There were many Dada’s. They have inhabited different cities, were named with many names, some were left unknown, others nameless. Borderlessness is written all over Dada’s body. She is not offended and she makes offenses. Directing infinity back to its own beginnings makes Dada capable of recurrently establishing clarity. Crossing and dismantling sense out of borders and limits – we know them as obstacles, as constraints, as objects to walk over, dodge and evade. For its destruction and digestion we need Dada that takes the principle of “kakortedragost” (“asyouplease” – the concept of Dragan Aleksić) to break through the ingrained structures of power.

RADADAR: a multimedia digestive circuit performative installation took place on 17th December 2020 in Ljubljana, Slovenia as an annual event of Radio Student’s open radio (art-theory) investigative platform RADAR (www.radiostudent.si/radar), hosted by Cirkulacija2, a basement echo chamber residing below the city’s main street. Trespassing the hours of the official curfew that the residents of the city must obey, the circuit comes to life. It is being fed by a messy archive of photo slides. Memories from another time are being chewed, consumed, processed, transformed and mutated. Humans along with analog and digital machines intervene into the past. Artefacts are being dragged out of the abyss of oblivion. Their materiality serves as a point of departure, the exit strategy is a creation of an experience for everyone and everything involved. The comment section of the website was being read by a synthetic voice, directly feeding comments into the circuit. The audience intervened and dadaised. The memories were calling for a situated reconfiguration.

In the RADIA show #821 you can hear only a snippet of the whole circuitry. At the time of the event was streamed live on air (FM 89,3MHz) and online (see archive here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMr0MyFzND4).

Concept was created by Mojca Zupančič and Tisa Neža Herlecin collaboration with Urška Savič, Sašo Puckovski, Luka Seliškar, Anja Hrovatič, Borut Savski, Stefan Doepner, Ana Lorger, Saša Hajzler, Kristina Pranjić and Matej Kavčič. (Arte)facts were given by mommy Annie, daddy Urosh and dear godmother, scenocollages by Matija Drobne – Maco. Tehnical support was provided by Jurij Podgoršek, Linč and the RTVŠ crew. Special thanks to Cirkulacija2, Blaž Božič and Bojan Anđelković!

A homage to the 100 years of the Dada Fair (Berlin, 1920) and to Modri kot.

Radio Študent Radia.fm programme curated by Urška Savič.

Plastic Whales

Jaka Berger is one of the most active, creative and versatile drummers, composers and improvisers on the Slovenian music scene in the last ten years. In 2006 he released his debut album with Samo Šalamon and Achille Succi for Italian label Splasch records. Since 2014 till today he is regularly publishing music for prepared drums that he is constructing by himself. His albums are reviewed by international media on improvisation and electroacoustic music. He is part of experimental project Partija with visual artist Matej Stupica, member of bands Ludovik Material and Darla Smoking. Performed in independent theatre shows Gremo Vsi!, Novo mesto Readymade and Nein. Toured with EBM legends Borghesia. In 2015 he released an album of graphic composition Treatise by Cornelius Cardew. In 2016 he performed his most complex piece Audiable life stream tentet for ten musicians. In 2017 finished a tour and released second album with the international trio Rieko Okuda and Antti Virtaranta. Currently, he is performing free jazz with Mezei Šalamon Berger trio, Džuklje Berger duo and Šalamon Džukljev Berger – Fresh Dust trio. He has just released his new electro acoustic album dedicated to composer Morton Feldman with pianist Dejan Berden, Fresh Dust trio album at FMR records UK and integrating modular synth into his prepared drumset.

A contribution for Radia Network show 796 is BRGS’s recently released album Plastic Whales, dedicated to all the creatures exposed to the pollution of the oceans and freshwaters.

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“It would be beautiful to be conscious of our past, remembering the mistakes we have made. Unfortunately, presence is full of division among reds, blacks and whites, while we should look forward to the future, each day less certain because of our ignorance to the effect we have for our environment.” #savetheoceans #stopplasticpollution

https://brgstime.bandcamp.com/album/plastic-whales

Radio Študent Radia.fm programme curated by Urška Savič.

