With a title that descends from a well-known passage in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, May it come that the sounds of the bardo shall be known as one’s own sounds, the piece opens with an improvised DIY ventilator that fails to sustain my bravewaves, waves that eventually flatline into a heavily decomposed electromagnetic soup. Then comes a freely associative consideration of the Beefheart Affliction; the dangerous game of creating schizophonic monsters; the compost heap of radio’s intrinsic entropy and instability; the creative possibilities released through the fractures of a broken subjectivity; a synthetic voice ripened, to the point of bursting; a piece of flesh that we shall call Figgy Pudding; a bit of brain beneath a fingernail; a scratched radio thanatophony; and a pair of eyes reflecting a Hegelian Night that becomes —- awful.

Gregory Whitehead: Artist, writer, radiomaker, text/sound poet, singer of tales, playwright and media philosopher. Since his first tape and radio experiments made during the 1980s, he has created a long list of radio plays, hybrid documentaries and acoustic adventures for the BBC, Radio France, Deutschland Radio, Australia’s ABC, NPR and other broadcasters. Often interweaving documentary and fictive materials into playfully unresolved narratives, his aesthetic is distinguished by a deep philosophical commitment to radio as a medium for poetic navigation and free association. In his voice and text-sound works, he explores the tension between a continuous pulse and the eruption of sudden discontinuities, as well as linguistic entropy and decay.

Whitehead’s plays have won numerous awards, including a Prix Italia for Pressures of the Unspeakable, a Prix Futura BBC Award for Shake, Rattle, Roll and a Sony Gold Academy Award for The Loneliest Road, which was described by the jury as “a master class in sound”. His 2005 BBC production of Normi Noel’s play No Background Music, featuring Sigourney Weaver, also received a Sony Gold Academy Award. On the Shore Dimly Seen, a “boneyard cantata” enquiry into no-touch torture, was short-listed for the 2015 Prix Italia.

Whitehead has experimented and collaborated within acoustic theatre, puppet theatre, dance theater, installations and mixed media cabaret. In film, he wrote the script and played the main character Walter Sculley in the 2003 docufiction, The Bone Trade , later becoming the centerpiece for an installation at Mass MOCA. Over the past several years, he has contributed voiceworks and sound to two experimental documentaries: Awareness and Lift Up Your Voices, by Arttu Nieminen.

Co-editor of the pioneering anthology Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant-Garde (MIT Press), his philosophical essays and hybrid speculative fictions have appeared in a wide variety of publications. A selection of writings has been published as Almanach de plaies insensées. Since 2012, he has published online exploratory researches within the context of an ever-mutating Desperado Philosophy.

“Interval Signals” are short pieces of musical phrasing, a sound effect or recorded speech that shortwave radio stations use to “introduce themselves” when broadcasting. The signals announce the start of a broadcast and create an identifiable touchstone for listeners old as well as those hearing the station for the very first time. Three Rules of Discipline and Eight Points for Attention (named for the title of China radio station’s Voice of the Strait’s highly recognizable interval signal) is a work that restructures interval signals from eight different countries into miniature compositions played on instruments and in styles that are significant departures from their original form.

Hali Palombo is a composer, visual artist, and filmmaker from Chicago, Illinois. Born in Northfield, Minnesota, she has had a natural curiosity about the Midwestern United States since a young age. Her work often weaves the absurd and mundane beauty of Illinois into her records, short films, drawings, and paintings. Palombo is an avid practitioner of “plunderphonics”: sampling existing musical/aural works and intertwining them into something brand new, whether its shortwave radio and CB radio samples, wax cylinder audio, or field recordings taken from Midwestern points of interest. She also draws great inspiration from endless adventures around the country—be they on Google maps or in her car—often photographing, filming, or drawing her findings.

Variations on a Topography is constructed in stratified layers, each containing a recording of a full scan of the AM/FM spectrum from bottom to top and back down again. Tuning through the spectrum in the same place every time, Kohl charts a map of her specific signal, showcasing the geographic specificity of radio and drawing out its topography with additional musical sounds. Cello and synthesizer highlight moments of clarity and static, creating a counterpoint ruled by the dichotomy between them. These “signal sweeps” also offer a sedimentary view of time, capturing multiple 28 minute sections of what would otherwise be completely ephemeral sounds. The recordings, taken over the span of a few months, speak in various ways to the passage of time – the weather gets colder, traffic patterns shift, wars break out. The signal, like a ghostly mountain range, hovers around us.

