, Kierkegaard and Pessoa, is a kind of mental theatre in the tradition of the Romantics.