13.07.2025
The day after, Meanwhile Back at the Ruins we headed towards Co. Carlow. This was the first long stretch of journey so we spent most of the day driving along at a steady pace and listening to music, mostly the dub poet, Linton Kwesi Johnson on that particular day. We set up the Twitch live stream and played cassettes on a Renault Blaupunkt Audio 3000 that we fitted as part of an experimental live broadcast project within tour de force called K7 dans la 4L (Cassettes in the Renault Quatrelle). Our intention was to broadcast our travels daily, including chats, music and unexpected encounters.
Looking out the small window from low seats, onto the bonnet and beyond gave the feeling of being inside a game. This is something that was ongoing for both tour de force and the pilot journey across France in 2024 ahead of Beep Beep – each became a kind of game, a mapped adventure with pit stops and detours. Much like Forza Horizon, a game that Liliane had played over a few months in 2023, she’d unlocked a seasonal level and discovered an abandoned wreck of an old Renault 4 in a barn. In the game you can restore the cars and rally them around the tracks, go off road, through the fields and onto tiny back lanes as well as taking part in races and rallies. This was emulated in real life for both the pilot in France in 2024 and last year for tour de force. It was like a real life video game. In this way tour de force was moving between real and synthesised worlds.
The Twitch set up was incredibly DIY with Liliane’s phone taped to the window with gaffer tape, and a cigarette lighter (see pics), and we’d frequently go out of coverage. But for the most part, the system worked; we’d found a way to set the system up to record and archive the journey whilst we moved through it bringing people from all over the world into the game with us. Initially, during the tour across France, we were streaming all day while we were on the road, using it as a way to stay connected with family and friends, though each day, new viewers tuned in to chat and pass the time with us. We drove across France and up through Ireland on a quest to get the recently re-animated car to The Pumphouse in Dublin port for Beep Beep, a major installation by Liliane, curated by Temple Bar Gallery + Studios in summer 2024.
I had the fiddle with me so sometimes I was playing tunes inside the car too. From this, I made a series of compositions, small pieces of music responding to different mechanisms under the bonnet, and the Beep Beep journey as a whole to create a sort of game soundtrack. These compositions on zither and fiddle were later incorporated into a performance and cassette project called Tuam Na Farraige, in collaboration with music and art collective, Metaxu.
For tour de force, we were on a quest to visit artists, musicians, mechanics, farmers, archaeologists, craftspeople, academics and aficionados over a series of pit stops all around Ireland. The musical element of the tour was important and throughout, we collaborated with musicians working across different mediums and genres who featured in live streamed concerts. Over the 45 day trip, K7 dans la 4L also hosted recitals inside the Renault 4 and played a variety of cassettes as well as music sourced from the collection of Irish Traditional Folk Music Archive. With genre meandering mix tapes and a growing collection of releases from underground labels, this broadcasting experiment became an ever growing cabinet of sonic curiosities. Driving from place to place, live broadcasts of conversation, atmospheric sound, interviews and music experiments, formedsoundscapes for the IRL game, as the Renault 4 moved through the landscape.
Photo credits: tour de force, Michael Hill and Ros Kavanagh.
