OUR LOVE OF MUSIC CLOSER TOGETHER

In early 2020, Jack Rollo and Elaine Tierney, the two DJs behind the monthly NTS online radio show, Time is Away, exhibited their “Fable of the Bees” broadcast in an exhibition entitled Time is Away: The Fable of the Bees at South London’s project and artist space, Black Tower.¹ Both the radio hour and exhibit were inspired by Bernard Mandeville’s provocative 1714 satirical book of the same name which celebrates the public benefits of private interests. As an artistic project, Fable wove sound, music, texts, and aphoristic phrases to evince “London’s central role in entangled histories of global finance capitalism, colonialism, urban planning, and speculative development.”² The multimedia radio hour and its corresponding display at Black Tower simultaneously evoked a “story” underpinned by “value-laden ideas of urban improvement” which were conveyed in various forms to showcase their role in shaping the city’s contemporary built environment.

At its most immediate, Fable was a loose or gestural interchange between three centuries of “spatial specialists, including architects, planners, speculators, financial stakeholders, and government,” alongside counter narratives of “persistence, resistance, resourcefulness, and ad-hoc building.”³ In a broader sense, one might say Fable curated a variety of artistic, sonic, and cultural strands to propose both multiple versions of London and the concept of “the city” more widely.

In 2023, Rollo and Tierney critically explored curation as an artistic and social practice with their hour-long Time is Away episode dedicated to the peculiar “Wildgoose Memorial Library,” also located in London. Focused specifically on Jane Wildgooose’s stewardship of the library’s eclectic collection of beachcombed paraphernalia, the broadcast highlighted her idiosyncratic model of collecting that resists the grain of the too-oft columbarium-like archive.⁵ Like “Fable,” the episode used a distinct makeup of sound, music, text, and (imagery of) objects related to Wildgoose.These elements ultimately gesture to the ways “the museum” as a concept and civic installation both reflects and has a role in the broader, albeit entwined, histories of imperialism, colonialism, anthropology, sociology, archeology, capitalism, and the culture industry writ large.

“Fable” and “Wildgoose” are both strong examples of Rollo’s and Tierney’s 10-year artistic oeuvre, which uses spoken word, field recordings, and music as part of their “ongoing reflection on the relationship between time, place, power, identity, and history-making.”⁷ London’s Cafe Oto’s event space describes their practice as a “story” that uniquely “map[s] personal, poetic, and sometimes playful dérives through the histories of their imagination.”⁸ Similarly, Black Tower describes their body of radio, installation, mix, and residency work as employing a distinct artistic approach that is “open-ended, associative, polyphonic, and, in places, deliberately opaque.”⁹ Their work often culminates, then, in a “distinctive sonic atmosphere in which to ruminate.”¹⁰

It is worth noting too that Rollo’s and Tierney’s monthly Time is Away broadcast is largely possible because NTS defines itself as an independent “rules free radio” internet platform where hosts are afforded ample opportunities to redefine sound, push the limits of the digital radio ecosystem, and combine disciplines.¹¹ As Jason Loviglio and Michele Hilmes note in their introduction to Radio’s New Wave: Global Sound in a New Era, the resources and creative spirit provided by digital radio means sound can “extend far beyond” the traditional confines of the mainstream media universe.¹² While a typical streaming site or radio station might disseminate music based on genre, style, or era, NTS features shows like Time is Away that blend or “mix” all three in unique ways (classical is combined with modern folk and ambient with experimental). Time is Away, then, is a creative entity unique to the NTS (and more broadly, digital radio) ethos, concurrently combining different genres of music which complement its unique, genre-defying inclusion of sound and text.

