Icelandic sounds in the NYT Magazine


Catching up on the activities of the autumn: the New York Times Magazine September 22, 2018 “Sonic Voyages Issue” focused on travel to parts of the world based on sonic attractions or properties. With soundscapes from 11 sites around the world, the issue included recordings by myself and Konrad Korabiewski, of waterfalls and burbling sulphurous mud pots around Iceland which we captured this past summer especially for this commission.

Accompanying photographs by Matthew Brandt, who we had the great pleasure to travel with while on assignment for this as well.

Listen to the special fall “Sonic Voyages Issue” of the New York Times Magazine from 22nd of September: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/09/21/magazine/voyages-travel-sounds-from-the-world.html
Press release: https://www.nytco.com/nyt-mag-takes-its-audience-on-a-sonic-journey-for-voyages-issue/




ICEbreaker FM


Settle in for quality listening on a long winter’s night with radioCona ICEbreakerFM, and exhibition of sound and radio art on the FM dial in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and streamed worldwide online.

Curated by CONA | institute for contemporary arts processing: Ljubljana, Slovenia.

From Sunday 11th to Thursday 15th February, 2018,
FM 88.8 MHz and www.radiocona.si
every day exactly at nautical twilight, from 18:28 (GMT +1) on with one minute delay every next day.

My contributions to this 10-year retrospective of radioCONA includes a rebroadcast of a piece for two radio stations created together with Brane Zorman: 4 Channel Improvisation on Two FM Frequencies
Monday, 12th February 23:00 to 00:00 (GMT -1) heard in Ljubljana on radioCona 88.8 MHz & Radio Študent 89.3 MHz

ICEbreakerFM will also rebroadcast the following pieces from my past residency with Cona in Ljubljana, Slovenia: Trilogy for Night and Radio (created with Konrad Korabiewski), Whale Radio, and White Night.

“The anniversary of radioCona reveals the ten year long breaking and melting of ice of radio-frequency space, through which it is becoming more accessible for the contemporary art production and offers the public an opportunity to gain sensibility for listening to more complex sound artworks. Five day long broadcasting in the form of FM exhibition showcases the cross section of production of radioCona, that opened up the issue of use of radio frequency as a public and gallery space and inspired artists, who are participating in production and promotion of sound and radio art. ”

Curators: Petra Kapš, Irena Pivka, Jasmina Založnik, Brane Zorman

 



FJARÐARHEIÐI at Tsonami Festival de Arte Sonoro


We are super pleased to be back in Valparaíso, Chile, for the Xth edition of Tsonami Festival de Arte Sonoro. Konrad Korabiewski and I are performing FJARÐARHEIÐI, our multi-channel audio-visual piece concerning the expressiveness of low-visibility and low-fidelity landscapes. The piece is conceived in East Iceland as a project of Skálar | Sound Art | Experimental Music.  

Concerts take place on Thursday December 8, 2016 in the Teatro Parque Cultural de Valparaíso, and on Wednesday December 14, 2016 at the Centre Cultural de España.



The Cold Road


FJARÐARHEIÐI is new multi-channel audiovisual performance by Konrad Korabiewski and me, which we premiered last autumn at the Festival de nouveau cinéma in Montréal. Here’s a little trailer/excerpt, featuring images from one of the two channels of photomontage which I created to accompany our live music.

Anna Friz | Konrad Korabiewski | FJARÐARHEIÐI | Festival Nouveau Cinéma Montréal | live | excerpt from Konrad Korabiewski on Vimeo.http://korabiewski.com

Here’s what the performance is all about:

Using field recordings, cottage-built electronics, analogue tape and feedback systems, Friz and Korabiewski perform live, accompanied by Friz’ monochrome two-channel photo-montage. Together, they craft pensive audiovisual landscapes, strongly influenced by the extreme oscillation between daylight and darkness characteristic of life over a year on the mountainous coast just below the Arctic Circle. Fjarðarheiði is taken from the name of the 25 km mountain pass which connects the village of Seyðisfjörður to the nearest town of Egilsstaðir in eastern Iceland. On this sometimes treacherous road, the visual and acoustic environments are transformed by dense fog and snow storms, effecting a perceptual flux between white-out and black-out which leaves only an aftergrain. If afterglow refers to the light or luminescence left in the sky after sundown, aftergrain is the sonic and visual noise that remains when most other frequencies are subtracted.

