NRRF presents: Irrational Anthem


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.



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.



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.

 



A few more photos post-Tsonami….


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Radios set up for my performance at the opening at the Tsonami Festival de Arte Sonoro, Valparaiso Chile, November 27, 2012.  The venue was an old prison transformed into a cultural centre; here the steep hills of Valpo are visible in the background. I had simply the most wonderful time at this festival of any event in recent memory–the organization really emphasized the social side of holding a festival in addition to top-notch works being presented. And I love love love Valparaiso! You can’t tell from these photos, but it was glorious summer weather, and that Pacific breeze blowing up the hills every day was nothing short of intoxicating.

This and all following photos credited to Nelson Campos.

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Gone south, with radios


I’ve packed up my radios, and taken them on the road to Valparaiso Chile, for installation and performance at the Tsonami Festival de Arte Sonoro 2012. Many thanks to the whole Tsonami team here, for putting on a really generous event with a great community spirit!

Respire is remounted here as a 3-frequency piece, located in the corridor of the lower access to Ascensor El Peral (there are many ascensors here, which are a kind of outdoor elevator that make it easier to scale the steep hills of Valpo). The radios sway in the Pacific breeze, and chuff and stutter at one another as the fog rolls in to town in the evening. More photos to come soon, but here are a couple from the install, where I had help from an excellent group of installers, including Claudia, Paula (a bit blurry in action in the bottom photo) and head tech for the festival Rodrigo Ríos Zunino:

The piece is open daily November 26 – December 2, 2012, 10h-14h, 16h-22h.

I played the opening night of the festival at the Parque Cultural Valparaiso on Tuesday November 27, 20h. In addition to two stereo pairs of speakers, I also fired up the big transmitter to send to 20 radios suspended over the audience. Two more techie Rodrigos hung them all with the help of a shopping cart…. not pictured is the imperious little black and white feral cat who also followed them around.

Also this week, a new radio piece (50 minutes) unifying some of all the radio and timekeeping projects I’ve been working on for the past two years. It’s called Collecting clocks and losing time, and aired on Monday November 26 at 23h on Radio Valentín Letelier here in Valparaiso on 97.3FM/ 940AM. Here’s a little description:

Once upon a time there was a house on the countryside which housed a hundred clocks. Once upon a time the clocks in every house ran on their own time, and all the trains and hotels and shops had their own time. Once upon a time the time was made universal, divided into zones, and propagated around the globe: it was known as Mean Time. Once upon a time there were microwaves fired at a cesium-12 isotope, and the rate of electron loss dictated the most standardized time of all. Still there were digital devices that did not understand which time zone they lived in. Still everyone was late. Still the clocks began to slowly drag the seconds and minutes and hours behind them. Once upon a time the clocks burned in a fire. Now there are only five that remain.

Finally, I’m joining 3 other artists from the festival to give a short talk on Thursday, November 29, 17h, also at the Parque Cultural Valparaiso; mine perhaps predictably about radio, radio art, and everyday practice.