When I interviewed Rollo and Tierney in January 2024, the two suggested that the textual, sonic, and musical material selected for and comprising their work forms a “shape”, including one that might be loosely associated with a “narrative, or an argument, or some kind of poetic form.”¹³ Their deliberately mixed “shapes” might be best described as soundscapes, audial spaces to prefigure, consider, or ruminate upon the important aesthetic, cultural, and political concerns of both the past and present. Rollo’s and Tierney’s work, which spans the radio, record releases, mixtapes, DJ sets, and exhibits, attends to potentialities across and within “the sound arts […] that affords transdisciplinary meeting points” to reflect upon amidst the socially discursive currents animating the rhythms of the present day.¹⁴ It is hardly surprising, then, that the broadcast takes its name, Time is Away, from Louis MacNiece’s poem, “Meeting Point” which reads,

Time was away and somewhere else,

There were two glasses and two chairs

And two people with one pulse

(Somebody stopped the moving stairs):

Time was away and somewhere else.¹⁵

 MacNiece’s poem is a literary distillation of the various medias, texts, and conceptual (or, in the case of Fable, physical) components comprising Rollo’s and Tierney’s practice. Indeed, the duo’s work is gestural to the highest degree, or, rather, it is “two people with one pulse” calling to mind “somewhere else” through the mediums of an hour-long broadcast, a mix, a compilation, or a curated exhibit space. According to my interview with Rollo and Tierney, their repertoire is, like so much poetry, “intended to be associative, dreamlike, and somewhat obscure.” By characterising their work in such poetic terms, the two call to mind the ways poetry or poetics in their most malleable or extrapolated forms opens, to quote LaBelle, “a language of continual reinvention […] that resists its own naming.”¹⁶ In a deeper sense, then, Rollo and Tierney are interested in “placing certain ideas, sources, or sounds together” and letting them “resonate” to intentionally “produce something to think with rather than something to persuade.”¹⁷ 

By considering the ways Rollo’s and Tierney’s soundscapes resonate across what professor of culture, literature, and the curatorial Carsten Junker calls “the boundaries of the written realm” in order to “venture” into “various media beyond text,” I aim to highlight the ways their “carefully planned and sometimes very intuitive” work “put[s] music and ideas in their same interpretive frame without preferencing one or the other,” to use their words.¹⁹ More specifically, this paper aims to highlight the ways the two facilitate a meeting point between music, sound, and speech in their standout NTS radio show, Time is Away. Furthermore, this paper claims that both Time is Away and Rollo’s and Tierney’s other sound-related work function as critical counterpoints to more traditionally curated sound, literary, and cultural work. By exploring the ways Rollo and Tierney equitably mesh different mediums together within their unorthodox radio, mix, and exhibit work, this paper will illuminate the underlying benefits their catalog of creative material can have in dilating interrelated fields at the intersections of sound studies, poetics, literary scholarship, and ongoing conversations around contemporary curatorial practice within the areas of education, temporality, and technologies of radio, respectively. 

Tying this essay together is the interview I conducted with Rollo and Tierney over email in January 2024. This exchange both connects this essay’s individual sections and serves as its underlying method for further analysis of their creative output (with a specific focus on their standout achievement in radio, Time is Away). While I later reveal that neither Rollo nor Tierney described themselves as outright “curators” during our conversation, I nonetheless characterise their work as employing certain, albeit largely unique, methods of curation. I suggest that the two might be said to curate their sound and exhibit work in ways that equally interweave and give precedence to seemingly individual artistic or cultural mediums. In a similar way, I do not focus on one aspect of their work or one moment during our conversation over another; rather, I try my utmost to layer their output of material alongside our conversation in equal measure. In doing so, I attempt to provide both a comprehensive (and revealing) survey of their work and our conversation in their entireties. Similar to how Rollo and Tierney DJ or arrange a plethora of sounds, sources, and musical pieces together into a seamless hour of radio, this essay tries to reproduce their groundbreaking approach to sound and orality by interlacing their creative register with the interview I conducted, to complement and expand both. 

 

Their Same Interpretive Frame

Time is Away is perhaps best considered along intersecting literary, historical, cultural, poetic, and musical lines. When I interviewed Rollo and Tierney, I opened one of my questions by highlighting their tendency to bring together different nodes. Their corresponding answer underscored their underlying intention in developing, to reference the emblematic phrase from my introduction, such a meeting point:

Q: Your shows regularly reference and/or sample spoken word excerpts from literary or literary-adjacent works. How do you go about choosing specific “texts” to anchor or orient your broadcasts to? Is the music or soundscapes you produce meant to amplify a narrative or are they more so associative in nature?