Lia Kohl is Wave Farm’s fall 2023 Radio Art Fellow. She is a composer, cellist, and sound artist based in Chicago. Her wide-ranging practice includes solo composition and performance, installation, improvisation, and collaboration. Kohl tours nationally and internationally, working in theater, jazz, rock, and experimental contexts. Her work centers curiosity and patience, an exploration of the mundane and profound possibilities of sound.

Sarah Sweeney’s father died when he was forty-four and she was seventeen. When Sweeney turned forty-four, she wanted to talk to him again. She contacted Resemble AI, a company that creates clones of voices using machine learning, and they worked together to create an AI model of her father’s voice. When this model was completed Sweeney was able to type and speak words into the interface and hear him speak. Conversations with My Deepfake Dad is a series of six conversations created through Sweeney’s interactions with this audio deepfake of her father.

Sarah Sweeney received her BA in Studio Art from Williams College and an MFA in Digital Media from Columbia University School of the Arts and is currently Associate Professor of Art at Skidmore College. She is the creator of The Forgetting Machine, an iPhone app commissioned by the new media organization Rhizome. Her work has appeared nationally and internationally in exhibitions at locations including the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, the New Jersey State Museum, the Black and White Gallery, and the UCR/California Photography Museum. Sweeney is a 2023 Wave Farm Media Arts Assistance Fund for Artists grantee for her project Conversations with My Deepfake Dad. https://www.sarahelizabethsweeney.com/

“I have made a mark, and I do not know whether I am drawing or writing. I am thinking about marks and how they collect on a surface. I have accumulated marks, and I believe that this accumulation is at once a drawing, a text, and an archive.”. –Steffani Jemison

Writes Ekpunobi, “Comfort noise, or comfort tone, is synthetic background noise used in radio and wireless communications to fill the artificial silence in a transmission in which low volume levels are ignored by the transmitting device. In a system that disregards sound under a designated threshold, the absence of that sound must be reintroduced to ‘comfort’ the listening ear.

Drawing on Saidiya Hartman’s process of critical fabulation, comfort noise reintroduces speakers and practitioners of love, freedom, and memory in conversation with one another. In this sonic third space, audio samples originating from 1976 to 2023 not only coexist, but collaborate. ”

playlist:
Free, Deniece Williams (1976)
Relation, Anaïs Maviel (2018)
Speaking Freely, bell hooks (2002)
welcome, i are u (2023)
Iru’s Introduction, Bongo Herman (2022)
I Love Myself When I’m Laughing…And Then Again When I’m Looking Mean and Impressive (Zora Neale Hurston Tribute), Imani Uzuri (2016)
DNA Activation, Witch Prophet (2022)
Neptune Frost Q&A: Techno-Spiritual Overtones, Neema Githere + Saul Williams (2022)
Creative Matriarchy, Shantrelle P. Lewis (2022)
Slow tv, Thomas Hellum [Invisibilia Podcast, Season 7 Episode 5] (2021)
Hvnli, KeiyaA (2020)
Theater of the Black Church, Serpentwithfeet [reinventing gospel with complex visions of gay black love] (2018)
Neptune Frost Q&A: Encryption, Saul Williams + Anisia Uzeyman (2022)
How do you preserve freedom?, Anisia Uzeyman (2022)
blessings mantra, iru ekpunobi (2023)
Happy Birthday EmmaB, KillMovesNate (2016)
Othership 23, KMNate + MC Maggley + Aleon + Angel (2023)
Grandma E’s Wishes, Esther Igboko (2019)
Can I Hold The Mic (interlude) + Stay Flo, Solange (2019)
The Phone is a Confessional, Miss Cleo (2022)
Are We African Gods or African American Gods?, Jordan Gallimore + Kristin Dodson [Flatbush Misdemeanors, Season 2 Episode 4] (2022)
Gladys is With Me Right Now, Shantrelle P. Lewis [In Our Mother’s Gardens] (2021)
Grandma E’s Wishes: Remixed, Esther Igboko (2019)
We Wear The Mask / That Survival Apparatus, Maya Angelou (1988)
HAHA, Charlotte Adigéry + Bolis Pupul (2022)

Iru Ekpunobi is Wave Farm’s spring 2023 Radio Art Fellow, a deep listener, DJ, and audiofuturist. A recent graduate of New York University, Ekpunobi began their journey in FM radio as an DJ and show host at WNYU 89.1-FM, where they synthesized Black musicology, revolutionary history, and futurist transmission on a weekly, 90-minute broadcast. Culminating in their undergraduate thesis, Ekpunobi launched Third Space Radio, a digital media project and community radio station exploring sonic transmission as a ‘third place’ where community, education, and love can persist.

