LISTEN TO THE FIRST PODCAST OF THIS SEASON: ELECTRONIC VOICE PHENOMENA
feat. Kenneth Goldsmith, Ron Athey, Ross Sutherland, Steven Fowler, Anat Ben David, Hype Williams...
ON SOUNDCLOUD HERE
EPISODE 2 will launch at 2pm on 14th September
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After Nick Holloway's "wry, laconic, dryly witty" podcasts during the Liverpool Biennial 2010, Mercy have invited another of our favourite writers up to the vocalising booth to host Mercy Podcasts 2012: Vanessa Bartlett
Including guest episodes also, Vanessa's weekly offerings will feature interviews, profiles and ephemera around this massive contemporary arts festival, the Biennial's theme of Hospitality - and our own Electronic Voice Phenomena strand.
Our first (launching today) and second (on Friday 14th) podcasts tackle the overarching themes - Electronic Voice Phenomena and Hospitality respectively. Then we'll be into the festival, and the ocean of noise thrown up by the artworks themselves...
You can find the podcasts though Liverpool Biennial
On the Mercy blog
on Soundcloud
and on iTunes
Below, Vanessa gives a little more detail about her approach.
For anyone involved in the Liverpool arts scene, the onset of the Biennial usually means three things: hard work, lots of parties and some very bizarre antics. I've participated in one guise or another since the first festival kicked off in 1999 and have done everything from invigilating artworks, to taking a live horse around the interior of the Adelphi hotel as part of Wong Hoy Cheong's film project Trigger. I've been around long enough to know that it's not always just the headline artwork that makes a Biennial experience so compelling. Often its the adventures that you have while searching around in a park or a pub for a site specific project at 2pm on a windy September afternoon, that really make the Biennial memorable, mind bending and heaps of good fun.
During the 2012 festival, Mercy have asked me to bring you my own sideways and probably highly subjective take on Liverpool Biennial, in a weekly podcast featuring artists, writers, music and events that we think you just can't afford to miss. Its part of the Electronic Voice Phenomena programme that Mercy are producing for this year's festival, in partnership with Liverpool Biennial. Think of us as an interesting back door to the Biennial, that you won't be able to resist drifting your way through every Friday afternoon at 2pm for the next eleven weeks.
We are especially excited about the huge range of talented people that we've already got on board to help us out. The effervescent Oliver Braid of The Ellie & Oliver Show will be bringing you regular suggestions on alternate ways to interact with artwork in the Biennial. We will also have podcasts guest hosted by artists including Daniel Rourke & Holly Pester, Ross Sutherland, Tamarin Norwood and one of our favourite sound art guru Scanner. Andrew Ellis of Samizdat will be curating the tracks that we play each week and our sound design will feature the eerie audio conjuring of Sid Volter.
Most importantly, there is space for you to get involved. In keeping with this year's Biennial theme The Unexpected Guest, we'll be inviting writers to help us produce an army of sound parasites that will creep between the audio cracks in each broadcast. Check out the brief here. In addition, you can let me know if you've got a burning suggestion for things we ought to feature! Get in touch via twitter @vanessabartlett and using our hashtags #evp and #biennial2012. More collaborators are coming on board each week so sign up to Mercy's mailing list or on FB/Twitter for regular updates