A: We are both steeped in books and have been since we can remember. We are always reading and always talking about what we are reading. Just as with music, when something jumps out at either of us, it gets stored away for possible use. You could look at the project as an attempt to bring our literary or historical interests and our love of music closer together. To put music and ideas in their same interpretive frame without preferencing one or the other. That sense of equality between music and speech in the program has been important to us from the beginning. Most professionally made radio programs dip music under speech. This automatically places the two elements in a hierarchy. In Time is Away, music, sound, and speech are all intended to carry the same weight.

Rollo’s and Tierney’s description of Time is Away as “an attempt to bring our literary or historical interests and our love of music closer together” within “their same interpretive frame” inadvertently positions their project as a viable conceptual blueprint to rethink senses of “equality between music, sound, and speech” outside hierarchical models of arrangement. While most “professionally made radio programs [intentionally] dip music under speech,” Time is Away employs the “same weight” to both. Within their broadcast, music, text, and speech all gravitate next to or around the other in a constellation that, as mentioned, broaches the likes of poetry. No individual element comprising their work overbears or overburdens the other; rather, equal resonances form each pool into unique molds that the listener or exhibit attendee can steep themselves in.

By carefully weaving music, text, and sound together in equal and complementary ways, Rollo and Tierney produce hour-long journeys to experience or immerse oneself in, wherein seemingly disparate parts form a poetic equilibrium. When interviewing the two, both spoke to the larger impacts of this technique claiming:

Radio is often experienced alone. Often the listener is doing something else: washing dishes, walking to work, chopping vegetables. It lands somewhere between active and passive listening. If you couple this with the kind of music we play, which you might say is drifting, immersive or repetitive, you may create a situation where a text can slip through the listener’s defenses. The length of the [radio] show allows the text and the music to form a shape, like a narrative, or an argument, or some kind of poetic form over its duration. Sometimes we pack it densely with text from lots of sources and positions and other times we explode a single text across the hour.

By crafting an immersive experience replete with “drifting” or “repetitive” sonic, musical, and textual rhythms, Rollo’s and Tierney’s radio work forms a shape that expands or “explode[s]” all three into a “poetic form” wherein supposedly contrasting mediums speak to the other in ways that disarm the listener during their everyday routines. In creating episodes that actively and passively breach “the listener’s defenses” while they, for example, “wash dishes, walk to work, or chop vegetables,” the two create a generative scenario or “situation” that intermeshes with the quotidian. Indeed, one might begin to implicitly or explicitly, or consciously or subconsciously, (re)consider their surroundings “while they wash dishes, walk to work, or chop vegetables.”

Time is Away, then, elevates and repositions one’s external surroundings through a sharpened confluence of sound, music, and text. Of course, such an elevating technique or repositioning practice can have potential social, political, or cultural connotations that draw attention to a variety of complex issues (as described in the case of “Fable” or “Wildgoose”), but it also calls to mind the broader ways forms of cross-media arrangements that are non-hierarchical (insofar as they do not privilege one kind of “text,” medium, or source over another) might be better suited to, as Rollo and Tierney suggest, “slip through the listener’s [or observer’s] defenses” with deep effects or resonances. 

If each episode of Time is Away is in fact an attempt to develop a “narrative” or “argument” that might affect or resonate in meaningful ways with the listener, then Rollo and Tierney might be characterised as unique curators in their own right who intentionally bring disparate mediums or elements together into new, non-hierarchical wholes wherein music, sound, text, and voice coexist alongside the other in complementary and evocative ways. More specifically, an episode might pair a piece of ambient music alongside a corresponding excerpt of poetry. In such an instance, neither the piece of music nor the poem would overshadow the other; rather, the two would feed into and feed off each other, with one calling to mind the respective resonances in the other.

The clearest example of this technique can be heard during the opening moments of “Time is Away: In Translation” wherein the opening lines of Dante’s Inferno, “In the middle of our life’s journey, I found myself in a dark wood”, are repeated across varying translations alongside corresponding ambient music. Both the translations and the musical pieces are elevated by the pairing and, taken together, weave an affecting sonic texture where resonances from each propel and sustain the other. In the case of “Translation” and Rollo’s and Tierney’s work more widely, then, a variety of artistic or aesthetic mediums are fed off each other to form a cross-media equilibrium for the airwaves.

