anna friz

Some news from the Uhrwald, where cuckoos nest at night: I’m very pleased and honoured to have been awarded second place in the Prix Palma Ars Acoustica 2014 for Collecting Clocks and Losing Time (2013), a feature-length radio art composition created in 5.1 surround sound for ORF Kunstradio, on the Austrian national public radio.

Collecting Clocks and Losing Time is part of a body work I’ve been developing over the past four years of iterative experiments with radio and timekeeping, and includes Studio Time (2013), 5 Times (less a hundred) (2012), Measure the time taken (2011), For the time being (2010), and the ongoing project Zero Hour. This piece has some special emotional resonance for me, as it was composed around recordings of my late father’s cuckoo clocks, one of which was broken in such a way as to eternally cuckoo until the escapement runs out. In addition to the individual eccentricities of these clocks, the work features manipulations of the atomic clock, or coordinated universal time as broadcast globally on shortwave frequencies. It would be fair to say I’ve been obsessed with broadcast time since the mid-1990s, and since making Collecting Clocks and Losing Time, I have continued my focused manipulations of clocks in longer form works for overnight broadcast, particularly the 5-hour work Uncoordinated Universal Time (2014).

No Comments | In: news, transmission | tags: anna friz, Atomic Clock, atomic time, Collecting Clocks and Losing Time, cuckoo clocks, ORF Kunstradio, Prix Palma Ars Acustica. | #

That’s right, is time for another episode of NRRF B Radio, broadcast live (87.9FM) from the mighty Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago, and streamed from Wavefarm radio/Transmission Arts in New York state.

Wednesday, April 16, 2014.  11:00-14:00 Central Daylight Savings Time (GMT -5), listen in on WGXC New York on Thursday, April 17, 2014, 0:05-2:20.

The Electric Earth

The Frosty and Frothy NRRF Pirates have found themselves and their trusty schooner locked on a course DUE SOUTH owing to a badly malfunctioning compass. As they approach what appears to be the frozen, southern polar landmass, they suddenly discover that their ship is no longer moving. They are immobilized by the pack ice, so they decide to sing songs while quickly finishing off the rum. In their stupor, the crew encounters one very smelly and dreadfully lost Ijiraq which causes them to vacate the boat and immediately become lost on the ice where they experience many strange sensations and illusions: an unsettling shift in gravity, rings around the sun, a very convincing fata morgana, and several frightening aural hallucinations, all of which confuse them further. As they press forward to nowhere, the ice or permafrost begins to give way under their feet in a glorious thaw. Is the land melting away? Eventually the crew finds magnificent caverns filled with crystalline formations that seem to be connected to a giant electric ray transmitter. What is this strange world? A mirage? Madness? A secret military installation? Or the solution to the world’s fossil fuel addiction? The fearless crew are all frozen in static, and we wonder, what could possibly happen next?!?

NRRF is a collaborative effort to make unlicensed neighborhood radio art. B Radio mashes b-list film and pulp fiction genres with radio art to structure the improvisational nature of the shows. It’s live radio, streamed, with special guests and live audience. The core group consists of Jonny Farrow, Anna Friz, Steve Germana, Jeff Kolar, and Peter Speer.

No Comments | In: news, performances, transmission | tags: anna friz, B Radio, Electric Earth, experimental sound studio, jeff kolar, jonny farrow, NRRF, peter speer, Pirate Radio, radio art, stephen germana, Wavefarm/Transmission Arts. | #

I’m hurtling across the corn fields of downstate Illinois on the train at the moment, through a decidedly un-spring-like landscape that is just thinking of coming back to life after the long winter here. I’m on my way to do some work with Jay Needham, Associate Professor in the Radio, Television, and Digital Media Department at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale IL. I’ll be giving a lecture in the department tomorrow (10 April) on research creation and transmission art, entitled Radio is not a Container. Jay and I are preparing for our lecture-performance Zero Hour at Art+Communication: Fields in Riga, Latvia, in May this year. And we’ll be firing up the mics for a radio party with some grad students later this weekend. Woot!

Also coming up, a new episode of NRRF: B Radio from 11:00-14:00 (CDST, Chicago time) on 16 April, streaming and broadcasting live from the Experimental Sound Studio, Chicago, and streamed/rebroadcast by WGXC Transmission Arts, NY. The intrepid crew reunites to explore The Electric Earth.

Finally, I’ll be passing through Montreal the last week in April, so stay tuned for another collaboration by Ghost Imbiss.

