Category Archives: #29

Show 406: Radio Arctic by Marko Peljhan and Radio Student

From Radio Student, Ljubljana, in Radia show 406 we bring You a mashap of authentic recordings from the Arctic, made by Marko Peljhan and his team, from one of their Arctic Perspective Initiative’s mission: therein recordings, local radio communications over short waves and folklore and pop music from the Arctic. “In the Arctic, there are the openest public radio stations. The radio station does not have a key, anyone can come on the radio and do the show.” (M.P.)

Marko Peljhan. After theatre and radio studies at the University of Ljubljana, Marko Peljhan founded Projekt Atol, an organisation working with visual arts and communications technologies, in 1992. In 1995 he co-founded LJUDMILA (Ljubljana Digital Media Lab), now one of Europe’s most significant cultural and tactical media labs. In 1997 Peljhan’s ongoing Makrolab, launched at documenta in Germany, provoked artistic and scientific reflection on sustainable technologies and energies. Radio is key to Peljhan’s research: he founded and coordinates the Insular Technologies initiative, which proposed an autonomous high frequency radio network long before wireless internet. Radio underpins performative works such as Solar (1997), Signal-Sever (1999 – 2006) and SPEKTR (2007). Peljhan is Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, Media Arts and Technology Program, California Nanosystems Institute, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA; he is also a licensed radio operator and trained pilot.

Arctic Perspective Initiative (API) is a non-profit, international group of individuals and organizations, founded by Marko Peljhan and Matthew Biederman, whose goal is to promote the creation of open authoring, communications and dissemination infrastructures for the circumpolar region. Its aim is to work with, learn from, and empower the North and Arctic Peoples through open source technologies and applied education and training. By creating access to these technologies while promoting the creation of shared communications and data networks without costly overheads, continued and sustainable development of autonomous culture, traditional knowledge, science, technology and education opportunities for peoples in the North and Arctic regions is enabled.

Radio Student. Based in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, founded back in 1969 in ex-Yugoslavia, with 24 hours program and more than 200 regular contributors today, Radio Student is one of the oldest and the biggest independent and non-commercial radio stations in Europe, with a long tradition in radio art and the diverse field of contemporary investigative art practices, especially throug Ministry of Experiment project in 90′s and 00′s, and today through our Open radio art theory investigative platform RADAR.

LINKS:

Show 405: Sound Effects Show from free103point9

From free103point9 in upstate New York, a story of sound effects, subverting a documentary-style radio show with bits of radio theatre created entirely of sound effects. Foley effects in films, and live theatre and radio sound effects are explored. Also music from Spike Jones (“The Sound Effects Man”), Rufe Davis (“I’m a Sound Effects Man”), and Dymaxion (“The Haunted Radio”), plus fake commercials, and excerpts of pop songs (“Paper Planes” by M.I.A. and “Pop Life” from Prince) and more. (27:58) Audio file:

http://data.free103point9.org/r/q5/46/23/Radia_s29_n405_free103point9_WGXC_Sound_Effects.mp3

free103point9 is a non-profit arts organization defining and cultivating the genre Transmission Arts by promoting artists and works with, for, and about the electromagnetic spectrum — the airwaves. Transmission arts programming from free103point9 Online Radio airs every Saturday and every night from midnight to 6 a.m. on WGXC 90.7-FM, a 3300-watt radio station in the Hudson Valley in New York State in the United States.