Marge Alpen Adria

The area crossed by the Alpe Adria Trail has always been a region of borders from ice age to cold war, but also of connecting paths of different kinds: military, animal, railway ones.
Through some research and walking, we investigated elements of dis / connection on the Alpe Adria Trail, collecting traces, documentation and creating some spontaneous interventions on the path.
We are two Italian and one Austrian artists from different backgrounds such as music, fine arts, game development, engineering and philosophy.
This is a flow of sounds recorded during the last walk in August 2019 along the Italian – Slovenian – Austrian borders. Eleonora Sovrani, visual artist, and Juliette Qualizza, musician walked from Robidišče to Tarvisio, passing through Prossenicco, Montemaggiore, Monteaperta, Gran Monte, Uccea, Saga, Bovec, Kranjska Gora, Canin, Sella Nevea, Cave del Predil, Coccau, Feistrits Alm, Feistritz an del Gail Arnoldstein. We spent the last days in a green house close to the Italian-Austrian border (Thorl Maglern) with Sarah Schalk, philospher and artist from Graz.
Sound suggestions speak of nature, mass tourism, intersections between people, prejudices, tradition, hospitality, isolation.
This was part of the project Interventions on the Alpe Adria Trail in 2019, supported by Österreichisches Bundeskanzleramt für Kunst und Kultur as well as Land Kärnten Kultur and Uti Canal del Ferro Val Canale

Credits: recording in August 2019 by Juliette Qualizza; voices: Eleonora Sovrani, Sarah Schalk,  Matija Sirk, Juliette Qualizza; composing and editing in December 2019 by Juliette Qualizza

Radio Študent Radia.fm programme curated by Urška Savič.

Ma‘am, there is no such thing in reality

Operetta for madams, violin and electronica by Nina Dragičević.

Nina Dragičević‘s composition “Ma‘am, there is no such thing in reality” opens up with a question. A question, or questioning, a doubt, this constitutive moment, this constitutive act of the enlightened subject, was in modern age marked with a genera-tion of new insights, with the search of new knowl-edge, with widening of intellectual cognition, with thinking. But the intonation of the introductory question – “No, I mean, do you understand me?” – uttered by one of the speakers from Nina‘s com-position, does not presuppose new knowledge, new cognition. Her question does not presuppose doubt; on the contrary, it presents the incantation of dogma, it presents non-thinking, it confirms the axiom, it strives to confirm the axiom, personal belief, in short, the ideologeme. The question does no longer express a questioning. It is no longer a search for new, but a persistent perpetuation and confirmation of stasis.

In this urban operetta, as Nina Dragičević marks her composition, many voices speak and “sing”. Here they are, here we are, contemporaries, sunk in mortgages, hungry, in constant deprivation, and here is theirs, ours, sonority.

That is how capitalism sounds like.

Extracts from the text accompanying the album written by Nataša Velikonja.

https://kamizdat.bandcamp.com/album/maam-there-is-no-such-thing-in-reality-gospa-tega-v-realnosti-ni

Radio Študent Radia.fm programme curated by Urška Savič.

From side A to side B of the Climate

Two presented compositions are taken from an album Klima (Climate) by Staš Vrenko released in March 2018 under a Slovenian label for improvised and experimental music “Zvočni prepihi”. Author holds a degree in sculpture of the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana but in his interdisciplinary practise he is intensively dealing with field recording and its performative aspects, as well as the technological and media specifications of the sound itself.

Presented composition from side A – Osončeno (Sun-drenched) is the longest one out of three pieces that in Vrenko’s words…

“…summarize the past two years of the creative work and research. The condensation of fragments and recordings is tracing the boundaries of field recording, plunderphonics, engaging in and creating electronic instruments and sound design. The complementing and intervening of recordings opens up the possibility for diverse audio material, of simultaneously being documentary and musical, even if it is usually not perceived as such. The principles of re-amping and recording, add their own acoustics to the material, such as sounds of various surfaces recorded with contact microphones, vinyl record manipulation, DIY modular synthesizer and others that usually don’t have it. Field recordings are thus placed in the same order. They, as real acoustic spaces, become subject to certain strategies of sound design and other media manipulations. Such ‘equalization’, which deals with all the recordings from a standpoint of the final reduction to the vibrations of the speaker membrane, complicates the relationship between contingency, that is usually ascribed to found sound and field recordings, and desire and composition, which are usually associated with the creation of electronic and composed music.” *

The 18 minutes long side B’s last composition Tehnike posvojitve (Adoption Techniques) juxtapose with the wider art project that holds the same name and was presented in Gallery P74, Ljubljana, Slovenija as a sound installation in September 2017.

