This weekend I’m taking part remotely in the Tactus Radio Festival, hosted by UsmaRadio in the Republic of San Marino. Giving a talk on Transmission Ecologies December 1, and joining a multi-nodal international sound improvisation on December 2.
As part of the festival, the generative radio piece Morse Mountain, created together with Absolute Value of Noise, will be transmitting on Radio LADA from December 1, 2023 and continuing for the next couple of months.
Continuum: December 2, 2023 19:00-20:00 CEST (GMT +2) A radio network created for/by telematic performance with artists on site and remotely, continuing and deepening experiments born in the 1990s. A telematic performance where some guests of the festival improvise together with artists remotely.
in San Marino: alien productions (Andrea Sodomka, Norbert Math), Gaia Ginevra Giorgi, L’Impero della Luce, NicoNote, Roberto Paci Dalò, Tobia Bandini, Vittoria Assembri
online: Anna Friz (Santa Cruz, CA) Bauhaus Radio Ensemble from Weimar, Germany(Tilman Böhnke, Fritzi Buhtz, Adrian Ciesielski, Lefteris Krysalis, Finn Röhmer-Litzmann, João Afonso Soares Leiria Parreira Ticão, Amir Shokati, Karlotta Sperling)
Tune In:Usmaradio.org and San Marino RTV (San Marino), bauhaus.fm (Germany), Wave Farm (USA), ARTxFM / WXOX 97.1 FM (USA), Fango Radio (Italy), NEU Radio (Italy), Beware The Radio (UK), Radio Raheem (Italy), Radio Tsonami (Chile), diffusionFM (Australia), Radio Bloc ORAL (Canada)
Revenant is a new solo radio art composition premiering on ORF Kunstradioon July 30, 2023 at 22:05 CDST (GMT +2). Listen live or stream from the project page. Rebroadcast on WGXC Upper Hudson Valley, September 8, 2023.
Here’s what it’s all about:
Revenant
A new radio art work in two parts, exploring mortality, rot, and regeneration, using electronic and radiophonic instruments, and sound from below and above ground. Recorded in the mighty RP4 studios of the ORF Funkhaus in Vienna and on various locations in Santa Cruz, California. Thanks to Martin Leitner, Elisabeth Zimmermann, and Indexical.
1: Outside In the increasing heat and haze of summer, the days are long and hot and the nights insomniac. After brief, fitful sleep, the sun is a tarnished penny in the morning when it rises behind an orange haze of smoke and ash from wildfire. Stuck indoors when the air is hot and thick, other creatures find their way inside to take refuge with me: coming in along the plumbing, up the drains, in the vents and down the chimney, through the cracks under the door or the walls. Unexpected insects, worms and a lizard that dry on the floor, various arachnids running up the walls, a small bird, a bat. It seems I must change my approach to cohabitation: when the creatures move into my nest, I trade places and take to the airwaves or escape down into their burrows.
2: Revenir The difference between the living and the dead is hard to discern. That which is dry and buried may not lie still, but move, resurface, rehydrate, transform. The dead gone to ground may yet pay visitations, or am I the visitor? Time underground enables metamorphoses of body and senses.
A portion of this piece is based on an earlier live remote performance for Indexical, Santa Cruz, from October 2020, a year in which I and my community weathered quarantines and evacuation for the CZU Lightning Complex wildfire. The next years saw drought, flood, regrowth, more devastation from storms, and more growth here on the ground. Outside my tiny backyard, a meadow is transformed into a gopher barrens each summer, pock marked and dry like a moonscape as imagined by rodents. I can’t help wondering what goes on underground, and what I might become if I tunnel down and join the potentially vast world of creatures and organisms there.
I have been hosted by ORF Kunstradio this past week, enjoying three days in studio at the ORF Funkhaus on Argentinierstrasse in Vienna working with the full foley capacity of the rooms. Sadly the Funkhaus is undergoing a transformation, with much of the building being renovated into other uses and the old studios unavailable for at least three years, so I was determined to make the most of my (possibly last) chance to work there, bittersweet though it is. And who doesn’t love a good foley pit?! Together with the joyful playful expertise of engineer Martin Leitner, I played all the surfaces and experimented with all sorts of mic set ups.
