Radio Boredcast was a 744-hour online radio project, curated by Vicki Bennett (People Like Us) with AV Festival 12, broadcast in the month of March 2012. In response to our ambiguous relationship with time - do we have too much or not enough? - Radio Boredcast celebrates the detail, complexity and depth of experience lost through our obsession with speed.

Playlist details listed with each track.

The full archive of this month of programming is archived at wfmu.org/playlists/zz

Many thanks to AV Festival 12 and WFMU.

BACKGROUND ON RADIO BOREDCAST…

Time is a curious thing – on one hand we complain about being so busy we just don’t know what to do with ourselves, and on the other hand we literally don’t know what to do with ourselves and say we are bored. Given that we need more time, when we are not killing it, it is also strange that (in the western world) we are so obsessed with speed – the one thing guaranteed to make us miss out on the detail, complexity and depth of experience in exchange for thrills and illusions of gaining something, that “something” often being more time. It is with these thoughts that I’ve entered into curating “Radio Boredcast” for AV Festival 12.

The first thing that struck me is that 744 hours is quite a long time. 744 minutes is a long time. Four weeks lined up in iTunes is a long playlist. It would be easy to think about how to fill this up as quickly as possible, but that’s Speediness rearing it’s rather worn out head again. “Slow” is subtle, it avoids the obvious, the short cut or the first hurdle; it is to start at the end of the race and see where we are running to. The only thing to be stretched is the concept of what Slow actually might be – the only aim to make it an engaging, entertaining and unpredictable a listening experience as possible.

Radio Boredcast has and impressive list of participants, providing content in the form of specially produced new and unpublished works, playlists and regular freeform radio shows, field recordings, interviews and monologues and much, much more.

While listening, you may hear adults talking for hours about slowness and children complaining about how boring it all is, thematic freeform radio shows, mathematical experiments and time-based compositions, field recordings of nature’s cycles and underwater rumblings, musical meanderings through memory and inner worlds of sleepless nights; across landscapes and back through time, discovering the world of ritual and speaking in tongues by way of babbling poets and bubbling brooks full of musical elephants, a voyage into deep concréte through art gallery toilets, scientific discussions on insects and evolutionary biology, ultrasound recordings of bats, journeys through very slow cheese, soundscapes from faraway lands with long phonecalls full of language removal, testcard music and shipping forecasts, vast sweeping summaries of the entire history of everything, and then… Silence. Outside of this will be programming of thematic playlists all the way through “Acconci” (Vito) to “Zzz…” (Leif Elggren & Thomas Liljenberg)

peoplelikeus.org/2012/radio-boredcast-schedule/