“In the Adoption Techniques, documents of highly processual and site-specific research and creation, are regarded as the explications of the acts of sound recording and playback.  They, as specific forms of performativity, enable the re-thinking of the position of the sound creator and the musician. The selection from a vast heterogeneous mass includes, among other things, examples of different occurrences of mediated sound, replay and consequent changes in the source locations and the time of the sound. The sounds are tied by the last stage – the final “recording” and the flattening of each fragment into a self-standing representation.  Emphasis is placed on the recordist – the listener who in the process of gathering recordings, recognizes events in the sound environment as signs. This necessitates the determination of the sound’s sources and echoes as well as the differentiation, arrangement and separation of sounds and their relations to meaningful and meaningless. Exactly tracing this unsustainable line, thinking about the acousmatics, transparency of the media, and the non-selectivity of the recording process of a recorder, which creates a complete (meaningful) whole from an inconceivable time-and-sound stream, brings on the reflection on what and how the audio documents can be ‘read’ by the listener. Repeated capturing, playback, re-recording and dubbing, results in an unfaithful tracing of the sound sources and in thinking about what the potential of a recording act, that for its audibility demands and creates a new, future playback site, is. The pursuit of these simultaneities, due to the temporal nature of the sound, intensely places itself on the point before and after sound, in the place of constant anticipation and distance from the moment of capture.” *

* text by Staš Vrenko

photo by Maja Burja

Excerpt from Ptičji Mozak

The presented material is an auditory stream of 4 compositions – a segment of the recent sound work by the audiovisual artist, poet and linguist Blaž Božič, released under alias SsmKOSK in the form of an album by Zvočni Prepihi record label in 2018.

Inter alia, it serves to exemplify his creative methods dealing with semantic multiplicity of music genre fusion, topologically specific to post-transitional Eastern Europe soundscape, most noticeably – turbo-folk. During the process of critical observation of the latter and working in the field of contemporary electronic music and sound art, the artist developed conceptually intricate techniques of working with sound, which further accelerate genre fusion by juxtaposing various found samples and usage of classical and non-classical instruments alongside spoken word, circuit bent equipment (guitar pedals, portable CD and VHS players, drum machine, etc.) and DSP tools for medium reconfiguration.

photo by: Blaž Božič

beepblip

The track was recorded live on Sound Topographies Festival at Škuc Gallery, on 1 October 2017, by an invitation of the festival’s curator Nina Dragičević. The track is based on various field recordings, which in their raw form often sound quite piercing for the ear. Field recordings are most interesting for the person who finds them, in simultaneity with the sound-event, in direct contact with the sound-field source. Such encounters are marked by an element of surprise in a unique event, a non reproducible moment in time. With repetition this moment becomes an object in the archive of memory, of something known and transmittable. In my relation to sound, the element of the unexpected plays a significant role, as though I am making sounds in the tension between repetition and surprise.

The track plays with various frequencies in audio or electromagnetic spectrums, which are outside the range of a human hearing. Often, such frequencies come in extremely high and sharp form, when they are transposed to the human hearing range. These are exactly the frequencies that attract me most. I am producing such sound in an attempt to shift the flow of conscious thinking.  In this way, the production of such persistent sounds is political, because they nullify the capacity to be productive and efficient; the two imperatives imposed by capitalist mode of reproduction. At the same time, these sounds are not particularly entertaining, and they offer relaxation only to the people who refuse to be relaxed in an anesthetic way. The track ideally works as a jammer for thought pollution.

A few words about field recording. In the immediacy of listening when recording, I am using amplifiers, catchers of frequencies, different antennas, coils, transducers. I record either outside of the hearing range, either in the electromagnetic fields or on the radio frequencies outside of the advertisement-polluted FM (AM or VHF). To walk through space with headphones and an amplifier of sort is like floating in some virtual inter-space, which is not connected to online or digital virtuality, but a virtual space on the level of electromagnetic waves, for example. In my utopian thinking, I imagine that computers and the web are not optimal carriers of virtuality. If we are ever to develop interfaces, which are more comfortable for our human bodies, we would have to invent new way of virtualisation. I am not interested only in producing sound compositions, but propose sounds, which would say something about the future. As a representative of contemporary cognitariat I feel flattened in two dimensions of a computer screen. And sometimes I am in awe with the 3D world with its forms and possibilities. An ordinary view of the world is virtual reality to me. My listening of electromagnetic waves is a way of opening the virtual space into more spatial and temporal dimensions.