http://www.free103point9.org/

Show 404: TEAFM. The time sound machine

La memoria histórica de la raza humana se basa en registros. Las pinturas rupestres, los altorrelieves etruscos, los mosaicos romanos, las primeras imprentas… todos esos registros eran visuales, tangibles.
Diez instantes de la Historia Humana en los que se refleja la importancia del sonido y de los elementos que refuerzan su poder de comunicación.
Pero del mismo modo que la percepción de una obra pictórica cambia dependiendo del entorno donde se observa, de la luz, de los factores externos a él, el mensaje que transmite un sonido varía dependiendo de las interferencias que lo acompañan.
Fijémonos más en esos acompañantes que en el propio mensaje.
Quedaremos sorprendidos de lo que podemos escuchar si prestamos la suficiente atención.
No es hasta la segunda mitad del siglo XIX cuando se realizan los primeros registros sonoros. Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville patenta en 1857 el Fonoautógrafo, considerado el primer aparato capaz de registrar sonido en un medio visible.
En este radiodocumental escucharemos la primera grabación conocida que ha llegado hasta nosotros es de 1860; Au Clair de la Lune.
Pero también los primeros registros sonoros del grafófono, la primera llamada telefónica intercontinental, capturas sonoras de voces nacidas antes de 1800…
Un viaje subidos a nuestra máquina del tiempo para recorrer los registros sonoros que han marcado los últimos doscientos años de nuestra Historia.

Una producción de la Escuela Creativa de Radio TEA FM para RADIA.
www.teafm.net | info@teafm.net

ENGLISH VERSION :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
The historical memory of human race is based on records. The cave paintings, Etruscan reliefs, Roman mosaics, the first printing … All these records were visual, touchables.
This program collects ten moments of human history which reflects the importance of sound and elements that reinforce its communication power.
But just as the perception of a painting environment changes depending on where it is observed, in the light of external factors to it, the message conveyed sound varies accompanying interference.
Let’s look at these companions more than the message itself.
We’ll be surprised what we can hear if we pay enough attention.
It is not until the second half of the nineteenth century when the first sound recording is made. Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville patented in 1857 the phonautograph, considered the first device capable of recording sound in a visible support.
In this radiodocumental we can hear the first known recording that has come down to us is 1860, Au Clair de la Lune.
But the first sound recordings of graphophone, the first intercontinental phone call, sound captures from voices born before 1800 …
A trip uploaded to our time machine to travel the sound recordings that have marked the last two hundred years of our history.

A TEA FM Radio Workshop broadcast for RADIA
www.teafm.net | info@teafm.net

Show 403: ‘Don’t panic’ A live performance by Chris Farmer in the Panik studio

A live perfomance by Chris Farmer in the Radio Panik studio, based on a previous work he did a few months ago for a german galery (Expo Berlin). The work he did in Berlin resulted in an improvised performance which was an electronic, harmonic and visual echo of the surrounding urban space.

In Brussels, Chris farmer proposed to the Radio Panik listeners to recreate the poetic and harmonic experience of that particular urban landscape, which he recorded and translated with his sound recorder and coloured pencils.

**

Living and working in Brussels, Belgium, Chris Famer is of vaguely British origin and a self-taught gardener, linguist, musician and artist who composes and improvises in all of these media. Since the early 1990s, he has gardened, translated and created his way through France, Belgium and the UK.

His quest is to find poetry in noise and the botany of language, hoping to one day compile a formally chaotic and above all subjective monograph of the world that confronts him, and us, every day.

Since an early age, Chris Farmer has been influenced, or obsessed, by song and sound, and especially how it can be transformed or dismantled, as seen in the works of Anthony Milton, Michael Gira, Richard Skelton.

He currently experiments with the relation between languages, culture, sound, structure, horticulture and art, in various random combinations.

Chris Farmer’s website.

Chris Farmer’s mixcloud.

Chris Farmer’s soundcloud.

Berlin In Art’s blog about the performance in Berlin

Expo-Berlin galery

Chris Farmer pour une performance en live dans les studios de Radio Panik.

À l’origine de sa proposition, une invitation de la galerie allemande Expo-Berlin qui avait donné lieu à une écoute aux casques d’une composition, improvisée en live, résonance sonore, visuelle, électronique et harmonique de ce que lui a inspiré l’espace urbain berlinois au cours de ses déambulations.