 

A New Aesthetic Formulation for the Airwaves

It is important to note that throughout my conversation with Rollo and Tierney neither explicitly described themselves as “curators.” I do think it is worthwhile, however, to consider both the possible benefits and drawbacks of describing their work in such terms because both perspectives illuminate new, albeit critical, ways to consider concepts and practices of curation along more expanded, intertextual lines that place equal, ungraded emphasis on sound, music, text, and exhibition (in its sonic and physical forms in the case of the latter). Carolina Rito, a scholar on contemporary curation, claims that recent concepts of the “curatorial” include the “arena of contemporary cultural engagements and articulations (material and immaterial), from production, to display, interpretation and dissemination, [and is] not limited to artwork and exhibitions.”²¹ For Rito, “the curatorial” has recently emerged as a field of practice and research where “different disciplines, agents, forms, and media come together or intersect (intentionally and unintentionally) to advance new aesthetic articulations through and about the world in which we live.”²² It is difficult to say whether Rollo and Tierney intentionally or unintentionally “curate” or “advance” “new aesthetic articulations through and about the world in which we live” through and about their work, but their repertory nonetheless, to use Rito’s language, equally “disseminates” different disciplines across an hour-long radio broadcast within the duration of a mix, or, in the case of Fable, temporally within a specific space. By doing so, Rollo and Tierney put forward a “new aesthetic formulation” that serves as a counterpoise in relation to more traditional disciplines, agents, forms, and media.

To describe Rollo’s and Tieney’s artistic method as “curatorial” carries complex political and cultural connotations worth addressing. In their episode dedicated to Jane Wildgoose, the two characterise The Wildgoose Memorial Library as a kind of alternative stand-in to traditionally curated spaces, such as galleries and museums. Included in the episode are audio samples featuring excerpts from Jane Wildgoose and those related to her. At one point in the episode, the listener learns that the Wildgoose Memorial Library is an unorthodox space that exists as an alternative to more typical museum spaces that are perhaps curated in more traditional ways and invariably have ties to histories of colonial violence. Similarly, the Fable of the Bees exhibit was partly designed to evoke creative counter narratives about ad-hoc city planning rather than foregrounding the work or influence of architects, planners, speculators, financial stakeholders, and government. While Rito gestures to a curatorial method and culture not limited to traditional artworks, displays, and exhibits, the conception of “curation” still carries specific, however misguided or generalised, overtones in artistic culture and even the culture outside the arts. Indeed, in more professional or managerial settings it sometimes appears that the language of curation has informed a new kind of “curation”, in an expanded, professional sense.

Fortunately, Rollo’s and Tierney’s work does not fall under traditional or expanded notions of curation. Rather, it largely embodies Rito’s wide-ranging, interdisciplinary, and intermedial conception of the curatorial. Even on a granular level, their work and their catalog of radio actively resists the mainstays of capital-C culture. For instance, their radio broadcasts tend to sample or employ underground or largely unheard music from mostly independent labels or private record presses. Their against the grain approach runs counterintuitively to the likes of algorithmically curated Spotify or Apple Music playlists and effectively sets their work outside any kind of prepackaged box. They alluded to this approach when describing to me how they uniquely interweave different kinds of music into their work, emphasising the critical role their selection process plays in forming a thought-provoking figurative space throughout their broadcast work. When I directly asked them to comment on the musical selections comprising their NTS radio episodes they wrote me back with the following illuminating response:

We are immersed in new and old music. We both grew up hunting for music we hadn’t heard yet, pre-internet, imagining what something might sound like based on the cover alone or from a description in the music press. The reality was often disappointing. So it has been a short step to re-creating and layering music to make it better fit our needs. In terms of how we select music, each program has a ‘tone’ – that’s as exact as we can define it. The music must work in some way with or against the [episode’s chosen] text, theme, or subject matter. It is never incidental – never an inert background – but critical to how we create space for reflection.

