anna friz

NRRF Radio returns, this time taking on the audio cultures of patriotism, specifically national and state anthems.

Radio and television stations around the world regularly play their national anthem, either at the end of the broadcast day or at a designated hour. In the US the practice was amplified under the COVID-19 pandemic on conservative networks. The imagined sound of everyone singing an anthem signals an equally imaginary unity around national identity. But this pantomime rehearsal of a uniform national ‘we’ continually erases difference while the band plays on, singing of warped colonial American dreams to the tune of an inevitably mediocre melody in doggerel rhyme. In Irrational Anthem NRRF takes up various anthems of the Americas as a radiophonic method; to deconstruct and interrupt regularly scheduled patriotism; to add to this messy contemporary soundtrack; to form a noisy hymn of resistance and reflection for new collectivities that include difference, dissensus, rebellion and renewal. 

Invited by Tsonami Festival de Arte Sonoro, NRRF will be performing in Valparaíso, Chile on December 12, 2021, at 20h (UTC -3). Jeff Kolar will be live on site, with Jonny Farrow, Anna Friz, Stephen Germana and Peter Speer performing remotely from Abu Dhabi, California, Florida and North Carolina.

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A project of the Acoustic Commons, As if radio… broadcasts to Glasgow, Scotland during the COP26 meeting; a collaborative radio space created in response to the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) in Glasgow from 31 October – 12 November 2021.

My collaborators and I are contributing two projects to the effort:

–Mechanical Velocities (created with Absolute Value of Noise) will air on Sunday October 31 at 14h Glasgow time.

-a new monthly program on WGXC entitled The Conduction Series kicks off its inaugural show for As if radio… on Friday November 5, 2021 at 19h Glasgow time. Featuring artists, educators and graduate students from UC Santa Cruz, SUNY Buffalo and CU Boulder, improvising together on the Mezcal platform created by August Black. Participants include: Travis Austin, Nima Bahrehmand, Betsey Biggs, August Black, Martin Freeman, Anna Friz, Jason Geistweidt, Max Goldfarb, Kyle Gonzalez, Paulus van Horne, Ryan Page, Tom Roe, Teri Rueb, Jason Sanford, Laurids Andersen Sonne, and Biyi Wen.

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This week, NRRF is back on the air, live in Chicago and Green and Columbia counties, New York, plus online all around the interweb.

NRRF Radio Collective Presents: We Interrupt This Broadcast

The world is burning: fires raging out of control; record heat and storms accumulating power and frequency; flooding ; disease vectors crossing the species barrier with ease. Apocalypse as usual. But we can listen to the radio: we interrupt our own broadcast to interrupt our own broadcast, and declare that “reception is interception”. And also to say that rubber bands last longer when refrigerated. Tune in won’t you?

7-10pm Thursday August 5, 2021 Central Daylight Time (GMT -6).

In Chicagoland, listen in live on the north side at 87.9FM; streamed live on Wave Farm Radio: NRRF Collective Presents; and in Green and Columbia counties, New York on WGXC 90.7FM from 8-10pm EDT.

NRRF is an ongoing series of radio art programs created and performed by the current NRRF collective composed of Jonny Farrow, Anna Friz, Stephen Germana, Jeff Kolar and Peter Speer. The group assembled in Chicago in 2012 at the Experimental Sound Studio for a summer residency making long-form, improvised radio art based on B-movie and sci-fi themes, deconstructing the genre for its tropes and stereotypes. The NRRF collective emphasizes abstract improvisation and takes as many tangents as possible. This results in an unpredictable mix of open sound fields, occasional narratives, spaceships that fail to launch, and even singing. 

No Comments | In: news | tags: ESS, NRRF, radio art, Wave Farm. | #

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Extremity Cassette is a generative audio piece that imagines samples on a near-endless stretch of audio tape. Wound through a complex, multi-head cassette machine, the samples overlap with themselves, repeat, vanish and reappear. The magnetic nature of the machine itself picks up noises from the ether and mixes them with free reed and heterodyne sounds.

Inspired by the short story The White Death by Stanislaw Lem, where a planet made entirely of inorganic material is the crystalline host to fabulous machines, Extremity Cassette imagines a prehistoric mechanism that loops and churns out a never ending, ever changing musical score. Until one day the organic world is introduced … then rust interferes with the workings of the cassette … the sounds become progressively more erratic, and eventually stop.

Originally composed for Art’s Birthday, 17 January 2009, Extremity Cassette will play overnight from June 1-7, 2021 on Radio Tsonami, originating from Valparaíso, Chile.

Absolute Value of Noise (Peter Courtemanche): VLF Antenna and Receiver
Anna Friz: Theremin, Harmonica, Kazoo, Melodica

No Comments | In: news | tags: absolute value of noise, anna friz, extremity cassette, Radio Tsonami. | #

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.

No Comments | In: news, performances | tags: 10 Band Radio, anna friz, Wave Farm, WGXC. | #

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.

The Joy Channel, created with Emmanuel Madan, is playing on the Rewire Radio presentation channel on Sunday May 9, while my solo commission with Radiophrenia in 2016 How To Pack A Whale airs on Friday May 7.

Checkout all lineup and links here!

No Comments | In: news, transmission | tags: anna friz, emmanuel madan, How To Pack A Whale, Rewire, the joy channel. | #

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. | #

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.

Tune in here!

No Comments | In: news, transmission | tags: anna friz, radio survivor. | #

No Comments | In: news, transmission | tags: anna friz, movement.radio, transmission ecologies. | #