Sounds Queer? was founded in 2014 by Zosia Hołubowska as a flying queer synthesizer laboratory and is now – with Adele Knall and Violeta Gil Martínez – a vital collective of three. It is a Vienna-base collective working on the intersection of electronic music, sound art and queer activism. Their approach was a unique one in Vienna that has been the spot for feminist networks and labels for many years such as female pressure, unrecords label, temp-records.
Sounds Queer? Starts with the eternal question: How does sound sound queer? and opens a wide process field between queerness, open hardware, software, music production or marketing. The idea of the project is to create a safer queer space through music, using music for process oriented discourse. During Corona they moved their workshop programme to the virtual space and offer online workshops.
In Oct 2019 they released a tape with odd, weird and queer and mostly unpublished tracks by former SQ? teachers and supporters: Aja Ireland, Masha Dabelka artist, Zdrada Pałki Waterflower, Qeei and Carlin Dally, and the three of us, Mala Herba, Matte/Glossy and Krach.
This radia show features music productions of the collective-members Krach (xxx ), Matte/glossy (let it die), Mala Herba (Mermaid Seduction) and an additional production by Aja Ireland (GrimeInside)
schnelle musikalische hilfepresents: Mein tiefes Mitgefühl für diesen Ohrwurm
schnelle musikalische hilfe is an imaginary institution that deals with small musical problems as an excuse to start debates on bigger or other variously sized problems. Every ear worm has a worm in it.
Mein tiefes Mitgefühl für diesen Ohrwurm is a lyrical and musical project that features small sung sentences as symbolic relief for earworms. Throughout four days of radioing at Seanaps festival in Leipzig in October 2020, schnelle musikalische hilfe offered her deepest sympathy to everyone’s earworm and displayed other than the regular ear worm solutions such as: playing sudoku, listening to God Saved the Queen, or avoid late night coffees; and transcended what is scientifically considered the ear worm cause: upbeat tempos or pitch patterns.
Including interviews with: Alina Medoia, Alice Feraru, Borys Slowikowski, Elisabetta Lanfredini, Gustavo Mendez, Heidi Heidelberg (Witch ‘n’ Monk), Kamila Metwaly, Larisa Crunțeanu, Maria Karpushina, Mihai Ogica, Petra Stefania, Ralf Wendt, Regina Sarreiter, Sarah Washington, Stephan Thierbach, Tatiana Lopez, Xiaoshi Vivian Vivian Qin
radia season 45 – show #814 (radio x) – RADIO ECOLOGIES – LOST IN TRANSMISSION – by KATE DONOVAN & GABI SCHAFFNER – playing from November 2 to November 8, 2020 –
RADIO ECOLOGIES – LOST IN TRANSMISSION by KATE DONOVAN & GABI SCHAFFNER
RADIO ECOLOGIES … is a Radio Art piece by Kate Donovan, 2020, with narration by Molly Donovan Higham. In this piece, radio is acknowledged as a natural as well as a human-made phenomena, that is interconnected and active across species and scales. The work asks: How does an expanded perspective impact our imagination of radio in the future?
In the beginning, there was radio. Some say that there was a quickening, and that the Earth’s core bubbled and burped to release the egg, and that the soft, brittle egg cracked to release the worm – the double worm of two entwined in one – to let it slither out and go underground, to disperse through all the elements and up through the aether, burrowing down and emerging up at the same time. But the sun and rocks and stars know that there was radio even before that. And nuclear waste (among other things) will go on to tell our more-than-human successors that there will still be radio, even then.
LOST IN TRANSMISSION … is a collaborative piece by Kate Donovan and Gabi Schaffner; editing and sound design: Gabi Schaffner.
How can we conceive of an expedition in non-territorial terms? Can we read the signals of our ecosphere? What if a reed turns out to be an antenna? Kate Donovan and Gabi Schaffner venture into the water retention basin of the Tempelhofer Feld, Berlin: at times an idyllic lake, sometimes a swampland the size of a football field, this body of water fluctuates between effective area and dreamscape, biomass and place of retreat.