À Bruxelles, et en studio, ce jeudi 13 décembre, Chris Farmer propose aux auditeurs de Radia de retrouver et de recréer la poésie et l’harmonie surgies de ce paysage urbain que son enregistreur et ses crayons de couleurs s’étaient amusés à traduire.

À propos de Chris Farmer :

Installé à Bruxelles depuis 3 ans, Chris Farmer est un autodidacte protéiforme : jardinier, linguiste, musicien et artiste, il compose et improvise à partir de ces différentes sémantiques. Depuis le début des années 90, il jardine, traduit et créée ainsi son chemin à travers la France, la Belgique et la Grande-Bretagne.

Faire émerger la poésie du bruit et la botanique du langage constitue une constante dans sa démarche qui vise l’espoir d’un jour, parvenir à recenser en une monographie, formellement chaotique, et par dessus-tout, subjective, notre rapport au monde.

Chris Farmer est influencé, sinon obsédé, par la chanson et le son, en particulier par la manière dont ils peuvent être déformés et démantelés, à l’instar des travaux d’Anthony Milton, Michael Gira et Richard Skelton.

Il expérimente actuellement les variations aléatoires qui peuvent résulter de la relation entre les languages, la culture, le son, la structure, l’horticulture et l’art.

Show 402: ‘Hitler’ A radio play created by Nikolai Galen and Dolf Planteijdt

<Radio worm>

A radio play created by Nikolai Galen (voices) and Dolf Planteijdt (soundwork) at the WORM studio in Rotterdam 29.10-3.11.12 with additional work at the Koeienverhuur Mobile in Amsterdam.
Based on a play text by Nikolai Galen. With thanks to RadioWORM.

(the actual play starts at 2.05. as we were short of the promised 28 minutes radioworm added a long ‘jingle’)

We asked Nicolai to tell us a bit more about the play and he did.

Nicolai about the text;

While choosing and writing the different texts which make up the text as a whole, I found myself attempting to grapple with some specific – and daunting – themes. Namely:

  • Anti-Semitism: What is it? Where does it spring from? How on Earth has it survived and festered for millennia? Why did it explode so pathologically in Hitler’s thinking and Nazism in general. Presumably most of us (me included) sometimes have proto-racist feelings of discomfort in the presence of people (perhaps immigrants, perhaps those of a different class) who seem especially other to us, whose presence, whose cultural differences can irritate us, even though, at the same time, we might (I hope) be irritated with ourselves for being irritated, for carrying such sick prejudices. Yet it’s an awfully, unimaginably, inconceivably long way from such feelings to genocide. Yet, there are plenty of populist politicians and their followers around, happy to play with racism in its various forms (they’re taking our jobs, they’re thieves and pimps, they’re incompatible with our ways and beliefs, they’re diluting the national spirit, they’ve no wish to integrate, etc…) fomented by nationalism, by myths of cultural difference and superiority, by a national claim for us versus them, and for this land being our land and all that. Bigotry is alive, well and kicking, as an uncountable and shameful number of contemporary murders and ‘cleansings’, especially in the world’s numerous ‘conflict zones’, testify.
    – Hitler’s popularity in Germany: How on Earth could such a pathetic, mad and manically-deluded man be so popular, and for so long? I could ask the same question about, say, George W. Bush, yet Bush isn’t mad, was Hitler mad? And what does it mean to say that he was evil? And given that he was evil (in a way Bush can’t hold a candle to) – radically evil – then how come he was so popular, so adored…?
    – How could 20th Century European culture, in the form of Nazism, be so unimaginably violent, even sadistic, even without any kind of rational justification, however feeble? Most obviously, there was no military reason for the death factories, nor the destruction of swathes of the Soviet Union after those regions had been conquered. It was as if the (German) nation (as imagined by itself) was infected with blood-lust.
    – What does it mean to say (as Jung does, amongst others) that Hitler was some kind of incarnation of the German collective psyche, of the national myth (made all the more absurd by Hitler being a puny black-haired guy, not a strapping blonde athlete)? What are the myths at the heart of Nazism, from where do they derive their power…?
    All of which I could only scratch the surface of. And the more I scratched, the deeper I found myself in the bowels of Western Culture. And it’s not a pleasant place…

