Hive has taken place, and I enjoyed it.  A profound experience.

While nothing will be quite like listening to the piece live in the Dome itself, you can still hear the whole of the piece as streamed at Mixlr by clicking here.

Well, almost all of it - the generator ran out of juice 15 minutes before 11am on Sunday, and refilling it and then resetting the computer and interface took quite a while, so I missed the one minute silence on Remembrance Sunday.  It was quite fitting in a way for the broadcast to be silent just then.  Strange how these things work.  

Click here to hear from 11am to 2pm - this recording starts with the bugler at the Cenotaph.  The Mixlr recordings are scrollable, so you can be impatient and go straight to the top of the hours to see how the multiplied news sounds, and check how different it feels at different times of day and night.  Some hours felt very impatient to me, others like the radios just weren't bothering.  Always shifting though.  Some of the audio overlaps were astonishing.

I had a backup recorder running, so hopefully I'll be able to post up the actual 11am silence moment at some point.  Of course not all the radios were silent, but the mood changed instantly.  I have recorded all of the 24 hours of Hive at higher resolution for use in a further representations of the piece.

I was very pleased with the response to the installation.  Thanks to everyone who came by in person, particularly those that made the long trip to the North Norfolk coast, and to everyone who listened live and communicated with me while it happened.  Thanks to Sound and Music for their support with Hive, and to Henry Labouchere for giving me my personal flypast in his 1930 biplane, such a thrill I almost dropped my iPhone.  Thanks once again to Bevis Bowden for another 24 hours.  And most of all many thanks to Patrick Allen, the Friends of Langham Dome and the North Norfolk Historic Buildings Trust for making me so welcome and permitting me to install Hive in their remarkable building.

Click here to go to the live audio stream of Hive - this will run until 2pm on Sunday 13th November.  Occasional video too.  It's working, which is a relief.  The audio stream sounds quite mad, but in a good way - in the Dome it's much more comprehensible.

Click here to go to the page which explains more fully what I'm doing this coming weekend at Langham Dome.  And what Langham Dome actually is.

Hive is my latest sound project, taking place in Norfolk on the weekend of 12th / 13th November 2011.  I am very pleased to be working with Sound And Music to present this installation, and rather than trying to think of a slightly different way of saying exactly the same thing, here is the blurb from the Sound And Music website:

"Following his 24-hour Theremin marathon on The Manhattan Bridge this summer, Nick Franglen’s latest sound installation will see the experimental musician holed up for 24 hours in a remote WW2 concrete gunnery dome in the company of fifty radios, each tuned to a different station.

Franglen is inspired by the urban landscape and other found spaces, from London and Manhattan Bridges to a submarine, a mine and jet engine test bed. His work contextualises its environment, providing an often spontaneous, improvised reaction to time and place. Sound and Music is delighted to support this latest work at Langham Dome. On Armistice weekend he uses this WWII anti-aircraft training dome as a unique place for his installation and testing site for his concept: ‘Hive’."

Hive is an open event in an unusual location, so the curious are more than welcome to attend to experience this piece for themselves.  Click here for location and times.  I will be recording the audio inside the Dome using moving microphones, and I'm going to stream some of that audio live so those that can't make the journey will be able to hear what is happening inside a concrete dome in North Norfolk.

Coming to this site very shortly is a full explanation of what I plan to do, and why.  It's all about filtering information.

After reading Adrian Searle's article in the Guardian, I went down to check out this art installation for myself.  

Bloody hell it's odd.  Well worth a visit.  Swiss artist Christoph Büchel has taken over the Hauser & Wirth art gallery in Piccadilly, and took two months to convert it into what appears to be a genuine community centre over four floors with everything you'd expect to see there - a fully working canteen with cheap kitchen, lino floors and public service furniture, a large room available for hire for everything from tea dances to yoga, a computer skills room, counselling rooms and so on.  Pinboards are overflowing with boring local information of all kinds, have a rootle around and you'll come across folders of admin documents relating to staff meetings and safety procedures from a few years back.  And if you need to relax after a stressful class there's even a dance floor and saloon bar area in the basement.