By suggesting that each of their programs has and is guided by a residing “tone,” Rollo and Tierney gesture to the underlying flexibility of the musical resonances that comprise their work. While a traditional curation might use music to prefigure a specific message or idea, Rollo and Tierney orient their broadcasts around a guiding, albeit gossamer-like, timbre that actively compliments or “works” with or against a text, theme, or subject matter.

The way Rollo and Tierney make use of music carries over into their method for incorporating the texts upon which they base their shows. A specific literary, cultural, or source text is generally, to use their language, “recreated” or “layered”, and is frequently expanded in ways that create “space for reflection.” During my interview, they claimed they “sometimes pack [an episode] densely with text from lots of sources and positions, and other times [they] explode a single text across the hour.” Their catalog includes countless examples of both techniques, but two recent episodes of Time is Away that come to mind are “Countercultural Bohemia as Prefiguration” and “The Mortal Muse.” The former of the two interweaves sampled text extracted from the late lectures of the cultural theorist Mark Fisher alongside evocative sound pieces, music, and other, related cultural sources, including performed spoken word excerpts taken from the writings of Herbert Marcuse, Sigmund Freud, and Ellen Willis. The goal of this textual interweaving is to “sound out” or “harness the psychedelic possibilities of consciousness-raising” with regards to concepts of the family, community, and “alternative visions of how to live together.” In contrast, Time is Away’s “The Mortal Muse” singularly explodes Anne Carson’s already splintered translation of Sappho by, according to the show notes, sifting, recombining, and fragmenting it further across sound and music within the timespan of a dedicated hour. In each instance, a set of texts or a text works in some equal way with or against the music or sound pieces that accompany it.

By “working” equally with or administering equal weight to the music, source text, or underlying theme in an episode of Time is Away, Rollo and Tierney reconfigure the concept of professionally produced radio and prefigure what an individual item or what a whole collection of literary or cultural text(s) might sound like mixed alongside, rather than above or beneath, musical or sonic accompaniments. In doing so, the two make it viable to frame Time is Away andtheir other sound work as critical avenues to explore the possible benefits of such an unorthodox and harmonious “curatorial”, or curatorial-adjacent, practice. More specifically, the individual parts comprising Rollo’s and Tierney’s work cannot be easily delineated or demarcated in ways that might reveal an underlying organisational logic. Instead, programs like Time is Away are mixes that weave together media in organic rather than overtly calibrated ways. Indeed, each hour-long broadcast progresses seamlessly as if it were a singular experience rather than an arranged broadcast with individuated tracks of music, spoken word excerpts, and field recording work. 

By prefiguring or bringing to the surface sound, music, text, and the occasional installation piece, in the case of Fable, together in commensurate and seamless ways, Rollo and Tierney open possible avenues for thinking about the role Time is Away and how their work more broadly might play within academic, pedagogical, and cultural spaces. In the case of the former, Time is Away might serve as a generative blueprint for ongoing and developing conversations around interdisciplinary scholarship involving the growing natural cross sections between literature, curation, sound, and music. In the most immediate and formal sense, Rollo and Tierney draw all four into close, often intermeshed, proximity, and gesture to the ways each of the disciplines are more interrelated than they are disparate. As I noted above, Time is Away’s “The Mortal Muse” pairs Carson’s fragments of Sappho with complementary fragments of experimental ambient, electronic, and classical music. By doing so, Rollo and Tierney, to quote their conversation with me, “create a space for reflection” to consider, amongst other things, the ways literature, poetry, music, and sound can all speak to the other in comparable ways.

 

The Critical Concerns of Our Moment

Rollo’s and Tierney’s ability to draw seemingly contrasting mediums together has implications and even benefits beyond the discipline of radio. One of these domains is the postsecondary classroom where an instructor might be interested in using Time is Away as an example to get students to think more associatively or draw scholarly connections between literary culture and the sound arts more widely.

