Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, Baird Auditorium, 10th St. and Constitution Ave, NW, Washington DC 20560.
USEFUL RADIO, part 2
Taking a deep dive into Rick Prelinger‘s radio listening archives as well as our own, me and my long time collaborator Jeff Kolar will be creating a live show that composes across shortwave, UHF and VHF, from air traffic control to citizen’s band, from encrypted security systems to emergency scanners. Employing live and sampled radio signals together with radiophonic and electronic instruments, we tune in to the ordinariness, the urgencies, and the intimacies of everyday radio communications, exploring the musicality of this transmission ecology.
Hosted by Walter Forsberg, Alison Reppert Gerber, Dave Walker of the Smithsonian Library and Archives, the event takes place at the Baird Auditorium at the Smithsonian.
Part of the Radio Preservation Task Force conference at the Library of Congress, April 27-30, 2023.
Full conference schedule here (conference is free and open to the public!)
The second in a series of twelve annual events taking place on December 12 from noon to midnight EST (9-9 PST, 11-11 CST, 17-05 GMT, 18-06 CET, 1-13 CST, 2-14 KST). Each year the event moves through each word of the 12-word phrase you and I are water earth fire air of life and death and activates the word of the year in myriad ways.
This year the word is ‘and’, consequently the focus is on repetitions, conjunctions, and duos. Last year it started with ‘you’, this year we connect you to anything and everything, we connect you to what you are together-with. Or, we get stuck in the very act that ‘and’ opens up, into the enormity that the so-what-next that ‘and’ implies.
LINKS – Link to main info page on the 12-year project here. – Link to project page here.
-AND- HOUR 2 (10 PST, 12 CST, 13 EST, 18 GMT, 19 CET, 2 CST, 3 KST) Radius (Chicago) PRESENTS Anna Friz (Santa Cruz) and Jeff Kolar (Chicago)
The end is pretend
Time does not pass, it accumulates. A series of gestures, repetitions, and refrains; human loops which may not last but do linger.
Anna and Jeff have collaborated together for more than a decade on various musical and radiophonic projects around the world, most often in the form of live improvisatory performances and broadcasts. In early March 2020, we met in Chicago to perform and to record new sound work. That week together was the last before the lockdowns in response to the COVID-19 pandemic began, so we were studiobound in that very uneasy moment before the many changes to come. We each created small sonic loops from a very limited palette of instruments or devices, including a radio scanner to pick up local two-way radio frequencies from shortwave to police talk. We are returning to these sonic moments 18 months later, passing them between us over greater distances this time, up to three exchanges of accumulating layers. This is a process of navigating public and personal crises buoyed by our artistic friendship.
A gesture, and a gesture, and a gesture. And another. And an other. And each other.
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 AnthemNRRF 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.
I have a number of radio art works (collaborations all!) in the current edition of Radiophrenia (2019). Tune in May 19-26, 2019 to listen to the full schedule of radio art from around the world.
Radiophrenia is a temporary art radio station organized by Mark Vernon and Barry Burns– a two-week exploration into current trends in sound and transmission arts. Broadcasting live from Glasgow’sCentre for Contemporary Arts, the station aims to promote radio as an art form, encouraging challenging and radical new approaches to the medium.
May 19, 2019 16-18h Glasgow time: NRRF B-Radio returns, with an all new surreal and labyrinthine episode The Forbidden Planet Awakens! Deconstructing the space opera, the countdown never ends as our intrepid space crew and their ever-practical Mission Control and chronically depressed Ground Control counterparts try to escape the Forbidden Planet.
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. For this episode, all members participated remotely, from Abu Dhabi, Wave Farm in Acra NY, Florida, North Carolina, and Radius in Chicago. Many thanks to the Wave Farm and Tom Roe for supporting the piece, which will also be rebroadcast on WGXC Greene and Columbia counties, NY in the coming weeks.
Two of my favourite people to play with and collaborate with! Here’s what we’re up to:
Home Radiation
Performing with radiophonic instruments, unique homemade electronics, micro-watt transmitters, and re-purposed objects, Anna Friz, Jeff Kolar and Eric Leonardson create intimate atmospheres traversing acoustic and electrode-magnetic space. Together their work can be characterized as a mindful collaboration with vibrational surfaces and unstable circuits; and with subtle treatments of potentially noisy, often lo-fi materials from which highly detailed landscapes emerge. Though all three artists have worked with one another in various constellations in Chicago and internationally, this concert is their premiere outing as a trio.
In addition to Eric’s Springboard instrument, Jeff’s panoply of open circuit micro-transmitters, and my little table full of feedback oddities, I’ll be bringing along an old friend to make some noise:
I’m writing about transmission ecology, radio art, some of my work, and projects by a couple of my favourite radio people Jeff Kolar and Kristen Roos. Expertly edited by another sharp radio mind, Neil Verma.
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.
∏-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.
Yup, it’s time to sally forth for our fifth and final episode of NRRF B Radio this summer, kindly hosted by the Experimental Sound Studio here in Chicago, with streaming support and rebroadcast from our favourite station WGXC and Wave Farm (free103point9) Transmission Arts in Green and Columbia counties, New York state.
This week, NRRF goes underground and returns with BROOD II: Emergence. Year 17 has arrived, and genus Magicicada are crawling out of the ground and playing the largest noise show of all time. But there may be more than one kind of insect emerging from its pupa…. All things insectoid, especially those that come in clouds and swarms.
TUNE IN! WEDNESDAY JULY 31, 18h-21h CDST (GMT -6).
If you find yourself on Chicago’s north side, tune in to 87.9FM, or better yet, drop in and say hi at ESS, 5925 N Ravenswood, where the live radio is happening.
or listen online at http://free103point9.org.
free103point9/ WGXC in Greene/Columbia counties NY will rebroadcast the show following the live show at 11CDT.
B Radio: a series of radio shows mashing b-list genres with radio art. Each B Radio episode features a theme to structure the improvisational nature of the shows, though tangents are frequent and encouraged. It’s live radio, streamed, with special guests and live audience. The core group of performers play live instruments and electronics, sample wildly, speculate broadly, and have been known to sing.
NRRF is a collaborative effort to make unlicensed neighborhood radio art. For this Chicago iteration, the core group of noisemakers consists of Jonny Farrow, Anna Friz, Steve Germana, Jeff Kolar, Peter Speer, with Sarah Knudtson (documentation and props wrangling). Earlier projects include street radio in Montreal (2001), the NRRF Radio Roadshow (2004), and Radio Free Parkdale in Toronto (2005-2007).