Support for the development of the project comes from Canada Council for the Arts (Friz); the Danish Composer’s Society and the Danish Arts Foundation (Korabiewski). Developed as a Skálar production.



Ascend into air, fall into water


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Last spring I made a radio art piece for Radio Arts UK entitled Two Sleeps, which was an oneiric journey through imagined landscapes, and the tendency in my dreams of ascending and descending through air and water. This time around it was much more basic: the plane takes off from the fog and murk of East Iceland, soars over the pack ice around Labrador and descends into another fog bank near Santa Cruz, California.  From air to earth, but actually to water–though there’s drought here, the ocean is the nearest and most impressive body around.

My new appointment here at UC Santa Cruz is keeping me busy, but some additional shows are coming up fast: even as we speak I’m madly finishing the audio for Public Studio‘s new 360 degree video installation entitled Zero Hour, to be presented at Toronto’s Nuit Blanche on October 3-4, 2015; and a brand new audio-visual performance Fjarðarheiði created with Konrad Korabiewski and presented by Skálar | Sound Art | Experimental Music at the Festival de nouveau cinéma in Montréal, October 10, 2015.

Look out for misc. colloquia in the central California area to be announced shortly as well… and when not teaching students about the glories of listening and making noise, I’ll be out and about, loitering about the waterfront…

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The Icelandic Space Program


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From our travels around the northeast corner of planet Iceland…

….back in East Iceland, doing some photography/sound recording/materials gathering together with Konrad Korabiewski during the foggy days and the all-night twilight. Moonscapes: check. Half expecting other planets to rise over the mountains. Contrary to the calendar, summer seems to be giving Iceland a miss, so it’s all wet wool all the time around here. We’re heading up to the Langanes Peninsula for a work period later this month, once the mechanics have finished sprucing up Konrad’s mighty Volvo Laplander.

While in Montréal last month, Emmanuel Madan and I finished the stereo mix of The Joy Channel version 3, our radio art play exploring the future of radio where the airwaves are used to transmit emotions. We mastered at Oboro, with the good ears of Stéphane Claude to weigh in, and the work will be released as part of a new transmission art series on the strange and wonderful west coast label IO. sound later this year.

Currently working on an episode for Radio MACBA Interruptions on the ‘little people’ who live inside the radio (not to be confused with Icelandic faeries, but perhaps they are relatives…), and a composition for 10″ vinyl release through Skálar | Sound Art | Experimental Music entitled The Eternal Cuckoo.

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My travel to undertake artistic research in Iceland this summer is generously supported by a grant from Canada Council for the Arts, Media Arts Division.

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Telefunken Twins Redux


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Telefunken Twins by Anna Friz and Konrad Korabiewski

April 12th, 2015, 23:03 CET (GMT +2)
Kunstradio LIVE on air and on line — podcast of the program continues to be available here at lower resolution

on air: Ö1 Kunstradio in Austria, http://oe1.orf.at
on line: http://kunstradio.at/2015A/12_04_15.html

Telefunken Twins is a suite of pieces departing from a duet between two vintage Telefunken Bajazzo radio/cassette decks. Using radio as instrument and as system exciter, the pieces also utilize micro-FM transmission, low fidelity electronic instruments, analogue tape, dictaphones, walkie talkies, spectral monitoring, and intricate feedback systems to craft and expressive and intimate world from the sensuality of signal and noise. By working with small circuits of transmission live in the radio studio of Ö1 Kunstradio, Telefunken Twins seeks to transform radio away from its everyday role as an apparatus of entertainment or information diffusion, instead proposing radio as instrument, as landscape, and as a poetic space of reverie.
Telefunken Twins is commissioned by Kunstradio and supported by Danish Arts Foundation.

Tuesday April 14, Anna Friz and Konrad Korabiewski at brutto, Vienna.