The reason this appears to be a genuine community centre is that it is an actual community centre - the facilities are in use by genuine practitioners offering services to the general public, often free, to a timetable you can read at the brilliant Piccadilly Community Centre website, which covers the scale of activities better than I possibly could.  When I arrived I passed the closed, but still slightly unsettling loans office and made my way to the canteen, where I was offered some baklava left over from a class earlier that day.  The computer room next door was full of pensioners learning about online something or other.  As I wandered freely around the building, baklava in hand, I watched a tango lesson - even though I felt I was intruding a bit by loitering, the teacher was very welcoming and had pamphlets out for his next classes.

But look beneath the surface - that's the point of course - and things start getting a little more confusing.

Just why is there a Cash Loan office in a community centre for a start?  And some of the classes are, er, unusual... If you're of a certain age you can enjoy the Pensioner's Fencing class, or Senior Speed Dating for those looking for a fencing partner.  And while half of the top floor is currently used by a genuine charity shop, the other half is occupied by the Conservative Party Archive, selling Conservative Party merchandise on the other - buy a mug and Vote For Change!  

It was only when I tried to buy some Conservative Party postcards, for slightly pathetic ironic reasons it must be said, that the mask of the Centre slipped for the first time; I was told by the girl at the till that they weren't actually for sale, unlike the charity shop items.

Then you get to the nub of it - take a stair ladder up into a roof space and you crawl into a fetid squat - half eaten food, TV and music blaring, messy beds, drink and drugs, a filthy toilet behind a curtain.  I took the photos at the top of this post while I was alone up there.  The walls are covered with Crass posters, Socialist Worker slogans, 'Wanker' scrawled across a picture of David Cameron.  An allegory for Broken Britain, albeit a bit of a teenage one in places.  It reminded me a bit of when I was live mixing John Cale's Dark Days installation in Essen last year, I snuck over a fence to check out the disused coal factory next door and found myself in the frankly terrifying 10 storey concrete stairwell where the junkies hung out. 

And at at the other end of the building in the basement bar, you open the Do Not Enter door to find the bad-smelling caretaker's room, shelves covered with tools, cuckoo clocks, medicine, nick-nacks old and new... and can squeeze down the hidden, tiny corridor at the back - are you meant to be here? - past dusty boxes of junk piled high, around claustrophobic corners.  It's genuinely intimidating, like something out of Seven.  You come to a dead end filled with another filthy single bed pushed up to another toilet, with attendant stack of 70s porn and dodgy VHSs.

Piccadilly Community Centre is part urban exploration, part community spirit fun, a very slick analogy of a Britain where we all strive together for a better future but beneath the surface it's all going really wrong.  It feels quite obvious in places, but it sure is done well - you do start questioning what's real and what isn't.  It's open until July 30th, so I'm definitely going back for another look.  I might even sign up for a class - anyone else for the Kathak Dance Workshop?

I'm looking forward to seeing this exhibition.  I can't help noticing how successful sculpture has been at looking into the future without completely alienating the general public every step of the way, unlike say modern classical music.  (Of course there are exceptions to this observation.)  Look at how modern Jacob Epstein's work still is, nearly a century later - here's Anthony Gormley talking about it.  And I find it hard to believe that this sculpture by Alfred Gilbert, Jubilee Memorial to Queen Victoria, was from 1887 and not an ironic work from 2003.  Looks like the sort of thing the Chapman brothers would have done, a grotesque addition to an existing work.  Or something by Glenn Brown.

Alfred Gilbert - 
Memorial to Queen Victoria, 1887.

Jake and Dinos Chapman - Insult to Injury, 2003.
(Painting over original Goya 'Disasters of War' cartoons.)

Glenn Brown - Architecture and Morality, 2004
(God knows what he's done here as I haven't seen it in the flesh, but he takes existing artwork and paints on top it, does photo manipulation, all sorts of stuff.  This blog describes it in detail.)

This tells a Knock Knock joke, without the punchline, each time you press the button.  I'd like it as my doorbell please.  Made by Ashley John Pigford.