Bill Talsma started hoarding the black and brown tangles of audiotape he found strewn on sidewalks and snagged in shrubs, but he wasn’t sure what to do with them.
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This urban tinsel is so ubiquitous that it’s practically invisible. Once he began wondering about it, Talsma started seeing it everywhere. In two and half years he collected about a thousand ribbons of varying lengths and conditions. He was fascinated by the idea that their undigested appearance implied that they had been vomited, like so many plates of spoiled linguine.
Last spring Talsma applied for and was awarded 40 hours of studio time at Andersonville’s Experimental Sound Studio through their Artists’ Residency Program. He proposed to create a composition made up of sounds salvaged from the tapes that would be reintroduced or “re-regurgitated” back to the community in the form of a radio broadcast.
Detritus: Radio Regurgitation will be broadcast on Something Else, an experimental-music program on WLUW, 88.7 FM, Sunday night at 10 PM and then on War Bride, Monday at midnight on WHPK, 88.5 FM. –Mike Sula
