The effect of the disembodied voices harmonising in the dimly-lit space is truly haunting.
The Telegraph
Requiem for 114 Radios began life as a Bristol New Music Commission for the rarely accessed cellars of Bristol Beacon (then Colston Hall) in 2016. Next, it featured as part of Daydreaming with Stanley Kubrick, an exhibition curated by James Lavelle (UNKLE) at Somerset House in London in July – August 2016. It has toured with the exhibitions Possessed in France, curated by Vincent Honoré, in 2021 and Seeing Sound, curated by Barbara London in 2024 in the US.
The installation comprises 114 analogue radio sets stacked on shelves that come to life in communal song. Fourteen individual voices are broadcast to the sets, and as some radios join together in harmony, others crackle and find the ‘in-between space’ between clear and broken reception. Collectively, these unseen singers perform a dramatic new Kubrickian version of Dies Irae from the Roman Catholic Requiem Mass.
The vocalists in the disembodied choir are: Matt Berninger (The National), Jehnny Beth (Savages), Casper Clausen (Efterklang/Liima), Jarvis Cocker, Jimi Goodwin (Doves), Rachel Goswell (Slowdive/Minor Victories), Blaine Harrison (Mystery Jets), Joe McAlinden (Linden, ex. Superstar/BMX Bandits), Aimée Nash (The Black Ryder), Beth Orton, Conrad Standish (Devastations), Jonnine Standish (HTRK), Elena Tonra (Daughter) and Rachel Zeffira (Cat’s Eyes).
Photography: Paul Heartfield
Famously interpreted by composers such as Verdi and Mozart, and used to chilling effect by Stanley Kubrick in A Clockwork Orange and The Shining, the Dies Irae is a powerful portent of doom. This work gives a playful nod to Kubrick and his fictional piece of radio equipment – the CRM 114 Discriminator – while also calling to mind Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus and the enigmatic radio transmissions which carried coded messages from the British military to the French resistance during World War Two.
It is a testament to the death of analogue technology; the radios call upon an intricate universe of mysterious messages, modulated hisses, mangled voices and incomprehensible words. Messages of death permeate a radiophonic babel.
With its obsolete technology, Cold War bunker ambience and allusions to Kubrick’s apocalyptic black comedy Dr Strangelove, it sent the requisite sepulchral shiver up the spine.
The Times
Photography: Toby Farrow, Chris Cooper, Paul Heartfield
You’ll know Dies Irae… it’s musical shorthand for doom, its ominous trochees among the most quoted melodies in the classical canon.
The Guardian
An astonishingly atmospheric experience… the doom-laden music a funereal lament for lost analogue technology.
Bristol 24/7
Photography: Jason Mandela