KATE DONOVAN is a practicing radio artist, facilitator and researcher based in Berlin. Her artistic practice deals with radio in an elemental sense, in terms of frequency, transmission and interconnectedness (but also disruption and interference). Her editorial and organisational work in free and community radio fosters inclusion and experimentation. Recent and current projects include: Datscha Radio 17, a garden radio art festival on the future of the garden in the Anthropocene; ‘The Bespoke Headpiece’, a speculative telling of radio history which was developed during a transmission arts residency at Wave Farm in 2018; and the ongoing radio show ‘elements’, which broadcasts monthly via CoLaboRadio, on FM in Berlin and Potsdam, and online.
GABI SCHAFFNER works as an interdisciplinary artist in the field of visionary documentation, poetics and sound art. Traveling forms a vital part of her artistic practice – as a source for sound and language recordings but also as “a rite of passage” enabling the artist to explore alternative narrative structures. Her works in the field of sound and radio art have been broadcast internationally, including commissions by Deutschlandradio, SWR, ABC Australia and many more. Besides radio she has realized site-specific projects and exhibitions in India, Australia, Iceland, Spain, Finland, France and, most recently, Taiwan. Her collaborative project Datscha Radio – of which Kate Donovan also forms part – won the Award of the Berlin Network of Free Project Spaces and Initiatives 2019.
Find out more about DATSCHA RADIO at www.datscharadio.de
credits: great many thanks to KATE DONOVAN & GABI SCHAFFNER for RADIO ECOLOGIES – LOST IN TRANSMISSION!
metadata: RADIO ECOLOGIES – LOST IN TRANSMISSION – by KATE DONOVAN & GABI SCHAFFNER radia production: miss.gunst [GUNST + radiator x] production date: october 2020 station: radio x, frankfurt am main (germany) length: 28 min. licence: (cc-by-nc) KATE DONOVAN & GABI SCHAFFNER www.radiox.de – www.gunst.info – www.datscharadio.de
additional info: includes radia jingles (in/out), station and program info/intro (english)
links: radio x & radiator x: www.radiox.de – www.radiox.de/radiator-x GUNSTradio & radiator x: www.gunst.info – www.gunst.info/radiator Datscha Radio: www.datscharadio.de
From Chaos to the Essential is a radiophonic piece made by Deserter c’est créer, a french duo who started playing during the lockdown. She is a poet trying to find beauty in the mud of things. He captures sounds trying to make sense with all that material.
From Chaos to the Esssential is part of the Ugly/Beauty project which could wear different artistic clothes like a poetry book, a play, some songs, field recordings, etc. Following rivers and tides the piece started near La Loire, then crossing the Ocean on the back of the Kraken to flow with the St Laurent in Québec and back to France along La Charente.
Electromagnetic improvisation with running code : a few system commands that use memory and processor while the electromagnetic emissions of one’s laptop runtime are picked up as sound with transducing induction coils. https://trippingthroughruntime.net
Max Höfler: ‘was wenn’ (Text composition with sampler.)
One from the vaults this time. The Resonance Radio Orchestra realised this acoustmatic radio opera, The Death of Kodak, as part of rough for opera on Tuesday 3 November 2015 at 7.30pm at The Cockpit Theatre, London. The line up comprised Rodney Earl Clarke (pictured): voice (as Rochester, New York); Richard Scott: voice (as Eastman Kodak); Louise Goodwin: percussion; the late Simon King: electric guitar; Elo Masing: amplified violin; Markus Sasse: bass guitar; Milo Thesiger-Meacham: electric guitar; and Chris Weaver: electronics. Ed Baxter provided concept, text (see above) and direction. Piers Gibbon did the voice over. The graphic score was flashed onto the retinas of the players in a completely dark space, bringing the score inside the human body for the first time – the only radical development in the score for the last half century. The text comprises (a) all the variations which led Eastman to select the till then meaningless word “Kodak”; and (b) a fragment from the lyrics of Blind Willie McTell’s eccentric love song, Travelin’ Blues. The performance was realised in acousmatic fashion, in total darkness, though a few luminous yellow ropes hung from the rafters to define the space for the live audience.
