Moving Homes

first broadcast: Deutschlandfunk Kultur, 2016 — commissioned by Deutschlandfunk Kultur and Australian Broadcasting Corporation Creative Audio Unit — guitars: Boris Meinhold / 
bass clarinet: Anthony Burr
 / Trombone: Hilary Jeffery
 / violoncello: Zoe Cartier
 / Tuba: Robin Hayward / male voice on DE version: Michael Rotscopf
 / woman’s voice and additional violoncello: Anthea Caddy
 / child’s voice: Agnes
 / voice, keyboards, electronics, realisation: Thomas Meadowcroft / sound engineer: Andreas Stoffels
 / producer: Marcus Gammel
 / Text: Thomas Meadowcroft (with citations from Emmanuel Kant, Søren Kierkegaard, Paul Virilio, Simone Weil and the testimonies of cyclone survivors from Far North Queensland, Australia) — duration 45′ / 2016

Moving Homes is a musical rumination on the loss of home. It’s cyclone season in Northern Australia, and the only way the local inhabitants can communicate to the outside world is through their radios. So begins a fictional radiophonic journey, where cyclone names are called out in a horserace, talkback callers are phoning in objects flying past their windows, and radio offsets the loneliness of natural disaster.

A tropical cyclone may destroy physical things: the sofa, the roof, the house itself. It may also destroy the symbolic order of things: where one belongs, the rule of law, the division between the private and the public. A tropical cyclone ruptures reality. It reminds us, in the age of ecological disaster, how fragile reality has become.

“Severe tropical cyclones may lead to the breakdown of civil order, from which, as a pretext to returning to this order the state can cut basic services. So. Ah. Grabbed the kids. But left the dogs hey…“

“All that work dissipated in the useless creation and destruction of superfluous patterns. Ideology is now the clouds above your head. From tropical low to tropical depression…”

“We’re here to keep you company tonight. The world is gone and radio will carry you...”

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