 |
Inside the houseboat VandaChan managed to salvage a few personal artefacts, which included an old Readers Digest atlas, a cassette player and a broken ship radio, and most importantly, for her, a box of recordings of radio broadcasts by world music specialist Andy Kershaw, which accompanied her on every expedition. The on board radio was completely irreparable but she managed to salvage and repair much of the onboard solar panel system so as to power the cassette player, and even occasionally boil a kettle. To pass time, and what would become a daily routine, Chan would browse through the atlas whilst playing the music tapes. Although she had found herself marooned and in complete solitude, the music she played became a catalyst for imaginary travel, taking her from continent to continent.
Almost ignoring her situation Chan found herself engrossed each day by taking imaginary journeys. Being guided by Kershaw’s love of world music, especially from Africa, she would listen to a song by Kenyan band Oriango & Kipchamba, and begin an imaginary journey travelling across east Africa. Kershaw's playlist would lead her to music by Chako Ni Chako II - Special Buruti International and become the inspiration for the next part of the journey. By the time she is listening to Orchestra Star de Mozambique, she had travelled right down the east African coast.
Whilst marooned and isolated Chan’s collection of Kershaw tapes became a readymade material for travelling, and undertaking journeys. The tapes were no longer simply a collection of world music songs but a material that prompted her to move from place to place. It was as if Chan had little say in where she went - Kershaw had become the tour guide, his playlist defining the route and direction of travel. VandaChans’ plight, the impossibility of actual travel produced the need for a kind of endotic travel, where she no longer had any option but to look to her own imagination. Like the imprisoned figure in Xavier De Maistre’s, A Journey Around My Room (1829), she found that she could travel across continents without leaving the confines of her own local space.
This remarkable story of imaginary travel taken whilst in solitude formed the starting point and inspiration for ‘Radio Tours’ a series of show devised for radio broadcast by Andy Webster. Each show followed the route of a historical or fictional journey, so, like VandaChan, each journey had a guide that determined the direction of travel.
The first tour followed the route taken in Dervla Murphy’s book ‘The Ukimwi Road’, the second recreated the journey taken by Che Guevara in the book ‘The Motorcycle Diaries’. The third tour followed the route of the Pan American Highway starting in Alaska and finishing in Argentina. The fourth tour followed the route taken in Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road.’ Each book determined the route for the journey.
All of the music used for each Radio Tour show was compiled by using soundtracks that people had uploaded on to the internet to accompany their own footage of journeys between the villages, towns and cities found on the routes of the places described in the books. These soundtracks were edited together so as to make complete journeys. The shows were first broadcast on a local community radio station in Falmouth called Source FM.
Tour 1 - The Ukimwi Road
Tour 3 (part 2) - The Pan American Highway
Tour 4 - On the Road