I personally have firsthand experience teaching Time is Away to undergraduate students in a second-year English seminar at the University of Guelph dedicated loosely to the possible interrelations between literature, culture, and social change. I used the broadcast to get students to think about foundational cultural thinkers in more complex and expansive ways. By assigning Time is Away’s “Countercultural Bohemia as Prefiguration,” I intended students to think through Freud, Marcuse, and Fisher along musical or sonic lines wherein a text such as Eros and Civilisation resembled more of an expansive sound than a strict or regimented text. This introduction to such expanded texts provided students with an opportunity to consider the ways one cultural field, whether it be psychology, philosophy, literature, or feminist theory, can be heard in visceral or compounded ways through sound across an hour of radio. 

My decision to introduce students to Time is Away in my classroom implies a curation or selection process on my end where I intentionally sought to provide those enrolled with material that reflected the broader themes of the course, which were loosely related to the convergences between literature, or literary representation, and broader social dynamics. The syllabus for my class, titled “Literature and Social Change”, included  episodes of Rollo’s and Tierney’s broadcast that specifically provide an affecting sonic texture to certain literary or cultural texts. One standout example that resonated with students in particular was Time is Away’s “Honey from a Weed Part 1 & Part 2.” This episode, comprised of moving folk music and transportive spoken word excerpts from Patience Gray’s genre-bending cookbook that interweaves mythology, literary anecdote, folklore, and cooking recipes inspired by peasant food traditions across Puglia, Catalonia, and Naxos was an entirely engrossing listening experience for my students. After listening, they were able to enthusiastically make connections between supposedly disparate disciplines across cultural contexts and discuss the meaningful impacts of these relationships in multifaceted ways during our weekly discussion sessions. More specifically, the episode helped my students vocally draw connections between traditional, albeit largely universalising, myths, their retelling, and the role both can play in shaping the culture of a given community.

By conveying Gray’s mythologised storytelling of peasant food via Greek mythology, Rollo’s and Tierney’s episode dedicated to her legacy helped my students make meaningful connections between the ways literary or artistic cultures can shape specific (culinary, in the case of “Honey from A Weed”) traditions within a given demographic of people. When considered more widely, then, the episode helped them think more seriously or consequentially about the formative power of storytelling on and within community practices, including their most quotidian elements like cooking.

My decision to elucidate these connections by intentionally assigning specific episodes of Time is Away opens another way to think about Rollo and Tierney as unique curators of their own. Where I might have been crafting an argument with the episodes I selected for my class (which, when loosely defined, posited that culture is connected to and shapes social dynamics), one might interpret Rollo’s and Tierney’s repertoire of radio as suggesting an overarching logic or message. Taken as a whole, Time is Away could be said to be interested in illuminating and commenting on the ongoing dynamics between culture, identity, place, and power. Formally speaking, their mix work meshes all these themes together through music, voice, sound, and a unique editing style, which, as mentioned, does not privilege one medium of media over another. By presumably privileging these themes alongside their unique artistic (if curatorial or “curatorial-adjacent”) practice, the two bring into consideration the critical concerns of the moment by intentionally moving in affecting or visceral ways while also drawing critical focus to the capacity for radio to expand these very concerns by including music, sound, and text across an allocated or programmed amount of time.

 

Spatialising Sound Through (Radio) Time

Rollo’s and Tierney’s radio work draws into critical focus the formal use of time and notions of the temporal more generally. Time is Away regularly employs time in literal and symbolic ways to simultaneously expand, explore, and comment on the underlying themes of a series of texts, field recordings, and pieces of music. “Time,” then, plays an integral role in their radio work which often aims to deconstruct or disseminate individual but related cultural works in ways that provide musical space “between the notes” for a listener to ruminate on their respective but interrelated themes.

For example, Time is Away’s “Souvenir” samples the performer and writer Christina Petrie reading extracts from Michael Bracewell’s part-memoir and part-work-of-psychogeography, Souvenir. Characterised by The Guardian as a work dedicated to a “London time forgot,” “Souvenir” the episode “drifts through 70s and 80s London from pre-development Docklands to the crumbling squats of Notting Hill and Paddington” while focusing on the central themes of its source material, including  the likes of architecture, light, weather, music, time, and memory.²⁴ By taking a self-described “cut-and-paste approach to [Bracewell’s] text.” Rollo and Tierney go back in time from the retrospective of the present and “read [London] from east to west.”²⁵ This reading occurs alongside evocative pieces of ambient music and textural sounds to weave a space amongst the airwaves of the present for the listener to ruminate on what The Guardian refers to as the city’s “less rapacious age.”²⁶

