anna friz

After more than a year of performing at a distance via radio and online broadcasts, I’m super excited to do my first live show tonight since January 2020!! Come on down to the Greenville Drive In theater, come rain or stormy weather (which there may be a bit of tonight). In celebration of the mighty WGXC, broadcasting high power community radio to Green and Columbia counties in New York state for past 10 years, I’ll be part of the festivities and doing a new 10 minute piece called “10 Band Radio” (note the emergent theme here….) Will there be walkie talkies? You betcha. And probably some silver rain gear.

The rest of the week I’m here in a mini-residency at the Wave Farm, doing live radio from the Acra studio at Wave Farm on Thursday May 27 2-4pm New York summer time to wrap up Jess Speer‘s Wave Farm fellowship, and a solo show Friday May 28 4-6pm where I’ll be making some new improvised radio art incorporating recent recordings and environmental media of all sorts with electronics and voice. Listen here.

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NRRF B(b) Radio presents: The Spiral Breath

created for the Basilica Hudson’s Drone at Home concert

Heard online and on FM at WGXC and Wave Farm April 24-25, 2021

When a white dwarf star dies it emits a stream of carbon atoms, carried across the galaxy like ash by cosmic winds. These atoms eventually reach other stars and their planets, thereby feeding their own cycles of life and death. The universe breathes, and so do we. Meanwhile, here on earth the current pandemic has focused our attention on both the dire risks and life-giving necessity of breathing, especially in close proximity to others. Spirals form in the human lung when carbon nanoparticles disturb certain surfactant molecules found there. Could those spirals be the imprint of the Milky Way inside our lungs? The carbon breathed out by stars draws an image when we inhale. Drawing breath is ever more precious. This drone meditates on these ideas across dynamics of scale: macro and micro cycles of starlight and breath, the vibrations of atoms, the bellows that power stellar forges which ‘exhale’ particles as breath and that we also breathe, and the indelible traces left in our bodies by these cosmic forces.

NRRF B(b) Radio is an ongoing series of radio art programs created and performed by the current NRRF collective comprised of sound and media artists Jonny Farrow, Anna Friz, Stephen Germana, Jeff Kolar and Peter Speer, with video by Sarah Knudtson. Performing across the fields of improvisational and experimental sound, neighbourhood radio, and translocational radio art, the group assembled in Chicago in 2012 at the Experimental Sound Studio for a summer residency where they made long-form, improvised radio art based on B-movie and sci-fi themes, exploiting and deconstructing the genre for its tropes and stereotypes. The NRRF collective emphasize significant abstract improvisation and take as many tangents as possible. This results in an unpredictable mix of open fields of sounds, occasional narratives, spaceships that fail to launch, and even singing. Sometimes there is cake.

No Comments | In: news, performances, transmission | tags: anna friz, basilica hudson, drone at home, nrrf b(b) radio, Wave Farm, WGXC. | #

I’m enjoying a few days at Wave Farm here Acra, New York. A bit of meeting, and a bit of mini-residency to work on some overdue sound making! The best part about Wave Farm is: no matter the plan you arrive with, farm art will somehow take over. The site is very specific. Last night (May 17, 2016 midnight to 1:00) I did a live show for Wave Farm radio and WGXC (90.7FM in Greene and Columbia counties), considering the nature of distance, listening in the dark, metamorphosis and drones of all kinds. Above is the Wave Farm Study Center and artist residency (also home to the Acra studio of WGXC) and below yours truly getting ready for the night.

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Back in October 2013, while on residency at Skaftfell Center for Visual Art in Seydisfjördur, Iceland, I crafted a 16:00 minute radio beacon to broadcast on my private transmitter every evening at sundown for a week. Radiotelegraph featured my first formal attempts at performing vocal morse code, laid over a bed of signals and oscillations. It was simulcast on the mighty Radius in Chicago, U.S. as episode 44 in their esteemed catalogue of transmission experiments.

