The opening sequence of the Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger film A Matter Of Life And Death

(1946) provides the inspiration and much of the raw material for this fugitive mediation on the

romance of radio, heavily influenced by the delightful theories of Friedrich A. Kittler. The audio

comprises a) a nine second cymbal crash removed from the final edit of an album by Kinnie The

Explorer, recorded by Bob Drake and “PaulStretched” to 28 minutes by Dan Wilson; b) Foley

aircraft sounds from the film soundtrack; and c) dialogue from the film soundtrack, featuring

David Niven (Peter) and Kim Hunter (June). Assembled as an outline for a live work planned for

the “Writtle Calling/2 Emma Toc” radio project, it pretends to be nothing more than a tentative

exorcism of the overwhelming feelings this film sequence provokes in me – which are such that I

can never watch it without bursting into tears. (It is surely designed to allow one to burst into tears

in the dark). I have the DVD but have yet to get beyond this opening, which I must have watched a

hundred times.

The piece quite accidentally functions as an antidote to its allusive usage in the opening ceremony

of the 2012 London Olympic Games, of which exercise in spectacular infantilism I was not aware

until I started googling to check my references. Ceremony director Danny Boyle and I both featured

in a 2009 newspaper article, the layout of which was such as to allow our faces to be pressed

precisely together when its pages were closed – in a print media kiss as absurd as the radio romance

of Peter and June is sublime.