We are honoured to present an hour of improv courtesy of The Nuclear Family on tonight’s Radio Joy. First broadcast on Mining For Gold on Resonance 104.4FM it is definitely worth a repeat.

Sylvia Hallett (violin and FX) Clive Bell (Shakuhachi and other reed instruments) Max Hallett (drums).

THE FAMILY PHOTOGRAPHS

A conspiracy of clouds over yon municipal dump
Rain coming down quick and cold
I stagger over mounds of useless waste
Used needles empty cans broken refrigerators.

A discarded mobile phone rings for a moment
And then dies
The loneliest sound in the world
All is dark
All is dumb
All is dying.

And then the sun breaks through
Gulls wheel above
The churning stench of endless garbage
And over this stretch of waste some kind of toxic rainbow
A chimera, all beautiful, a chemical transience
And at the other end the thing I’ve come looking for.

The Family Photographs…

All of them are there

Generations of love and war

And blood and truths and rumour

The past pointing to the future

Sepia to Polaroid and beyond
To lose them would be to lose you
To lose you would be to lose my world
This is a miracle.
I run to collect
But it’s the wind that catches them instead
Carrying them up into the skies
As the clouds gang up once more and close
And the darkness returns
As the rain comes down harder than ever
And the stench finally breaches my nostrils.

Poem by Johny Brown

The recording of this show is available on request.