In the last month, Radiotelegraph has made its way around the world in various ways:

-featured on Radius’ Sketchpad series on WGXC New York and the Wavefarm’s Transmission Arts archive, May 23, 2014

-featured in the latest curated playlist of Radius’ PATCH series on WFMU New Jersey and the Free Music Archive (FMA), posted June 1, 2014. This series includes three Radius episodes that reflect on the concept of distance.

-featured as part of radio trickster Gregory Whitehead‘s edition of Radio Yak, heard on the brand new Soundproof program, Radio National of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, aired May 25, 2014.

And finally… tomorrow I’m on my way to give a paper at the Radio As Art conference at the Weserburg Museum Studienzentrum in Bremen, Germany, taking place from 5-8. June 2014. I’ll be talking about “The Wireless Experience of Distance”. The whole conference will be streamed by Mobile Radio here, including some really nice curated overnight programming from the Radia network and ORF Kunstradio.

No Comments | In: conferences, news, transmission | tags: anna friz, FMA, Gregory Whitehead, radio art, Radio As Art, Radius, shameless self-promotion, Soundproof, transmission art, Wavefarm, WGXC. | #

The art and mayhem continues, even with a sugar hangover…. For those of you in the Greene and Columbia counties of New York state, WGXC is rebroadcasting our full NRRF Art’s Birthday radio shenanigans tonight (Saturday, January 19) from 22h to 4h overnight (that’s GMT -5).

ORF Kunstradio is also remixing audio from many different international nodes on January 20 and Feb 17, including some NRRF nuggets.

Flaming cake by Jonny Farrow. Piñata supplied and modified by Jeff Kolar.

Thanks to free103point9 for streaming help on January 17!

No Comments | In: news, transmission | tags: art's birthday, free103point9.org, Kunstradio, NRRF Radio, sugar hangover, WGXC. | #

map by Glenn Gear

Emmanuel Madan and I are doing a little residency at the free103point9.org Wave Farm in Greene County, New York this week, and as part of our stay we’ll be doing a broadcast this afternoon on WGXC, a full-power community radio station supported by free103, serving Greene and Columbia counties in New York state.

TUNE IN 16h-18h EST (-5 GMT) today, January 21, 2012, or check the station archives.

We’ll be talking about our ongoing project The Joy Channel, and playing some excerpts of old and new material related to the project. Here’s a description to give you a taste:

The Joy Channel is an experimental radio work by Anna Friz and Emmanuel Madan. The piece proposes that the radio of the future will no longer be characterized as a primarily sonic medium, but rather as a means of transmitting emotional or empathic communication. The piece explores tensions between empathic realization and the neurological manipulation of emotions, the interaction between the listeners as active or passive subjects, and the renewed struggle over access to the airwaves. In the year 2147, after nearly 150 years of business as usual (government corruption and privatization, toxic resource extraction and industrial practices, bad weather, civil uprising, earthquakes and pandemic), the nation states of Canada and U.S.A. no longer exist. Approximately 40 million people remain in North America, mainly concentrated on the west and east coasts, and in thinner communities inland. The technique of transmitting emotions over radio frequencies is originally developed as a psychiatric home tele-treatment procedure for long-term depression patients. However, by 2147 corporate broadcasters are also exploiting the technology for its entertainment and behavioural control potential.

This sudden domination of the EM (formerly FM) radio spectrum encroaches upon another, more arcane radiophonic pratice: radio-empathic communion. Wandering in the relative silence of wasted urban and ex-urban spaces in the central continent, small communities of empaths had begun to form and to reach out to one another. They discovered that the FM radio spectrum, largely abandoned during the upheavals that accompanied the population collapse of the late 21st century, was open ground for a type of communication not yet experienced in human history: tele-empathy. These neo-nomads developed the sensitivity to feel one another across greater and greater distances without the use of transmitters or receivers. Their process is rudely interrupted when Hi-Zenith’s standardized emotional broadcasts go live to air from coast to coast.

We’ll be doing some more radio late Sunday night/Monday morning, just in time for the lunar new year! Tune in for the zero hour January 23, midnight EST (-5 GMT), on WGXC.

No Comments | In: news, transmission | tags: anna friz, emmanuel madan, free103point9.org, snow all over the damn place, the joy channel, WGXC. | #