The soundtrack to my life

Save 6music protest reimagined by Gary JC.

"BBC 6Music provides the soundtrack to much of my home life. It is so ingrained in my family's daily lives that it seems almost unimaginable that at one time there might have been the need to save it through petition and protest.
I lived for many years in South Africa and Germany where radio stations are peppered with advertising, and are often commercially swayed in programming decision-making. I returned to the UK with heightened appreciation for the BBC and its offerings. It also rendered me sensitive in terms of protecting the commons, of which the national broadcaster is just a part. While protecting a cultural institution may not seem as important as political struggle, I would argue that the two are interlinked. And, in this case, the public action worked, 6Music is still with us providing the soundtrack to many lives and homes such as mine.

For my work, I wanted to create a short, somewhat dissonant audio collage representing the diversity of music that can be experienced on 6Music - from the African Jazz Precussion that might be heard on Giles Peterson, to brooding synth, strings and beats, perhaps more at home on Mary-Anne Hobbs - to fuzzy post-punk bass that might be heard on Iggy's Friday night show. The diversity of sounds that can be heard on 6Music makes it (in my opinion) something worth protecting, worth fighting for. My reinterpretation uses the protest recordings alongside diverse, disjointed fragments of music to create something not entirely musical, nor entirely non-musical."

Part of the Protest and Politics project - find out more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/protest