I have undone the sob of the lost echoes…
I have the deep infinite playing in my hands

Become the caress. I don’t want you to limit
your eyes in my body. My road is space.
To travel me is to flee from all paths…
I am the dancing imbalance of the stars.

excerpts from a Julia de Burgos poem entitled, Mi senda es el espacio / My Road is Space

Writes Rivera,“Co-regulating the spectrum: Meanwhile, the wave is a radiophonic river of shifting reflections across neurodivergence and consciousness studies, radio and radar via the electromagnetic spectrum, language and communication, ufology and ET lore, and diasporic musings regarding the political and cultural history of Puerto Rico. Through a dense assemblage of sound design and field recordings, and cut-up bilingual samples from poetry, personal reflections, interviews and archival documentaries, the electromagnetic landscape becomes an imagined extrasensorial, polymorphic, carrier of consciousness; a pulsating presence that is inhabited, and that inhabits, in a myriad of Other ways.

What do you mean when you say “spectrum”? What of “being on another wave-length,” or “the same frequency”? Like tuning a radio, bats from a cave, or flying saucers from the deep waters beneath the island, possible meanings emerge via aqueous transmissions and various slippages of language and meaning. Moving between English and Spanish, the piece utilizes common tropes such as contacts with extra-terrestrials, and autistics and other neurodivergent minorities as aliens with the felt experience of being an other and being othered. At the same time, the piece references a 1901 US Supreme Court ruling (Downes vs. Bidwell) that, in response to categorizing shipments for tax purposes, determined that Puerto Rico and the “new” island territories like Guam and the Virgin Islands were “inhabited by alien races” and “foreign, in a domestic sense.”

In addition, the work is equally inspired by the radical Neuroqueer Theory of Dr. Nick Walker (she/her), an autistic trans scholar and writer, the diasporic longings of Puerto Rican poet, Julia De Burgos, Ida M. Kanneberg’s book, UFOs and the Psychic Factor, and the science fiction of Octavia Butler.

What does is it mean to experience communication differences, sensory sensitivities, or other ways of being? How might these communication differences serve as opportunities to experience time and space differently and/or connect in other ways? How can a bodymind listen to, regulate, and communicate with itself, others, and the environment? Do bodyminds receive and transmit signals to and from beyond the local, and like radio and radar, can the diasporic experience be related?

At times, the listener’s attention is signaled outwardly towards the stars through ominous drones and radio feedback. Simultaneously, a notion of embodiment and grounding is alluded to with the samples of yoga nidra and tai chi explanations, and sounds of shelling habichuelas (Puerto Rican beans) recently grown in Vermont. Woven throughout the piece are field recordings captured while camping across the island in the July of 2022. Serving as textural markers and place-holders of memory, the recordings feature bomba performances, conversations, city ambience during an apagón (black out), and street protests, as well as various environments such as farms, forests, beaches, and caves.

Though a spectrum is defined as “a condition that is not limited to a specific set of values but can vary, without gaps, across a continuum,” the piece ultimately lies in the curious space between the gaps of the spectrum; among the edits, along the time shifts and losses, and across the possible waves and feeling frequencies of meaning and energy.”

Special thanks to: Wave Farm (Galen Joseph-Hunter and Tom Roe), Gregory Whitehead, Anna Friz, Joan Schuman, Neil Verma; Dr. Mel Houser, Sierra Miller, and the Neurodivergent Community of All Brains Belong VT; Vermont Art Council; and PR, the land and its people across the island and diaspora.