Yes, that’s a bit of leftover snow on the ground.

No Comments | In: news, performances, transmission | tags: anna friz, Ghost Imbiss, jay needham, NRRF B Radio, the electric earth, zero hour. | #

I began working with Elle Flanders and Tamira Sawatzky aka Public Studio in 2011, when I composed music and did sound design/installation for their multi-channel film work Road Movie. The piece explores the segregated road system in the West Bank, with perspectives from Israelis and Palestinians. Recently I’ve been working on the sound for Public Studio’s current long-running project What Isn’t There, documenting the Palestinian villages of 1948, from which their Arab inhabitants were displaced and exiled. This latest installment in Public Studio’s 15-year process with the villages is a multi-channel film installation featuring 14 villages.

Up until last week, I had never traveled to Israel/Palestine, and so had been learning about the area through various books, news and editorial media and through immersion in the sound recordings from Public Studio’s location shoots so far. Last week I finally went there myself, to take the Public Studio deluxe tour of the West Bank, record sound at some village sites, and to try to parse the long history of conquests that is writ large on the landscape, from Roman ruins to Marmaluke fortresses to Palestinian olive groves to Bedouin encampments to Israeli army bases, checkpoints, and walled-in settlements.

Suba, a Palestinian village built on the ruins of a Crusader fort

Tamira and I take a beak to sample some tart green almonds off the tree…

The current situation is quite literally inscribed on the land, revealing that this is now a battle that is largely being fought by pervasive, insidious construction and control of infrastructure, where the one with the biggest walls, the fastest roads, and control of the checkpoints wins. On the hilltops in Palestine, the radio communications towers are the one of first indications that an illegal Israeli settlement is coming, bringing walls and soldiers and strangely Santa Fe style-suburban homes with them.

Meanwhile, time seems to stand still, in a way, in the hazy hills around Nablus or Ramallah, where lemon trees and olive groves flourish in the terraced hills, drivers are fearless, people are kind and hostly, and the dust blows forward and the dust blows back.

No Comments | In: installation, news, research | tags: anna friz, Elle Flanders, Public Studio, Public Tours, Tamira Sawatzky, What Isn't There. | #

I have the great pleasure of playing together with Maja Osojnik this weekend in Vienna. She’s a vibrant performer and composer who uses a broad palette of instruments electronic and acoustic, including her voice.

Saturday March 1, 2014   20:00,    e  c  h  o  r  a  u  m     Sechshauser Straße 66  Vienna

We’ll be playing solo sets, and a set together, using a pile of electronics, instruments, voices, radio, cassettes, and all. My set will be focused on my current favourite sample, the zero hour….

We played together on Art’s Birthday (January 17, 2014) in a translocal exchange over the interwebs between Vienna-Ljubljana, produced by ORF Kunstradio and radioCONA, which you can listen to here.

No Comments | In: news, performances | tags: anna friz, audio art, echoraum, experimental music, maja osojnik, the zero hour. | #

Oh Berlin, I love your flea markets. This little night light is going to be in a new piece this spring…. I just bought her sister on the interweb…

No Comments | In: news, transmission | tags: anna friz, future radio art, telefunken, the future as imagined by the past. | #

A train and a ferry ride away from Berlin, and I find myself in Copenhagen, Danmark this week for a series of events, thanks to the enthusiastic curatorial efforts of Jan Høgh Stricker and Anne Clement and KNTN.

Tonight (7. February, 2014) I’m performing together with Konrad Korabiewski (that’s us in action above) at the noise bunker known as Mayhem, Ragnhildgade 1 Kbh NV. Doors at 20:00, opening acts Hannibal Andersen and David Maranha, though we will be performing second. We’ll be using a multi-channel speaker and radio set up, with various low-fi electronics, cottage-built instruments, and mutually intertwined feedback systems. As analogue as possible.

Sunday 9. February 2014, 12:00-16:00, Konrad and I will give a workshop, whose title is inspired by the ever-erudite Gregory Whitehead:  An Intricate Game of Position: Critical artistic and phenomenological approaches to sound and radio.  This workshop discusses key paradigms such spatiality and resonance, active listening, transception, and transmission ecology, and includes a listening session and demonstration of basic transmission principles using micro-radio. Participants will also undertake guided activities and improvisational exercises such as soundwalking, and work together to create ‘instant’ performative radio pieces.  Taking place at the YNKB and Astrid Noack’s Atelier here in ydre Nørrebro, Copenhagen.