London past and present is often a central point of focus for Rollo and Tierney as they explore space and place. In the case of their Fable of the Bees exhibit, the two explored these themes in a more immediate, physical sense. When I asked them to comment on the project and the ways they curated the space at Black Tower they responded:

Fable of the Bees was the first time we took the project [Time is Away] outside the imagined space of radio and into real space. In this case, it wasn’t so much a matter of putting sound together to fit the space as creating a space to hear the sound in. We aimed to make a space in the gallery somewhere between a council office and a building site. Then we filled it with speech and music, reflecting on ideas of urban improvement, resistance, and change over time. One of the most exciting aspects of the process was that we were able to spatialise the sound with different voices and pieces of sound appearing from different parts of the room. Although this was a first attempt at this way of working, we hope the sound did activate the space for participants.

By using their exhibit space to “spatialise sound” through equal parts recorded speech and music that reflected on “ideas of urban improvement, resistance, and change over time,” Rollo and Tierney attempted to “activate” a physical space that evoked aspects of all three ideas. Furthermore, by creating a specific atmosphere that complimented their sound work rather than attempting to “fit” specific sounds into a predetermined venue, the two drew into focus the ways an exhibit and sound can work to supplement the other in equitable, thought-provoking ways. Taken together, this technique once again calls to mind the ungraded approach that might work to define Rollo’s and Tierney’s “curatorial” technique, and additionally, illuminates a critical lens to think through or a possible blueprint with which to rethink the ways curators interested in employing a variety of medias in their own exhibits might arrange the physical space they use.

 

A Multitudinous Somewhere Else

What underscores Rollo’s and Tierney’s creative process more generally is their deep proclivity to collaborate with others. When I asked them if they could comment on their regular decision to join up with writers, voice actors, musicians, and artists on Time is Away, they wrote back with the following emblematic response:

Collaboration is really important to what we do. At its heart, Time is Away is a collective effort. It is a collaboration between two people who bring distinctive bodies of knowledge to it. This ethos also looks beyond the two of us. Time is Away is an inherently outward-looking project. Friendship is really important to us. So it makes sense to work collectively: we can stretch beyond the limitations of our own insights and experiences. Ultimately, working with other people makes what we do far richer.

At its heart, Time is Away is a “collective effort” in the most rudimentary sense. Each component of Rollo’s and Tierney’s work, whether it be a piece of music, a text, a poem, a series of sounds, or an exhibit object, works alongside the other to form a truly collective effort. Consequently, Rollo and Tierney challenge the listener or participant to look beyond the “limited” ways they might imagine seemingly disparate pieces of media relating to or existing in relation to the other within the interdisciplinary discourses surrounding curation, the literary arts, and sound. Beyond these three discursive nodes, Rollo’s and Tierney’s genre-defying, “outward-looking” work might inspire generative developments within socially focused arenas, including those involving the interrelated fields of pedagogy, social justice, and counterculture.

Nearing the end of my interview, Rollo and Tierney suggested to me that Time is Away more often “explores translation across media”^, including turning disciplines that are predominantly visual (including texts) into sound. They suggested that such a process could engender what they referred to as “the slipperiness of meaning.” Such slipperiness could transform or “translate” supposedly familiar and independent forms of media into pieces that are more fluid and better positioned to entwine in productive ways that might call deeper attention to their potential capacity to work alongside or be arranged collectively with each other in revealing, resounding ways across the airwaves, strands of time, exhibit spaces, and intertextually across several facets of aesthetic or literary culture. Indeed, Rollo and Tierney are not interested in drawing focus to one specific arena but instead, à la the MacNiece poem from which Time is Away takes its title, uniformly sounding via “two people one pulse” a multitudinous somewhere else.