José Alejandro Rivera is a 2022 Wave Farm Radio Art Fellow. Rivera (he/they) is a Puerto Rican, Ohio-born artist, composer, designer, and researcher currently based in SW Vermont. Their layered, place-based practice is informed by a background in music, architecture, and tending land. Working through sound and space to draw on critical cartography, technological ubiquity, systems, and flows of temporalities, José creates evocative, experimental soundworks, geo-notational maps, sound design for podcasts and the moving image, and multichannel, audiovisual installations and performances. Visit https://wavefarm.org/radio/wgxc/calendar/mvfqk3 for more information.

Writes Stuhl,“The age of automation – that art of worker-less factories which has industrial management crackling these days – is coming close to broadcasting,” announced Broadcasting magazine in 1954. Just as it is today, automation to radio practitioners in the 1950s was a daunting complex of threats and promises around technology, labor, and artistry. But it was also, more simply, a property of magnetic tape recording. Radio automation began as the technique of embedding “cue tones” in taped sound and configuring tape players to start or stop upon detecting them. From the ’50s into the era of syndication by satellite, almost every automation system used the same frequency for these tones: 25 Hz.

25 Hz splices together audio samples from a span of 1951 to present, casting radio automation amid characters from the sonic arts and popular culture in a historical drama. A 25 Hz “cue tone” punctuates each splice, inverting the automation system’s goal of seamlessly executing a programmed sequence. Re-sonifying those seams from within radio, the piece aims to open automation up as more than an industrial object – as a peculiar, emotionally charged, and passionately countered dream that has perhaps had something in common with avant-garde legacies in post-WWII America.”

Audio sources include:
John Cage, Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (1951)
Russell Tinkham (as voiced by Gregory Whitehead), “Automatic Station Operation” (1953)
Schafer 1200 advertisement (c. 1960)
John Cage in conversation with Morton Feldman on WBAI (1966)
Paul Schafer (as voiced by Lynn Claudy), NAB Radio Automation Workshop (1968)
Annea Lockwood in conversation with Pauline Oliveros (1972)
Annea Lockwood, Soundmap of the Hudson River (1982)
American Grafitti (1973)
Howard Broomfield, A Radio Programme about Radio (1974)
Schafer 903 demonstration at 2KA Katoomba (1975)
Lee Bailey, Drake-Chenault automation tips (1975)
TM Productions jingle package promotion (c. 1976)
Jack Miller, The WCFL Story (1979)
TM Productions beautiful music automation package promotion (c. 1976)
Dave McElhatton, KPIX news segment (1980)
Shelley Pope, “A Human Radio Station,” (c. 1980)
Phil Jones, “The Last Polka” (1992)
Christof Migone (as voiced by Jennifer Cherniak, Amos Latteier, Chris Myhr, and Gintas Tirillis), Radio Naked (1994)
“Bart Gets an Elephant” (1994)
Absolute Value of Noise (Peter Courtemanche), “Monster Audio,” 1998
Tom Petty, “The Last DJ” (2002)
Paul Schafer, NAB Engineering Achievement Award acceptance speech (2002)
Shellac, “The End of Radio” (2004)
Google Radio Automation advertisement (2009)
Anna Friz and Emmanuel Madan, The Joy Channel (2018)

Many thanks to the following sound artists who contributed 25hz tones:
Keith de Mendonca
James Staub
Andrew Madey
Ezra Teboul
CJ Eller

A special thank you to Gregory Whitehead for voicing and audio production in the reenactment of “Automatic Station Operation” (1953).

Andy Kelleher Stuhl is the 2021/2022 Wave Farm Radio Artist Fellow. He is also a PhD candidate in Communication Studies at McGill University, where his dissertation traces the cultural meaning of radio automation between 1950 and 2010. He approaches radio history as a resource for overlooked precedents that artists and critics might adapt toward intervention in present-day technological systems. Visit https://wavefarm.org/wf/calendar/x1x6q0 for more information.

Writes Robinson, “BLACKBODY, WHITE NOISE is an experimental radio art composition. For an entire week, while in residence at Wave Farm, I collected sounds using two vacant cast iron cubes and sound reproduction technology. Each structure bore a single hole (a Blackbody) allowing sunlight to penetrate and radiate throughout the interior space. During the course of the residency I recorded thermal conduction, movement, and ambience. I manipulated the collected data to compose a sonic relationship with excerpts from La’Vender Freddy’s Sunscreen Conspiracy project. The title Blackbody, White Noise is inspired by Frantz Fanon’s highly acclaimed literary work, Black Skin, White Mask. This project set out to reveal and translate a relationship between the light of the Sun and the struggle against forces determined to control it. The resulting meditation articulates a historical conflict, thereby leaving the listener to reimagine a new future inspired by a new solar narrative.”