The track consists of modified fragments recorded with a radio receiver on AM waves. Mostly they are without narration, and sometimes a word or a melody creeps in. I listen to these tracks like they would be arias of some sort. The tracks also consists of sound layers recorded with a coil for sound detection of electromagnetic waves. These recordings were mostly taken in 2013 and 2014 in New York City, where the EM waves are omnipresent. This part of the recordings is also the reason to call this track Underground Acceleration. What interests me in this sound layer is the tension of constant acceleration with few releases. This constant electromagnetic tension works like an illustration of capitalist depletion and accelerationism.

There is also a really beautiful example or an acoustic citation of light installation by Kurt Laurenz Theinert: Gespinst, exhibited a few years ago at the Lighting Guerrilla Festival in Ljubljana. In addition to these field recordings, there are also several sound levels produced live with analogue electronic synthesisers.

For the conclusion, perhaps a short explanation of the title AMonFM. Not only are some AM transmissions now channeled on radia-FM, the FM in this case is also the Shape of a dozen of analogue patches.

From the artists statement and description:
As certain spaces and times have become oversaturated due to urbanisation and the population explosion, certain (animal) species have began withdrawing to unpopulated landscapes and unoccupied times – into the night. We understand these withdrawals as a search for solutions that could lead to a ‘better quality of life’, an existence that would be better than the one offered to us by the oversaturated space-time.

Zorman created a 55min long wolf howling composition using from various sources and recordings techniques that was commissioned and premiered during radioCona:wolFMoon project in january 2017 (http://www.radiocona.si/radioconawolfmoon/).
This shorter edited version dives a listener to a cold winter night when wolfs howl to mark and protect their territory in and symphony of one of the most suggestive and powerful sound of nature which can be heard on remote parts of wolfs packs landscape.

Paul B. Preciado calls for the universal use of dildos in order to denaturalize sexuality, to infect it with a thing that is not a copy of a penis but an object that is both a way to appropriate the ass as the universal passive and non-reproductive organ that all people have and a way to multiply sexual acts, distributing them throughout the whole body. In this radio show, simply called “OM 29 – Co-Fi-Re (Conceptual Field Recording) 2”, I’ve tried to create an analogon to this notion of denaturalization, which this time comes in the shape of denaturalization of the machine of mechanic reproduction, the recording device Zoom H2N, which is no longer used only as a device to reproduce reality, but a device which directly addresses the feelings of a subject who holds it. Denaturalization comes hand in hand with the fact that on the secondary level the recording device is still doing what it was devised to do ñ it records ñ but its primary practice is interwoven with the subject, who is afraid of walking in the dark in the foreign country and in the fields xe has never walked before. Subject knows what can xe expect, but xe never experienced it before. The flow of affects is pouring in xem, but the only thing to reassure xem that xe will be all right, is the device, which was primarily meant to only reproduce reality. The recording device Zoom H2N stops reproducing reality and stops being a substitute machine for capturing reality and becomes something else. (Andrej Tomaûin)

http://radiostudent.si/kultura/otitis-media
http://www.radiostudent.si/

Evil Earth’s Notebook is the spoken word segment of the project Evil Earth, realized by visual artist Lala Rascic during her residency in Ljubljana at the Cultural Center Tobacna and her collaboration with Radio Student.

In Evil Earth’s Notebook one hears Rascic read quotes, notes, loose associations, and custom-software generated text in the hypnotic-poetic  verbal performance exploring the notions of landscape, mountains, new optics, vertical imaging and remote perspective.

Evil Earth is a project dealing with the representation of landscape under contemporary conditions of visuality. As Marjorie Hope Nicholson outlines in Mountain Gloom, Mountain Glory, the shift in mountain attitudes in writings of the English poets of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries came about due to advances in science and technology, Evil Earth explores the cognitive shift happening today. The basic question asked is how does our perception and understanding of nature, earth and our environment change under the influence of contemporary consumer modes of visualization and screen technologies?

https://lalarascic.com/

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