Resumé: Frequencies and Fragances

Fragrant was the night… and permeated with the sounds and reverberations of the numerous radio guests that materialised in the garden in the South of Berlin. This garden offered many paths (carefully tended by their owners Tiger Stangl, Valie Djordevic and Jochen Liedtke), and just as many approaches were taken in Datscha Radio’s quest for a ‘translation’ of scent into sound. The weather was very fine that evening, with the heat of the day still lingering in some formerly sunny spots, and the dusk that arrived after the station’s set-up was accomplished, steeped the garden and its plants in iridescent shades of continually fading blues.

 “…That’s what the peony said in three puffs of perfume”: The show’s kick-off was one of the ten flower scent poems written especially for this occasion and played intermittently through the night, rather like a scented station id. Written by Gabi Schaffner, they were spoken, sung, whispered and hissed ingeniously by the New Zealand poet Hans Kellett.

Kate had brought her hydrophones, which Niki Matita played whilst Kate read a brief overview of Datscha Radio’s theme for the second ‘Nightgardening’ session:

Smell comes in waves, with a breeze, it rides on the air. Just like radio.

Smell is a fleeting sensation, it lives in time, it connects directly to our memories and emotions. Just like radio.

Smells, odours, fragrances, perfumes, they are all around us. Just like radio.

An introductory walk through the garden followed. Tina-Marie Friedrich (allgirls Berlin international) and Helen Thein explored our location (dragging a long, long mic cable behind), conversing about selected plants, the perfumes of their leaves and flowers, our human sensitivities and culturally imprinted scent perception.

All the while more guests arrived, among them Monika Glaser, chairwoman of the gardener’s association and her husband Jürgen. The radio artist Jasmina  Al-Qaisi accompanied by artist Helena Otto, and the ‘maverick violinist’ Katt Hernandez as a last minute guest and previous Datscha Radio artist. Tina talked about her research into the finer details and cultural differences of smell perception, which led on to the introduction of some of Datscha Radio’s open call artists, among them a piece about the scent of rain by Ian Stenhouse. One of Niki Matita’s thematic DJ Mixes followed.

Looking from the outside into the window of this Treptower Datscha, we could now see Caroline McMillan, together with programmer Isabelle Wei and dancer Lena Kilchitskaya, preparing the wearable tech dress that Caroline had designed for their olfactory and experimental dance performance “Aura:Maton”.

Meanwhile, the long table in front of the terrace was decorated under supervision of the Mobile Radio duo Knut Aufermann and Sarah Washington. Wine glasses, six especially selected bottles of Moselwine, and still more guests appeared, among them Winona Lin and friends as well as the radio researcher Golo Föllmer and Kai Knörr, president of the “Studienkreis Rundfunk und Geschichte”.

“Aura:Maton” proved to be quite an otherworldly experience. Dressed in a white dress, adorned with a head band (a surreptitious brain wave detector), and wearing a mysterious ‘harness-minilab’, consisting of LED lights, wires and an assortment of vials on her belly, Lena appeared. Her face serene, she danced among the guests, graciously, stepping forward, resting, bending, stretching out her arms. From time to time a blue light flashed from her belly-lab and waves of scent were set free.  

            In her talk, Caroline explained that dancing has an impact on the dancer’s brain waves, which, in this case, then get stored and transformed into electronic signals which in turn activate the scent machine the next time she dances. In the garden, Lena was dancing to and with the scents of a dance memory. Data and scents. McMillan says that for her, the main common traits between them lie in the fact that both leave behind trails…

Just a little bit later, Kate Donovan and Katt Hernandez joined forces to play with frequencies. Kate had brought a SOMA Ether (a so-called ‘sniffer’, which turns electromagnetic frequencies into sound), in order to listen to the inaudible frequencies generated by the outdoor radio studio. And Katt had brought her violin – her trusty old friend by the name of Maude. Together they made and played with frequencies in and of the garden.

Trails and tastes of a different kind were explored in Mobile Radio’s expedition into “the extremes of Moselwine”. Mobile Radio’s wine tasting involved six interviews with winegrowers from the region, each stemming from a question concerning smell during the process of wine-making. In between the interviews, one wine after another was slowly decanted into the glasses and everybody was invited to spontaneously describe the scent and taste. Each wine attracted its own peculiar vocabulary, from “like my grandmother” to “cheesy” to “stale” to “woody”, “pearly” or “calvados-like”. The performance took its course, lasting for an hour and a half, and as such allowing ample time for Jasmina Al-Qaisi and her performance partner Helena Otto to build a fire in preparation for their upcoming show.

“To the Belly and Back” featured delightful scenes, musical interludes, and dialogues about food and eating and smells. It was grounded in a very serious question: Can I trust you and how do I know if I can trust you? Jasmina and Helena explored the answer by feeding each other with eyes closed, food and non-food from the grill and further afield, wrapped in foil or paper or plastic or nothing. Their trustful exchange culminated in offering each other old (but clean!) socks to smell, which they’d secretly filled with fragrant contents from the garden.

Time for more coffee, one or two scent poems, for some guests to make their way home, for open call compositions, and for “The Scent of Water”, a preproduction initiated by Helen Thein, based on a (local) water degustation with the American scientist Christy Spackman. By now we had reached 3 am in the morning.

“Olfactophobia” is the irrational fear of smells that can go so far that some people can’t even bear to think of certain smells without suffering actual panic attacks. Niki Matita presented a radio piece of that same name, that probed deeply into this special psychic condition.

Armed with a walkie-talkie, Kate Donovan then disappeared down the main path to the end of the garden. From under the colourful garden lights she read an excerpt from the novel “The Fountains of Neptune” by Rikki Ducornet, taking listeners into the mind of the protagonist, who had also disappeared into a strange and dreamy world of garden, meditation, and mastication… “I could not help but think that if time had a smell it would be like this.”

We still had a lot on our plate to present to our listeners: Niki Matita’s interview with Nicolle Schatborn of Keuken van het Ongewenst Dier in Amsterdam about the “Smell of Dead Bodies”, more open call contributions, and a fantasy sound tale in French about a scented lichen in Paris, read by Julia Drouhin. Sarah and Kate agreed to read the English translation together before the French piece was played, and the way they rendered the story had a deep impact on all the present listeners.

By 5am the skies were slowly lightening up in fluffy greys. At a quarter past, the time for our morning garden walk had come. Gabi, Tina and Kate went down the garden path, slightly tipsy from lack of sleep but happy to lean towards the garden plants again, to inhale their morning scents and the fragrance of a fresh day, and to greet the first rays of the sun that came forth behind the neighbour’s apple trees. Thanks to Udo Noll who provided for our streaming on his server.

This post is also available in: German