BRUTTO meets Ö1 Kunstradio
Featuring live sets by Anna Friz & Konrad Korabiewski + Broken Heart Collector
on site: Brut Künstlerhaus, Vienna, Austria.  Entrance 3.-/5.- Euro
http://www.brut-wien.at/programm/detail/1186/de/

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Aftergrain


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Wednesday April 8, 2015: performing a new work with Maja Osojnik at Kino Šiška in Ljubljana, Slovenia, as part of a short residency with CONA Institute for Contemporary Arts Processing as part of their ZVO.ČI.TI so.und.ing Duo series.

We were initially planning to each perform a solo, then a new duo, but we so love playing together that we combined our concepts into a single full set with accompanying slideshow/video by yours truly. So the piece moves from whiteout to blackout, with field recordings, electronics, and instruments, to explore the landscape of built infrastructure (“under lines”) and eventually plunge into the dark for some “Cinema for the Ears”.

Sunday April 12 11pm brings me to Vienna, Austria and ORF Kunstradio, to do a live in-studio radio art piece with Konrad Korabiewski based on our performance Telefunken Twins for the Austrian national radio, followed by a live show with projection on Tuesday April 14 at Brutto Vienna, sharing the bill with Maja Osojnik‘s excellent band broken.heart.collector.

And what exactly is the aftergrain? If the afterglow is the light or luminance left in the sky after sundown, the aftergrain is the sonic and visual grit that remains after most other frequencies are subtracted. For these two live performances with Maja and Konrad, I’ve developed accompanying slideshow/videos based on my photography in Iceland, Chile, and Slovenia, where many of the images eventually decompose from blown-out white to black with just some distorted visual morsels left behind. Aftergrain in sound and signal.

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Funding for my travel and artistic research in Iceland generously supplied by a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts, Media Arts Div.

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Trilogy for Night and Radio


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This week is the premiere of the first part of The Remote Series, produced by Skálar FM and commissioned by the Creative Audio Unit of ABC Radio National, Australia for their weekly radio art program Soundproof.
Listen on air, online or download the series prologue Trilogy for Night and Radio: Radiotelegraph/Night Fall/Relay, a three-part sound work by Anna Friz and Konrad Korabiewski.

Autumn in the far north is characterized by a dramatic loss of daylight. In Seyðisfjörður, a small village on the far eastern edge of Iceland just below the Arctic Circle, each day in October has eight minutes less daylight than the one before. The sun is slower each day to crest the mountains which ring the fjord, until mid-November when it no longer rises above the mountains, and the town experiences only indirect light until February.

Trilogy for Night and Radio is a radio art work in three parts that explores remoteness, the descent into darkness and the long Northern winter night. Trilogy is a collaborative exchange between two traveling sound artists – Anna Friz and Konrad Korabiewski – that meditates on feelings of place using the materiality of signals, overlapping remote geographical spaces. As part of the work, we recorded, performed, re-recorded, and composed with sounds and signals from Iceland and Slovenia, with a relay broadcast to Chicago.

Radiotelegraph, is a beacon in spoken morse code, designed by Anna for unlicensed radio simulcast in Seysdisfjördur, Iceland, and in Chicago, U.S.A on the Radius platform in October 2013. Incorporating performed morse code, electronics, and sampled radio signals, Radiotelegraph reflects Seyðisfjörður’s remote location in a deep fjord off the Atlantic Ocean, which was also the site of the first telegraph cable connection between Iceland and Europe in 1906.

Night Fall is an improvised live performance by Anna and Konrad for unlicensed low-watt transmission in Seyðisfjörður to accompany the shift from sundown into full night time darkness. Night Fall elaborates on the sonic palate created in part one, with a soundscape that contemplates the acoustic and electro-magnetic landscape of Seyðisfjörður in the disappearing light of dusk and the feeling of suspended or expanded time that strongly characterizes this village in east Iceland. The performance was recorded live from a small transistor radio receiver, and edited.

The final segment, Relay, is built from recordings made by Anna and Konrad around the winter solstice (December 21-22) in the empty post-industrial spaces in which they were working–Anna in a former tobacco factory in Ljubljana, Slovenia; Konrad in an empty herring factory in Seydisfjördur. They intertwined these traces and signals from distant spaces, using the architecture and landscape as a filter for their signals. Anna took elements from Radiotelegraph and replayed them into the iron bannisters and wooden walls of the tobacco factory using tactile transducers, or speakers which transmit vibrations into surfaces. These signals were re-recorded using contact microphones, and sent to Konrad, who mixed them together with field recordings from different houses and the empty herring factory.

