On Touching is a radio show about both touch (the tactile, or the haptic) and that which touches (affects or moves us). Typically, our most tender moments are those when vision is obscured and contact is obstructed, if not forbidden entirely. Fingering through my (mostly digital) collection I have pulled out a selection of music that is connected through different strategies of making contact across seemingly impassable divides and within impossible situations
In these unsettling times of ‘social distancing’ and self-isolating, technology again promises to put us in touch with each other.
The reality, however, is that these very apparatuses can operate to differently distance us and amplify the problems of both ‘sense’ and sensing. Perhaps If anything can restore contact, it is music and particularly the human voice; phenomena that are radically communicable, dislocated, even disembodied but somehow attuned, harmonious.
Split into two parts, On Touching reaches out across two adjacent weekends in the ‘lockdown’, summer of 2020.
Commissioned by TACO for rtm.fm.
First broadcast on Saturday 30 May and Saturday 6 June 2020