“Skopje 26th of July” is a radio piece dedicated to the victims 1963 Skopje earthquake. It contains sounds from documentaries about the city made just before and after the earthquake, news from the first Macedonian radio – Radio Skopje and music from the period.
Authors: Joana Risteska, Mihail Dimitrov
Joana and Mihail are from Kanal 103. Risteska is a guitarist, Dimitrov is a film editor.
Ayn Rand’s highly dubious novel ‘The Fountainhead’ has become a source of morbid fascination for us since entering lockdown – forming the basis for a research pathology driven at least in part by an urge to inoculate against certain worlds that could (re)emerge post-Covid. Firmly embedded within the (arguably impoverished) neo-liberal literary canon, ‘The Fountainhead’ is nonetheless something of an embarrassment for many of those who actually live by its values. Even for many of its proponents, the novel is just ‘too much’: Rand does not hold back from not only depicting but outright embracing a brutal vision of sociality governed by self-interest and extreme egotism. The question we ask ourselves is, how can anyone like this? The popularity of the novel seems unabated despite its unbearably didactic tone, flatlining dialogue and overstated rhetoric. In order to at least move towards resolving this deadlock, in our radio broadcast we will be ripping this text to shreds – via absurd electronically affected characterisation, O.T.T sonic scenography and unreliable narration blurring the line between where the (awful) text ends and our possibly unqualified dismantling of it begins. The whole enterprise – if providing no concrete answers regarding where to go from here, might at least provide some indication of what to avoid.
Anna Danielewicz
Anna Danielewicz (b. Koszalin, 1991) is an artist and writer based in Glasgow.Coming from a background in performance, her practice is now rooted mostly in writing and the workshop format. Her most recent projects include Lip, Belly, Foot at the Scottish Sculpture Workshop and Voun Town at the Edinburgh Art Festival. Anna is a member of the programming committee of Market Gallery. She is currently working on a prose fiction project to do with the language of teenagers, and the problem of translation.
Max Syedtollan
Max Syedtollan (b. London, 1994) is an artist-composer based in Glasgow. In 2019 he was selected as one of Sound and Music’s ‘New Voices’ and exhibited work in the Venice Biennale, as well as releasing his second album of DIY chamber music on Glasgow label GLARC (supported by the Arts Council). His pieces have been broadcast on BBC Radios 4 and 6, and performed at institutions such as Cafe Oto and Snape Maltings. In 2020 he is working on a new moving image piece exploring the overlap between history and fiction.
This sound piece is created with sounds recorded on the roads of Belgium, the Alps and Lapland.
« Walking is the best way to go slower », says the philosopher Frédéric Gros. We need to find slowness again, to anchor our feet into the ground, to feel its texture, to listen with our toes. At least this is the invitation launched by this sound piece, a geopoetic immersion, an invitation of the paths.