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1. NTS is an online, listener-supported radio station and media platform launched in Hackney, London in 2011. It can be accessed 24/7 at https://www.nts.live. Although the base platform is free to all users, there are tiers of subscription-based modules that can provide more customisable options for listeners. Jack Rolley and Elaine Tierney, “Time is Away – The Fable of the Bees”, Time is Away, NTS Radio, February 24, 2020, https://www.nts.live/shows/timeisaway/episodes/time-is-away-24th-february-2020. ↩

2. “Fable of the Bees,” Black Tower, accessed February 25, 2024, https://blacktowerprojects.com/products/fable-of-the-bees. ↩

3. “Fable of the Bees.” ↩

4. “Fable of the Bees.” ↩

5. Jack Rollo and Elaine Tierney, “Time Is Away: The Wildgoose Memorial Library,” Time is Away, NTS Radio, April 27, 2023, 1:00:05, https://www.nts.live/shows/timeisaway/episodes/timeisaway-17th-april-2023. ↩

6. Jane Wildgoose, Wildgoose, 2006. ↩

7. Jane Wildgoose, Wildgoose, 2006. ↩

8. “Time is Away,” Cafe Oto, accessed February 24, 2024, https://www.cafeoto.co.uk/artists/time-is-away/. ↩

9. “Fable of the Bees.” ↩

10. “Fable of the Bees.” ↩

11. This ecosystem of independent online radio includes Brooklyn’s The Lot Radio, Glasgow’s Clyde Built Radio, and Toronto’s FSR.Live. ↩

12. Jason Loviglio and Michele Hilmes, Radio’s New Wave Global Sound in the Digital Era (New York: Routledge, 2013), 2. ↩

13. Jack Rollo and Elaine Tierney (Time is Away) in discussion with the author, January 2024. ↩

14. Brandon LaBelle, “Poetics of Listening,” in English Studies in Canada 46, no. 2–4 (May 2023): 274. ↩

15. Louis MacNeice, “Meeting Point by Louis MacNeice,” Poetry Foundation, accessed February 25, 2024, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/91396/meeting-point. ↩

16. Brandon LaBelle, “Poetics of Listening,” in English Studies in Canada 46, no. 2–4 (May 2023): 275. ↩

17. Jack Rollo and Elaine Tierney (Time is Away) in discussion with the author, January 2024. ↩

18. Robin Silas Christian, Time is Away, photograph, 2021. ↩

19. Carsten Junker, “The Musings and Mirrors of W.E.B. Du Bois – From an Essay Collection to the Essay Plaque,” in From the Scenic Essay to the Essay-Exhibition: Expanding the Essay Form in the Arts Beyond Literature and Film, ed. Jasper Delbecke, S:Pam – Studies in Performing Arts & Media, (Ghent University, 2023), 25. Jack Rollo and Elaine Tierney (Time is Away) in discussion with the author, January 2024. Subsequent quotations from this interview will be left uncited when in the text. ↩

20. “Fable of the Bees” Black Tower Projects, Time is Away: Fable of the Bees, (London: Black Tower, 2020). ↩

21. Carolina Rito, “The Essayistic in the Curatorial – Repurposing the Politics of Exhibition,” in From the Scenic Essay to The Essay-Exhibition, ed. Jasper Delbecke (Ghent: Studies in Performing Arts & Media, 2023), 99. ↩

22. Rito, “The Essayistic in the Curatorial”, 99. ↩

23. Jack Rollo and Elaine Tierney, “Time Is Away: The Mortal Muse 27th November 2023,” Time is Away, NTS Radio, accessed February 26, 2024, https://www.nts.live/shows/timeisaway/episodes/timeisaway-27th-november-2023. ↩

24. Sean O’Hagan, “Souvenir by Michael Bracewell Review – the London That Time Forgot,” The Guardian, September 14, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/sep/14/souvenir-by-michael-bracewell-review-the-london-that-time-forgot. “Time Is Away: Souvenir,” NTS Radio, accessed February 26, 2024, https://www.nts.live/shows/timeisaway/episodes/timeisaway-23rd-january-2023. ↩

25. O’Hagan, “Souvenir.” ↩

26. O’Hagan, “Souvenir.” ↩

27. O’Hagan, “Souvenir.” ↩

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Article: Creative Commons NonCommerical 4.0 International License.

Issue images produced by the media installation All We'd Ever Need Is One Another (2018) by Adam Basanta.