a girl p{{{{{laying with a rock //Lockdown Symphony

AN Online BROADCAST /

RTM.FM / 15 APR / 20:00

RACHEL CATTLE / BxNT

Sound production Olie Griffin

a girl p{{{{{laying with a rock //Lockdown Symphony is a commissioned broadcast by Rachel Cattle and BxNT, an experimental improvisation group.   





 a girl p{{{{{laying with a rock (27 mins),  muses on a painting by American artist Joan Mitchell, viewed online, whilst being interrupted by one side of a lockdown Zoom session with fellow members of the Bishopsgate Experimental Noise Theatre (BxNT).  A recorded transcript of another recording, its layers reflect frustrating and enlivening streams of thought on a creative life, through emails and conversations with the protagonist, friends, and a group of women through time and space, including Virginia Woolf, Moki Cherry, Kim Gordon, Elizabeth Fraser and Lee Lozano.

BxNT, a workshop group devoted to improvisation, grew out of an avant-garde music course run by Roger Thomas at the Bishopsgate Institute, 2013. The group subsequently met monthly in a recording studio above the Cockpit Theatre - a room where wires tangled between electronic sound equipment, bits of plastic and various other non-instruments. Fast forward five years and the ‘current situation’ precipitated the possibility of new explorations.

Lockdown Symphony (33 mins), developed from live sound made at home whilst being broadcast to each other across Zoom, individually recorded, edited and re-mixed by Olie Griffin for transmission.



Rachel Cattle is co-editor with John Hughes of JOAN, a publishing project for contemporary artists’ writing. Through an expanded publishing practice, her work explores undervalued feminist methodologies and gestures–offering new possibilities for revitalising and amplifying these across writing, drawing, performance, and sound. Witch Dance (pub. Centre for Useless Splendour, 2017) is held in the Tate Library Collections, and La a dybird was published by Ma Bibliotheque in 2019. Her work has been broadcast on Resonance fm and Radiophrenia, exhibited and performed at The Barbican, Focalpoint, CCA Glasgow, Clockwork, Berlin, Publish and Be Damned and ASP (Artist Self Publishers) at the ICA. She is a member of experimental sound collective BxNT and We Are Publication, a group testing innovative forms of contemporary art publishing originating at Kingston School of Art’s Contemporary Art Research Centre. The group has broadcast on Resonance fm and Radiophrenia, CCA Glasgow, and exhibited at The Stanley Picker Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery, Camden Arts Centre, and Pratt Institute, New York.


BxNT is Roger Thomas, Sumit Paul–Choudhury, Rachel Cattle, Olie Griffin, Kevin Hicks, Georgina Walker.


*Image courtesy of Rachel Cattle