Earlier in the week, I curated this month’s episode of Københavns Radiobiograf at the Gloria Bio on Tuesday 4. February (where an audience gathers to listen to radio pieces in a darkened cinema). In addition to some old and new pieces of my own (Respire, Pirate Jenny, and Radiotelegraph) I had the pleasure of sharing some of my favourite pieces by others, like Miranda July‘s WSNO, About Time by Yves Daoust, and an excerpt from a.j. cornell‘s Private Telephone 1981. Check them out yourself, and wear some headphones while you listen!

Also gave a lecture on Thursday 6. February at the Hovedbibliothek or main library here in Copenhagen, on the topic of “The Unstable Art of Radio“, which was a brief introduction to creative uses and manipulations of radio and electro-magnetic waves, particularly looking at working with transmitters, manipulating receivers, and some aeriology. Really nice audience, and a great opportunity for me to dig up old crystal set schematics and evidence of DIY tinkering… even as proposed by Quaker Oats:

No Comments | In: news, performances, transmission | tags: anna friz, Astrid Noack's atelier, konrad korabiewski, Københavns Hovedbibliothek, Københavns Radiobiograf, making noise where ever we go, Mayhem, radio art, transmission art, YNKB. | #

Currently getting around the independent radio networks of Europe and beyond: extensive broadcasting in Ljubljana, Slovenia with radioCONA and Radio Študent in January, then some spontaneous radio making with p-node at Club Transmediale, Berlin (featuring some lovely collaborations with Jeff Kolar of Radius, Ann Rosen and Sten-Olof Hellström of Schhh, and as Ghost Imbiss with Jeff Kolar and Emilie Mouchous). Special Radius playlists including my episode 44 Radiotelegraph graced the p-node last week, and will be broadcast overnight on February 7, 2014, on the Endless Tape program of EPSILONIA Radio Libertaire, 89.4FM in Paris, France.

No Comments | In: news, transmission | tags: anna friz, Ghost Imbiss, Radiotelegraph, Radius. | #

Jeff Kolar and I will be performing new work together tonight for the hybrid radio project ∏-node at the 2014 CTM Festival. Tonight’s show is co-organized by Salon Bruit and senderberlin.org.

∏-node is an experimental platform for hybrid Web/FM radiophonic composition. As a multi-dimensional radio infrastructure platform, ∏-node explores the narrative, participative, and imaginary possibilities of radio through the use of both historic and new, digital technologies.

CTM Festival is an international festival dedicated to contemporary electronic, digital and experimental music, as well as the diverse range of artistic activities in the context of sound and club cultures here in Berlin. Since 1999 it takes place concurrently and cooperatively with transmediale – international festival for art and digital culture, Berlin.

Listen:
p-node radio stream

When:
January 29, 2014
12:00 AM – 2:00 AM GMT +1

Where:
Where is Jesus Temporary Space
Wrangelstrasse 57, 10997
Kreuzberg, Berlin, Germany

No Comments | In: news, performances, transmission | tags: anna friz, CTM festival, jeff kolar, p-node.org, salon bruit. | #

This week (27.01.2014 – 02.02.2014) our second NRRF B Radio episode Voyage to the Forbidden Planet rebroadcasts on the international independent radio network Radia, devoted to new and forgotten ways of making radio.

Radia is a network of 25 independent, non-commercial stations operating in Europe and beyond:

Campus Paris (Paris, FR) CFRC 101.9 FM (Kingston, CA) CKUT (Montréal, CA) Curious Broadcast (Dublin, IR) JET FM (Nantes, FR) Kanal 103 (Skopje, MK) Orange 94.0 (Vienna, AT) Radio Campus (Brussels, BE) Radio Corax (Halle, DE) Radio Grenouille (Marseille, FR) Radio Helsinki (Graz, AT) Radio Nova (Oslo, NO) Radio One 91 FM (Dunedin, NZ) Radio Panik (Brussels, BE) Radio Papesse (Firenze, IT) Radio Student (Ljubljana, SI) radio x (Frankfurt/Main, DE) Rádio Zero (Lisboa, PT) RadioWORM (Rotterdam, NL) Reboot.fm (Berlin, DE) Resonance104.4fm (London, UK) Soundart Radio (Dartington, UK) TEA FM (Zaragoza, ES) Wave Farm WGXC 90.7-FM (New York, USA) XL Air (Brussels, BE).

No Comments | In: news, transmission | tags: B Radio, NRRF, Radia network. | #