Radio Cycle 101.4FM (2003)
Imagine a bird’s eye view of Bow, East London. Imagine the shifting sound map that ebbs and flows with the passage of the day. Imagine a music that infiltrates that. Not just through several homes tuning into the same radio station at the same time, or a host of folk all being into the same cd at the same time. No. Imagine that piece playing from 50 small speakers, all moving through the streets in choreographed routes, individually, in small groups or together. Quietly infiltrating the everyday noise of the city, like spiders, all in unison, maybe unnoticed, maybe coming together at some street corner to play some weird music or hear a story. Imagine that those sound pieces are made by you.
RADIO CYCLE was set up to do just that. A mobile stage and live radio station it broadcast music, stories, and favourite sounds chosen and made by visitors, as its teams of radio carrying cyclists performed scores mapping out London’s East end. Drawing parallels between Marconi’s early wireless experiments and today’s advanced communication technologies, RADIO CYCLE also ran interactive broadcasts and free guided workshops for participants to come make music and choreograph sonic cycling maps for airwave transmission. Radio Cycle was the starting point for The Marvelo Project.
Kaffe Matthews was born in Essex, England, and lives and works in London. Since 1996 she has been making new electro-acoustic music through a system of self designed software matrices through which she pulls and pushes different sounds live. The variety of sounds, things and places she has worked with have ranged from self played violin and theremin, sounds of spaces, kite strings on an uninhabited Scottish Island, flight data from NASA scientists, Scottish and Irish pipers, melting ice in Quebec, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, vibrating wires in the West Australian outback and recently a Vietnamese monochord and seaside sounds processed with 11 year olds to be dispersed by visitor pedalled bicycles. She has just returned from a month of working with sharks and conservation scientists on the Galapagos Islands.
In 2006 she established the collective research project music for bodies making music to feel rather than just listen to through specialist sonic interfaces. With the worldwide Bed Project intending to build its seventh Bed, her research is now developing outdoor concrete Benches in Hackney, with the first now permanently installed in Mexico City.
Kaffe continues to regularly collaborate, and was an Artistic Advisor to STEIM, (electronic music studios) Amsterdam, NL. Her 2004 collaboration Weightless Animals was awarded a BAFTA, she received a NESTA Dreamtime Fellowship in 2005 and an Award of Distinction, Prix Ars Electronica 2006 for the work Sonic Bed London. In February 2006 she was made an Honorary Professor of Music, Shanghai Music Conservatory, China and in 2009 a patron of the Galapagos Conservation Trust shark project.
Recent works include: Sonic Bed_Marfa,(2008),The Ballroom Marfa, Texas; The Marvelo Project (2008), work for bicycles and GPS connected scores, Folkestone Triennial; Sonic Bench_Mexico,(2007) Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Mexico City; Body Abiding (2007), BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Glasgow, Scotland; Sonic Bed_Shanghai,(2006), Xuhui Art Museum, Shanghai, China; Three Crosses of Queensbridge,(2005) work for bicycles + radios, the Drawing Room, London; No-one here but us chickens (2005), TATE Modern, London, UK. Her stereo solo works are released and available through Annette Works.
Website http://www.kaffematthews.net