Nicolai about the radioplay;
For the radio version of Hitler we found ourselves layering and treating voices in ways which led me to thinking that we were purposely giving voice to Hitler and the other protagonists without (anyway impossible for the medium) giving them body. The voices are disembodied. They float by like phantoms. The texts we chose for the radio play are particularly obsessed with death – one could say, with the factory production of phantoms. One could also say that Hitler aimed to make his Promethean utopia (which would of course have been the dystopia to end all dystopias) out of death (something he had in common with other great dictators). Perhaps out of death he thought he would be able to resurrect a new (‘better’ for das Volk at least) kind of life. Instead, out of death he only produced the final vast and awful nothing of silence and phantoms. The phantoms of the dead. The phantoms of those – people and cultures – that can never be resurrected.

But our terrible times are less different from those terrible times than perhaps we would like to believe. War carries on unabated in its demented fury, and some of those wars – those in the Middle East – have some of their roots in World War Two. And as we rape and ravage the planet, we also are leaving behind us silence and phantoms, with much more, and maybe much worse, to come. On the one hand it seems an absurd question to say, ‘George Bush was a little Hitler’ but I’m not so sure. The veneer may be politer, and the process of gaining power more ‘democratic’ (but not for the victims, they had no say in it); but was, say, Bush really so much less Promethean, especially when the juggernaut power of the USA is looked at as a whole.

But I don’t want to single out the USA, many other states are just as bad, only not as powerful. Anyway, it seems to me that what happened seventy-odd years ago has rather faded from the memories of many, especially those for whom only the grandparents lived through that war. Trying to bring the horror of Hitler and his accomplices back to life seems to me essential. But let them stay only as voices, as phantom voices. The attempt to give them flesh (as in cinema) just doesn’t seem to carry sufficient horror to be anything other than another entertainment, just another war movie. But when we only hear the voices, they enter our heads, we can’t keep them out, and therefore we have to engage with them. We have to never forget them and we have to recognise that the times have not changed very much at all.

Show 401: An Interruption – live – by Lucas Cejpek and Michael Fischer

//Radio Helsinki//

Lucas Cejpek text, reading
Michael Fischer live-mix with 2 CD-players

A live on air improvisation by Michael Fischer based on textfragments by Lucas Cejpek, dealing with interruption. The texts are part of a work in progress, a dictionary of a single word, which is INTERRUPTION.

In 2005 Michael Fischer developed connex:context, a series of live performances on Orange 94FM – community radio station Vienna, in collaboration with the authors Marietta Böning, Petra Ganglbauer, Christine Huber, Semier Insayif, Gerhard Jaschke, Christian Katt, Margret Kreidl, Peter Pessl, Valeri Scherstjanoi, Birgit Schwaner, Lisa Spalt, Dieter Sperl, Günter Vallaster, Peter Waugh, dasfröhlicheWohnzimmer; live performed at Alte Schmiede, Salon Praterstraße, Literaturhaus Wien, Literaturhaus Graz and festivals Literatur in Grün or Haydn in der Wart.

Lucas Cejpek born 1956 in Vienna, where he is living as a freelance author and director of theatre- and radio-plays. Latest book: Where Is Elizabeth? A novel, Sonderzahl publishers, Vienna 2009.