Featured Voices Credits:
Preface: Black Body Radiation, Prince, Joseph Campbell, Hazel Barnes, Malcom X, Dwight D. Einsenhower, Harriet A. Washington, Maxine Hong Kingston, Neil Postman, Arthur Firstenberg, Dr. Ruha Benjamin, Jacob Bronowski, Professor Dave
Chapter One: M. NourbeSe Philip, Louis Daniel Armstrong , Ambervision Infomercial , Huston Smith, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, BLACK on BLACK by Joe Saltzman , Margaret Mead, Daniel Quinn, Dr. Robin DiAngelo, Jimi Hendrix- Star Spangled Banner, Anthony T. Browder, Russell Means, Documentary The Milgram Experiment , Alice Walker, Dr. Frances Cress Welsing, Chude-Sokei, Maya Angelou, Octavia Butler, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin, Alex Haley, Amina Baraka, Russell Means, David Roberts, Duck and Cover, Elizabeth Kolbert, Osofo Kofitse Ahadzi, Kwame Ture, Miriam Makeba, James Dewey Watson, Paul Robeson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Wiener Today, Georgia Bea Jackson, Marvin Gaye- Star Spangled Banner, Zora Neal Hurston, Haunani-Kay Trask , Jessica Valoris-Xigga, Douglas E. Brash-Sunlight Continues To Damage Skin, Aldous Huxley, Greatest Story Ever Told- Sun, Kathryn Yusoff, Joseph S. Nye, GCSE Science Revision Physics: Black Body Radiation , Carolyn Finney, Malidoma Patrice Somé, Carl Sagan, Fred Moten , Shock G., Sindiwe Magona

Ricardo Iamuuri Robinson was in-residence at Wave Farm Sep 24, 2021 – Oct 03, 2021. Visit https://wavefarm.org/wf/calendar/b5q45p for more information.

We are constantly surrounded by waves, vibrations, transmissions, traveling invisibly through and around us and carrying messages: information, 24-hour news feeds, talk shows, rock shows, data streams, conspiracy theories, sad songs, bad songs, operating systems, all of them whizzing around us. How many bummer vibes have passed through your home today, even without being picked up by a receiver?

The Radio Witch Moon Hotline is a counter-spell encoded into the radio vibrations, carrying with it messages and signals to reinforce the good vibrations inherent in the world. In this broadcast, we talk about the magic of radio itself, what makes radio different and how it works on us and the world. Will radio magic about radio magic create a feedback loop? Call in with your feedback and perhaps it already has. +1-518-302-6067.

The Radio Witch Moon Hotline was produced by Jess Speer as part of the Wave Farm Radio Artist Fellowship 2020/2021. Previous episodes can be found at wavefarm.org. Jess Speer is an artist, radio DJ, educator, librarian, and mother living in Asheville, North Carolina. As a librarian and artist, she explores questions about permanence, presence, history, mindfulness, mortality, and access to information and ideas. Speer has collected over 800 records, many of which include sound effects, field recordings, spoken word and documentary works, and mines this collection for both broadcast and live performances. By collecting records and making field recordings, she attempts to create an archive of sorts, to gather time, history and experience together. Performing with them, over broadcast and in live events, brings that history to life and shares it, while also embodying the ephemerality that’s at the heart of history, truth, nature, and human beings. She is the host of Ecstatic Listening on 103.3 WSFM-LP Asheville FM.

Useful Radio is a new radio mix focused on radio voices, citizen listening, and the intimacy of signals. Featuring collaborations with Joe Jeffers, Anna Friz, and Zeena Parkins. Track listing in order or appearance: Untitled by Jeff Kolar; Creepy Tipi by Joe Jeffers and Jeff Kolar; Far Gone by Jeff Kolar; Useful Radio by Anna Friz and Jeff Kolar; Hooking by Zeena Parkins and Jeff Kolar; and Prologue by Zeena Parkins and Jeff Kolar.

This work was commissioned by Wave Farm for the durational broadcast event Christof Migone’s You- taking place on December 12, 2020.