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
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.
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-.
Even underground, insomnia follows. There is light at the end of the burrow, and darkness in the pipes and the tunnels in and out of the house. There are ways in and there are ways out. What comes in, and what goes outside?
Online solo concert for Indexical, Santa Cruz California, October 10, 2020.
I performed live with walkie-talkies, radio, and electronics to a video I shot earlier the same day.
Many thanks to Andrew Smith and Indexical; special thanks to Rodrigo Ríos Zunino. https://www.indexical.org/
Evaporation, condensation, sublimation, deposition. Action, activism, control, resistance. How do changes in state involve exchanges of energy? How do changes of matter cause changes of state? State policy regarding land, mining, mineral extraction and its accompanying infrastructures and consumption of raw resources such as fresh water are all brought to bear on the political landscape.
Sonic reflections on volatile political and industrial times via field recordings from copper and lithium mining areas northern Chile, cottage electronics, sampled media and radio, and voice. Live performance at esc medien kunst labor by Anna Friz, with sounds of public uprising in Chile shared by Rodrigo Ríos Zunino. First broadcast for Art’s Birthday 2020; rebroadcast on Radio Tsonami, Valparaíso for Chile’s 2020 election.
On the 100th anniversary of the first global entertainment broadcast, Radioee.net and online radio stations from across the world present Wireless, a 24-hr translingual radio broadcast about planetary wireless communication.
NRRF Bb Radio: The development of planetary radio practices and systems also brought the insight that Earth is continually bathed in radio signals emanating from points across the universe, from ‘nearby’ within our solar system or from vast distances in space and time. Departing from Velimir Khlebnikov’s poetic observation in 1920 that “even starlight is a wireless signal”, the NRRF collective eavesdrops on the radiophony coming our way, and encounters fast radio bursts, long waves, and even the loneliest wave of all.
NRRF is an intermittent collaborative effort to make unlicensed neighborhood radio art. Earlier projects include a series of clandestine FM broadcasts in Chicago, Montréal and beyond with a rotating group of collaborators. Since 2012 NRRF features Jonny Farrow, Anna Friz, Stephen Germana, Jeff Kolar, and Peter Speer. It’s live radio expanded and improvised from various geographical locations, with the current group collaborating from Vermont, Florida, North Carolina, Chicago and Santa Cruz. The core group of performers play everything from traditional instruments to home built electronics, sample wildly, speculate broadly, and have been known to sing. @JonnyFarrow, @peter.speer, @jeffkolar, @wave_farm, @free103point9, @wgxc
On August 27, 1920, “The crazy people on the roof” (Radio Argentina
Society initiators Enrique Susini, César Guerrico, Miguel Mugica, Luis
Romero and Ignacio Gómez) installed a smuggled Marconi transmitter on
the rooftop terrace of the Teatro Coliseo in downtown Buenos Aires. This
broadcast of Wagner’s “Parsifal” marked the first radio broadcast in
Argentina and the first mass public entertainment broadcast in the
world.
On August 27, 2020, Midnight to Midnight Argentina Time, Wireless explores radio pasts and futures, from technology to entertainment. Everything wireless runs on radio, radio waves are the medium of wireless internet. Through translingual dialogue, music and sound, Wireless will consider the various modalities of this evolving planetary condition–spectrum, networks, telecommunications, infrastructure, urban acrobatics, physics, entertainment and education. Each partner radio will rebroadcast the marathon stream, leading to an amplification of radio investigation, entertainment, and solidarity.
radioee.net is an online, nomadic, multilingual radio station. They host 24-hr broadcast events on mobility and movement. They take up topics of transportation, migration, and climate transformation, transmitting local voices, music, and sound to create an audio portrait of a place in time.
