The Vienna Radia Collective – worked out the common transmission with online video sessions during the covid-19 closing and confronted with the common work in front of the monitors and the mirrored mutual reality made us think of the novel Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll.
We used the Radia proven method of “Cadavre Exquis” to mirror and reflect our sonic ideas mutually. Our program “Abre Cadavre” consists of small parts that went around in our collective and the last 30 seconds of each piece of the predecessor’s piece were the basis for the next one.
Unconsciously a journey through a sonic magic land with sound, text and surprising transitions was created.
Contributions by Barbara Huber, Barbara Kaiser, Lale Rodgarkia-Dara, Karl Schönswetter and Peter Wetzelsberger.
Thanks to Alex, Feli, Martina, Susanne and Susi for their voices.
Listening’s Urgency In times of contact restrictions the radio is all the more an instrument to bridge the isolation. What role does listening play in times of crisis? In his project “Listening’s Urgency” the composer and sound artist Hardi Kurda explores this question, searching for the in-between sounds of the medium and the gaps in the social order: Do we overstep the borders of legality by listening? What does illegality mean? Can illegality make noise? Is noise illegal?
For the second performance in the course of the project, Kurda asked musicians, artists and writers from different parts of the world to answer those questions. Their voices and narrations were the basis for a one hour live radio performance with a six-member radio ensemble which came together on Radio Corax on April 26 2020. For radia.fm Kurda made an edited version of the live radio performance.
Listening Urgency – live radio performance by Hardi Kurda, with: Andre Damiao, live from São Paulo; Maximilian Glass, live from Leipzig; Kamil Korolczuk, live from Berlin; Hardi Kurda, live from London; Soheil Soheili, live from Teheran; Ralf Wendt, live from Halle; and with the voices of: I-ID from Teheran, Kani Kamil from London, Peshraw Mohammed from Berlin, and Niga Salam from Slemani.
Hardi Kurda is currently stipendiary of the Radio Art Residency, an international fellowship program by Radio Corax and the Goethe-Institut.
Laura Agnusdei is an electroacoustic composer and saxophone player from Bologna (IT), classically trained, she also holds a Master in electronic music composition by The Institute of Sonology of The Hague (NL). Her compositions feature the saxophone as the main voice within sonic landscapes that shift between melodies and textures, the song form and improvisation, fusing acoustic, digital and analog sound sources. She is actually touring presenting her new album Laurisilva, six tracks that invite the listeners to explore an imaginary landscape made from sounds growing and layering like biological organisms within a forest. This work, as well as Laura’s debut ep Night/Lights, was released by London-based label The Tapeworm. Since 2016 her music has been presented in many venues and festivals such as Rewire, Dekmantel, EYE Filmmuseum (NL), Cafè Oto (UK), Node, Macao, MAST (IT).
“Hand in Hand with a stranger” is a radio piece I composed partly during my residency at Worm Studios and partly during the Covid19 pandemic lockdown period. Inspired by the art of Lithuanian-American videomaker Jonas Mekas, its form is what we can describe as an audio-diary; a collection of personal thoughts, feelings, and small ordinary events that happened between January and March 2020, when I was touring South Italy and during my residency period in Rotterdam. Nevertheless, these sonic sketches are not presented in a chronological sequence but assembled freely to compose an intimate story where a state of displacement and loneliness triggers an intense and attentive relationship with the surrounding world.
More info on laura’s Worm-residency; https://worm.org/projects/worm-talks-to-laura-agnusdei/
Mixing is a collage, that’s how I understand it. Some of raw recordings, some other are made from bits and pieces of elaborate works : films, songs,radio programmes – we’re thieves, and we make something out of our larcenies. Jean-Luc Godard suggested that better then making political films we should make films politically. I try to apply the same idea to radio. I’m Anaïs Denaux, I’m a member of the groups Le Bruitagène and Asu (Association Sonore et Utopique). We make documentaries and other more creative audio pieces, we don’t believe in being impartial. We are also organising public listening sessions and the audio artist residency Utopie Sonore. We believe in collective experiment.
Here are the audio pieces I chose for this Radia programme..
Biodiversité – Biodiversity, the sound you can hear now in the background, I made to answer the call of Mixage Fou, to mix different given sounds into a 80 second piece.
The Meaning of Life, a piece I made for the second digital album by Fair Play, a compilation of pieces by cis and trans female artists – The Meaning of Life is a collage with Nostalghia, The Mirror, Solaris and Stalker by Tarkovsky, the voice of Orson Welles on BBC4, Alphaville by Godard, a few words by Vaughan Supple about Tarkovsky’s work – and says on how mankind cope with the absurd of existence, wants to understand, knows the question is vain, but still wants to reproduce.
La Tempête des géants – Tempest of the Giants, a piece I created for my girlfriend during the Yellow Vest movement and is about the aburdity of police violence.
Followed by Restez chez vous which is a short piece by Leslie Doumerc at Radio Panik, with Gaëlle Morand and me as cops telling the population to stay at home during de pandemic.
Une Certaine dose de tendresse – A Certain Dose of Tenderness – a piece I made during the evacuation of the zad of Notre-Dame-des-Landes in April 2018. The title is from the famous speech by Subcomandate Marcos which says « A certain dose of tenderness is necessary in order to walk when there is so much against you / in order to awaken when you’re so exhausted. A certain dose of tenderness is necessary in order to see, in this darkness, a small ray of light / in order to make order from shame and obligations. […] But sometimes a certain dose of tenderness is not enough and it’s necessary to add… a certain dose of bullets. »
And Stalker, the last piece, by Clémence Fermé – with La Jetée by Chris Marker, Stalker by Tarkovsky, Alphaville by Godard, Roma by Fellini, Metropolis by Fritz Lang – this piece was carried out for L’Acentrale, radio held by a large group of people to speak out for strikers, workers and social riots.
