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.
Writes Karen Werner, “To make this radiophonic quilt, programmers at Wave Farm’s radio station WGXC came together for a day to make short radio art pieces about RADIO. We approached this theme in an imaginative, associative and at times literal way: radio as invisible waves, as a metaphor for communication and longing for community, as nostalgic soundscape, as a relationship between senders and receivers, as an amazing little box.”
Quilt sections in order of presentation: An SOS from Planet Earth by Liz LoGiudice The Mountain Blocks the Signal by Alanna Medlock Continue by Paulus Van Horne Tableaux Drawing by Max Goldfarb WGXC Piece by Thatcher Keats Radia Segment by Tom Roe
Threads and borders throughout the quilt: Gardens of Discordantia by Heather Martin Voicemails 1 and 2 by Sam Sebren Edited interview with Garrett Roche Edited interview with Carline Murphy Edited interview with Azouke Legba plus samples from the quilt sections above
A Radiophonic Quilt will broadcast on the 30 international stations that comprise the Radia network, June 22 – 28, 2020, Season 44, Episode 18.
A Radiophonic Quilt was collectively produced as part of a Wave Farm Radio Art Workshop led by Karen Werner, the 2019/2020 Wave Farm Radio Artist Fellow, who sewed the quilt together. Many thanks to the whole Wave Farm crew for organizing this event and to everyone who participated. And to Radia for creating an international broadcast platform for radio art.
He writes, “Phonography has been sometimes been defined as “creative field recording,” taking and placing microphones out into the world in unusual ways and unexpected places. In this program phonographer Christopher DeLaurenti presents several specimens of subaudible phonography – field recordings from outside the realm of human hearing.
This program features four examples. “Below the written pitches of Brian Ferneyhough’s ‘Superscriptio’ for solo piccolo” spectrally extracts sound beneath the written pitches of Brian Ferneyhough’s “Superscriptio” to reveal recording anomalies, latent undertones, and mechanical noises. It’s akin to hearing the piece through a hydrophone.
In “Silences normalized from the complete organ works of Olivier Messiaen (part 1)” I amplified room tone to reveal the inner workings of an organ and its environment, including residual tones, traffic, stray speech, and tiny electrical anomalies.
The third example is an odd specimen of radio transmission—a rarity for its length and depth of activity: “Open Carrier, Citywide One Manhattan.”
In the United States, an “open carrier” is police parlance for a radio that has been inadvertently left on in Talk/Transmit mode. An open carrier stalls and paralyses broadcast traffic, leaving so-called “dead air” to reveal sudden gaps, smudges of hiss, gently swaying drones, beeping alerts, fragmented words, quick phrases, recessed conversations, and other unexpected artifacts. It’s like butt-dialing everyone who is listening to the radio. I recorded this example by accident in 2004 during the protest against then-president George W. Bush and the Republican National Convention in New York.
The final example is an excerpt from “of silences intemporally sung: Luigi Nono’s Fragmente-Stille, an Diotima.” Here, I have inverted Nono’s only string quartet by muting the audible passages played by a string quartet. Then I elevated room tone, discreet ambiance, and other assumed silences above the threshold of audibility. You will hear on-the-fly tunings, annunciatory gasps, hurried breaths, sul ponticello bowings, and creaking chairs; these eruptions and outcries fuse with flickers of ambient sound. You might also hear artifacts of the recording process, especially digital glitches and artificial echo. Visit delaurenti.net for more about Christopher DeLaurenti and subaudible phonography.”
Programming Environments was a networked event May 25, 2019 featuring live coding artists interacting with Wave Farm’s 29-acre wooded campus through code and transmission. They rewrite the code and the radio. Participating artists include Paul Feitzinger, JohnLP.xYz, Messica Arson, and Sarah GHP. Programming Environments was organized by Jen Kutler. wavefarm.org
Written in 1924 by Hans Flesch, “Magic on the Radio” depicts chaos surrounding a radio broadcast under siege by conflicting interests and mysterious technical problems. This was reportedly the first radio play ever broadcast in Germany. This is the debut of a new translation of the text by Carl Skoggard and Franziska Lamprecht. Recorded Feb. 24, 2018 at HiLo in Catskill, New York before a live audience. Featuring: Tom DePietro, Brian Dewan, Jeff Economy, Philip Grant, Maria Manhattan, Debby Mayer, Tom Roe, and Phyllis Segura. Directed and produced by Alanna Medlock and Jess Puglisi. wgxc.org wavefarm.org Click here to download or play audio.
Excerpt from “The Lost Hour” a series of short experimental radio autoethnography pieces made by students in Hörvergessen, a course taught by Ricarda Denzer at the Universität für Angewandte Kunst Wien, in which Karen Werner visited as guest artist and introduced students to radio autoethnography. Students participating in the class: Ahreum Kwag, Aral Cimcim, Ayse-Gül Yüceil, Binta Diallo, Elnaz Haghghi, Hanna Kucera, Hannah Sakai, Hector Schofield, Huda Takriti, Karl Kühn, Katharina Spanlang, Laura Irmer, Laurids Oder, Lea Föger, Liim Jang, Martina Pouchlá, Nazanin Mehraein, Oscar Cueto, Ramiro Wong und Simeon Jaax. Produced in March 2018.
Also included is “What is collaboration?” a radio autoethnography assemblage by Karen Werner and Deanna Shoemaker. Produced in May 2018.
Rory Solomon presents his CB radio project, live at Wave Farm’s “Lodge” show at Riedlbauer’s Resort in Round Top, New York Aug. 26, 2017. Solomon reviews citizens band radio history in the United States, and relates CB radio today to mesh networks. Solomon also plays a CB radio game with participants during the show. Photo by Bryan Zimmerman.
Includes an interview with Amanda Dawn Christie about her experimental documentary film about Canada’s RCI shortwave radio towers, plus excerpts from William Basinski’s “Shortwavemusic,” and this year’s “Shortwave Shindig.”
Dive into the Wave Farm pond to hear a different sort of radio waves this week. Zach Poff’s Pond Station is a set of hydrophones at the bottom of one of the ponds at Wave Farm in rural New York. The solar-powered webstream runs from dawn until dusk, and, occasionally, artists interact with the waves. Hear, listen to artist Zach Poff explain the pond station, and hear artists Ralph Lewis and Jeffrey Leppendorf play with the pond sounds. Also, Neptune’s “Marconi’s Belief” opens the show.
‘Remote Viewing’ is a slide program, developed for radio: The articulation of Maximilian Goldfarb’s text is accompanied by improvised sounds, performed by Crazed, which is the electronic sound outfit of Jack Schoonover and Maximillian Hamel. As a visual archive escaping traditional representation, we perform excerpts from a text that conveys a hallucinatory urbanism, interconnected anatomies, and the mechanics of everyday apparitions.