Anne Versailles is a Belgian artist, polymorphic, based in Brussels. She lives on the edge of the Forêt de Soignes which is her creative studio. She is a walker, a geopoeteer, a director and a sound designer. She works on the border between text, image and sound. By training, she is a biologist and has done her PhD on the selection of the lapwing’s nesting habitat (it’s a bird). In 2010, she crossed the Alps, from the Adriatic to the Mediterranean, in three months of autonomous walking (www.vialpe.be). Since then, her poetic work explores, between documentary and poetry, the slowness and the crossing of territories and landscapes. www.anneversailles.be
Adaptation radiophonique du disque vinyle « Sounds of silence » de Matthieu Saladin, Patrice Caillet et Adam David. (Frac Franche-Comté / Alga Marghen, avec le soutien des éditions Incertain Sens, 2013)
Equipe de réalisation Radio Grenouille-Euphonia : Jean-Baptiste Imbert, Chloé Despax, Margaux Wartelle, Alex-papi Simonini, Marine-Roya Sahabi Ghomi
Version française :
« Sounds of silence » est une anthologie réunissant certains des plus intriguants morceaux de silence de l’histoire de l’enregistrement et comprend des pièces d’Andy Warhol, John Lennon, Maurice Lemaître, Sly & the Family Stone, Robert Wyatt, John Denver, Whitehouse, Orbital, Crass, Ciccone Youth, Afrika Bambaataa, Yves Klein, etc. Si tous ces morceaux ont en commun un même et unique matériau, et peuvent en cela paraître au premier abord interchangeables, ils sont en réalité on ne peut plus divers. Ainsi, oscillent-ils entre le performatif, le mémoriel, le politique, la critique, l’abstraction, le poétique, le cynisme, la blague, la technique, la promotion, l’absurde et l’indéterminé. Les morceaux choisis de cette anthologie rendent néanmoins tous compte de la spécificité de silences pensés et produits pour un médium reproductible, jouant de sa matérialité en le mettant à nu. Ils exposent et révèlent leur médium, jusque dans son usure et ses imperfections. Ce sont de simples surfaces, des spirales de sillon tournant sur elles-mêmes. Pour cette même raison, ces plages de silence se distinguent de la rupture conceptuelle opérée par John Cage avec 4’33’’. Depuis les années 1950, le silence a trouvé une place dans l’économie du disque et a connu d’innombrables appropriations. La plage de silence paraît en effet ne faire exception à aucun courant musical. « Sounds of silence » rejoue ces silences d’après leur support d’origine, conservant toutes les imperfections liées à leur matérialité propre et leur histoire spécifique, sans toutefois négliger le postulat d’une certaine satisfaction d’écoute chez l’auditeur. Cette approche documentée révèle les motivations effectives ou présumées de ces silences, tout en s’aventurant dans des correspondances ou des interférences inédites. Un disque « à jouer fort » (ou non), en tout lieu et toute circonstance : une réelle expérience auditive.
English version :
Radio adaptation of the vinyl record « Sounds of silence » by Matthieu Saladin, Patrice Caillet et Adam David. (Frac Franche-Comté / Alga Marghen, avec le soutien des éditions Incertain Sens, 2013)
Radio Grenouille-Euphoniaproduction team : Jean-Baptiste Imbert, Chloé Despax, Margaux Wartelle, Alex-papi Simonini, Marine-Roya Sahabi Ghomi
An anthology of silence pieces from the records history. Sounds of Silence is an anthology of some of the most intriguing silent tracks in recording history and includes rare works, among others, by Andy Warhol, John Lennon, Maurice Lemaître, Sly & the Family Stone, Robert Wyatt, John Denver, Whitehouse, Orbital, Crass, Ciccone Youth, Afrika Bambaataa, Yves Klein, etc. In their own quiet way, these silences speak volumes: they are performative, political, critical, abstract, poetic, cynical, technical, absurd… They can be intended as a memorial or a joke, a special offer, or something entirely undefined. The carefully chosen silences of this anthology are intrinsically linked to the medium of reproduction itself and reveal it’s nude materiality. They expose their medium in all its facets and imperfections, including the effect of time and wear. At the most basic level, these silences are surfaces. And it is in their materiality that they distinguish themselves from the conceptual experiments of John Cage with 4’33”. From the 1950s silence has found a place in the economic structure of the record industry and since then it would increasingly be appropriated by a vast array of artists in a vast array of contexts. Indeed, the silent tracks seem to know no boundaries. The LP presents the silences as they were originally recorded, preserving any imperfection that the hardware conferred upon the enterprise, without banning the possibility to satisfying the ear. The liner notes provide historical background for each track, revealing the stated (or presumed) motivations for these silences, while providing novel sound correspondences or interferences. This album is meant to be played loud (or not), at any time, in any place: a true aural experience.