Michael Fischer musician-composer in the range of improvised music, noise, new music, soundscapes on saxophone, violin, cd-player/mixer, conducted instant compostions, since 1999 working on the implications of the electro-acoustic phenomenon feedback. 2005 he launched the Vienna Improvisers Orchestra, working as an instant composition conductor also for other large ensembles. Concerts, performances, festival appearances as musician and cross-collaborator throughout Europe and Japan. http://m.fischer.wuk.at

In cooperation with Radio Orange 94.0 FM (Vienna)
Original broadcast: Radio Orange 94.0 FM, November 6, 2012, 22:00 – 22:57

Show 400: Radia present by Hartmut Geerken

Musician and sound artists Hartmut Geerken lives in the middle of Bavaria in Wartaweill and works with the sounds of surrounding nature. His ways to communicate with the animals are the present to celebrate the 400th Radia show this week. We follow Geerken into a nest of bumblebees and listen to the queen and all the smart insects while having breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Show 399: No One Turned Away / No Guest List by various Kingston artists

Neven Lochhead, a musician in Kingston, Ontario, recently put together and released a compilation cassette of local musicians who are engaging with experimental musical and performance approaches. This episode features compositions from various artists on that compilation, and gives the listener a glimpse into the D.I.Y. approach in Kingston that explores alternate routes in attempts to arrive at new sonic shores. The diversity of the tape is evident in this episode, yet the pieces seem to speak to each other, if only in obscurity – through the collective blips, beeps and squeals, the listener can map out the nature, and the architecture of an imagined city. Find out more / listen more: http://tonedeaf10.bandcamp.com/

Show 398: antipodean field : constellations from kings rapid, by david haines.

radia season 29, show #398 (radio one 91FM. dunedin, new zealand), playing from november 12 to november 18, 2012.

Antipodean Field: constellations from Kings rapid.

by David Haines

“This piece was recorded in Dunedin New Zealand and in the Blue Mountains of
New South Wales, Australia. I thought I would climb Mt Analogue with this
piece, instead I found a deep and dark sandstone gorge. This is where I
live, not far from the Wollemi, which for the local indigenous people
translates as “look out country”. Electro-acoustic and electromagnetic
undulations tear open the firmament to reveal a thin sliver of the multiple
scales of an infernal roar.”

David Haines

David Haines lives in the Blue Mountains, Australia. He was born in London in 1966. His practice in contemporary art is diverse and he has shown his installations in galleries and museums internationally and throughout Australasia. His work encompasses all forms of installation, including working with sound, aroma and digital technology. He is also known for his collaborations with Joyce Hinterding that have won several awards and been shown Internationally including the Sao Paulo Biennale 2004. He is represented by Breenspace.

additional sound : Joyce Hinterding

Show 397: ISTANBUL COURTHOUSTEP  by 2/5B

ISTANBUL COURTHOUSTEP
by 2/5BZ for reboot.fm

With support from Europe’s and the world’s biggest palaces of justice, and with a vision of solving the problems of unemployment and using F- and T-type prisons as for-profit companies with cheap labor, “Advanced Justice” is surging towards becoming a global brand: The world’s largest palace of justice (courthouse) is under construction in Istanbul’s Kartal district .

2/5BZ,  (Istanbul), works in a range of media, with releases in video, music and literary formats. His work is characterized by a balancing on the verge of trash and the ongoing production of collages of music, cinema, web caches, speech and field recordings. 2/5BZ has put on live audiovisual performances in 19 countries and 91 cities, at clubs, festivals, squats and exhibitions. He concentrates on concepts such as cultural pipeline, energy dialogue, Turkish pop cinema, deconstruction, exotic tourism, anti-city myths, copy culture and remakes, investigating cultural clichés and Recent ( New-Age ) scientific discoveries; hardcore ultra modernism’s new strategies of future developments and their effects on the economic and political situation of individuals. In his audiovisual performances he has focused on new security measures and the indisputable acceptance of volunteering and is currently working on “New Age Toolerance Vampirism”, “ DNA Fascism”, ”Hologram Doctrine”, “Avatar Liberalism”, in “Palaverel” and Parallel Universes as well as  ” Cosmic Nottoman NOptimism ” and recent performance ” Istanbul Courthoustep.”.