Trilogy for Night and Radio is the prologue to the four part Remote Series, which will air on Soundproof in early 2015 and will feature artists Tumi Magnússon (Iceland), Fernando Godoy M (Chile), Jana Winderen (Norway) and Christina Kubisch (Germany).

Trilogy for Night and Radio was produced for the Creative Audio Unit with additional support from the Danish Arts Foundation, the Danish Composer’s Society, radioCONA, Kultural Center Tobačna 001, Skaftfell Center for Visual Arts, and Radius.

 



Tsonami Festival de Arte Sonoro, Redux


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Lately there’s been so much cross-continental traveling and work that I’m utterly behind on the updates here. So let’s begin with where I am now: back in one of my favourite places in the world, Valparaíso, Chile for the 2014 edition of the Tsonami Festival de Arte Sonoro. It’s my great pleasure to be invited for the second time (the first time was 2012, catch up on the fun in photos here and here)!

This year at Tsonami Festival I have a full plate of activities: a three-day workshop on expanded radio practice, a lecture with Konrad Korabiewski on our activities as the collective Skálar | Sound Art | Experimental Music, and a concert together. See full descriptions below. Tsonami Festival has also branched out to include two days of programming in nearby Santiago de Chile, where I will reprise my workshop as a two-day affair.

Konrad and I are staying in Chile for a while after the festival to gather audio visual material on urban infrastructure, post-industrial and industrial landscapes for a couple of projects in the works. We feel there is an interesting  I will also be working on a new commission for U.K.-based Radio Arts on the theme of Dreamlands–my concept involves dreams of flying.

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Workshop: Radio is not at container
2-4. December, 2014  10:00-14:00 Balmaceda Arte Joven Valparaíso;
and 9-10. December 2014 10:00-14:00  Centro Culural de Espana de Santiago
Pull the radio out of the studio, off the tower and out of its black box! Radio is much more than the broadcast of information and entertainment. Radio can be an instrument, a landscape, and a meeting between real and imaginary space. This workshop uses micro-radio transmission, small circuits and radio instruments to explore the huge potential for radio art. Participants will be introduced to and listen to some of the diverse art works made by artists working across the electro-magnetic spectrum, and take part in a series of field exercises and improvisations in order to expand their experience with all aspects of creative radio practice, from laying hands on radio circuits to listening to waves in the city, from making ‘instant’ radio theatre to artistic interventions into the spectrum and the city.  The workshop can include a public presentation or intervention.

Performance with Konrad Korabiewski: Magnetic Meridian
Thursday 4. December 2014, 19:30  Teatro PCdV
Imaginary lines connect magnetic south and north poles. Friz and Korabiewski begin to describe one such line, crooked and meandering, from a point on the far east coast of Iceland moving south and west. The material of one place listens to another, and the particular presence of one space affects another. Magnetic Meridian is an improvised concert reflecting upon the conditions of geographic and communicative remoteness, and the fragility of unstable human signals. Using field recordings, small electronics, radiophonic and acoustic instruments, and electro-magnetic tape, the two artists evoke an audible landscape, actual and imagined; a northern landscape experienced and transformed, through drone, signal, and dictaphone.

Lecture with Konrad Korabiewski: The Feeling of North
Thursday 4. December, 2014  17:00 hrs  Biblioteca PCdV
Friz and Korabiewski are currently curators and practicing members of Skálar | Sound Art | Experimental Music based in Iceland and Berlin. The organization is both an artist collective and a mobile curatorial platform, focused on creating site-specific sonic-based interactions with landscapes, both geographical or built. Skálar is particularly interested to generate and support artistic practices which highlight unstable systems, open spaces to new interpretations and use, and which engage in perceptual feedback and affect between site and subject. The artists will discuss Skálar’s activities in remote landscapes in Iceland, as well as examples of their own work, such as the audio-visual collaboration NS-12 and the radio art intervention Radiotelegraph.