The new piece, entitled Revenant, will be completed later this month for a premiere on Kunstradio on 30. July 2023. A work two parts, including a section built from an earlier live sound performance entitled Outside, Revenant weathers the long hot summer, in drought and fire, where the sun seems suspended and the nights are insomniac, considering mortality, loss, and regeneration. Using electronic and radiophonic instruments, it slips between the surface and the underground.
Here’s a nice old Austrian radio we found in the basement:
The show is hosted by Radio ARA, heard internationally on over 14 radio stations, and takes place at the Apdikt, behind the Bridderhaus, 1 Rue Léon Metz, 4238 Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg. For anyone local, drop in to experience this live show between 14:00 and midnight. Free entry.
Here’s what it’s all about:
A radiophonic day and night composed live from listening and responding to signals within the long slender fog zone between Santa Cruz and Jenner on the northern California coast. Existence here is shaped deeply by the marine layers and tule fogs that water the land and flow over and into its contours. Ancient coastal Redwood trees grow only as as far as the fog rolls ashore, and in the absence of rain for many months of the year the fog is the only source of water. Particularly during the summer months, the coast is deeply buried in daily fog. Yet as the climate crisis brings drought and wildfire to this area, the fog is also receding. Without the fog, the land will be transformed to a more sere, harsh place. As Etel Adnan also writes: “We believe in the uniqueness of these times as in the originality of this sky.”
The fog is no more a container than radio is a cup to be filled with programming. A medium is not merely a conduit for moving content; a medium might be understood in the multiple senses of conveyance, expression and cultivation. Land, sea and air combine as fog. Similarly, tune in to listen to the radio as it carries across from the Pacific coast to inland Esch and beyond, bringing all manner of signal activity from foghorns, raven calls, coyotes, pedestrian signals, harbour communications, redwood forest and chaparral, sounds from the burn scar of summer fire, air-to-ground chatter, owl calls and the dry continuous flirtations of spring insects.
Like refrains through these field recordings are stories and live performed compositions based on a ‘score’ crafted from forces observed at key points where fog and infrastractures meet, such as the narrows where the Pacific Ocean enters the San Francisco Bay. Based on cycling over the Golden Gate Bridge, I have assembled a list of forces characteristic of the bridge, such as the fog moving over and under the deck, the rhythms of car traffic, the intense buffeting wind that one leans hard into while cycling, pelicans surfing air currents overhead, railings that sing, and fog beacons and horns sounding on the nearby headlands. Throughout the 22 hour program, I will be live in studio in Esch, intertwining field recordings with performances of such observation-based scores in response to the real-time movement of the fog along the north coast based on satellite information, using my assembled instrumentation of electronics, voice, lung-powered boat horns and radio instruments.
Radiophrenia has launched, the excellent radio art project in Glasgow, heard on FM, on-site and online from February 7-20, 2022, transmitting from the Centre for Contemporary Art.
I have a couple of collaborative projects broadcasting as part of the overnight slots: the NRRF Radio Collective‘s We Interrupt This Broadcast(2021) and my ongoing collaboration with Absolute Value of Noise/Peter Courtemanche on the project Solar Radio(which will also soon be a permanent installation at Wave Farm in Upper Hudson Valley in 2022).
Tune in:
February 12, 2022 01:00-05:00 and February 16, 2022 03:00-04:30 Glasgow time for Solar Radio
February 8, 2022 0:00-02:00 and February 11, 2022 05:00-07:00 Glasgow time for We Interrupt This Broadcast
Very pleased to have 2 pieces in the current Rewire Festival, the International Festival for Adventurous Music usually taking place in The Hague, Netherlands, which is online this year.
Heard online and on FM at WGXC and Wave FarmApril 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) Radiois 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.
Thanks to the long-running syndicated radio show and podcast Radio Survivor for inviting me on to chat about radio and transmission art, experiments inside and outside the radio studio, radiophonic instruments, and more.
Conversations with ancestors, bodies, and ancestral selves. You. Distant and longed for, distant and beloved. You. Are changing, have changed. You. Consider all your relations.
Our performance includes sounds of archival tapes of past selves and absent family members, current generations of children and elders, bodies moving, bodies playing, and bodies experienced over distances of time and space.
12-hour online event organized by Christof Migone. First in a series of twelve annual events taking place on December 12 from noon to midnight GMT (7-7 EST, 5-5 CST, 4-4 PST). Each year the event will move through each word of the 12-word phrase you and I are water earth fire air of life and death and activate the word of the year in myriad ways. This year it all starts with you-. It always starts with you-.
