On this episode of the Radio Art Hour, we'll listen to radio works focused on landscape, from the desert to the parking lot, from Mexico City to the aether.

All of the works featured on today's broadcast were selected through research into two major radio art initiatives first broadcast on KUNM Albuquerque: Ned Sublette's Radio Performance Project (1977-1979), and Aether Fest (2003), curated by Steve Peters with Alan Lidell and Steven M. Miller.

(espial) by David Dunn was the first of a trio of pieces commissioned by Ned Sublette for the 1979 season of the Radio Performance Project, alongside Jennifer Kotter's Tough Break, a radio documentary on immigrant workers in La Jolla, and Ron Robboy's Sudden Loss of Hearing, which reflected on the composer's performance practice as a concert cellist. (espial) is equally singular: a three-and-a-half hour solo violin performance in 21-tone just intonation, set in the Anza-Borrego desert, then condensed to a half hour recording through the simultaneous playback of 7 cassette recorders. In Dunn's own words, his early environmental pieces from the 1970s represented an expansion of context, moving from interactions with a single member of another species towards interactions with complex environments: "Foremost in these experiments was a concern for sound as a means to explore the emergent intelligence of non-human living systems. My interest was in regarding the complex web of environmental sound-making as evidence of complex-minded systems— a way of experiencing what Gregory Bateson has called 'the integrated fabric of mind that envelops us.'"

Steve Peters was the self-described "instigator" of Aether Fest, and his own work has spanned multiple formats from live improvisation to compositions for dance, theater, and film. His work Santa Fe Parking Lot (1991) is part of a collection of five pieces for radio, Sight Specifics, in which a narrator describes a place they'd like to visit; the narration is then mixed with field recordings from the place in question. Writer Ann Racuya-Robbins improvised her spoken performance.

We'll also listen to two short pieces broadcast on Aether Fest: a layered loop-based field recording piece from Mexico City by Jorge Reyes and producer Lidia Camacho, Zocaloop; and Send by Chantal Dumas, a hybrid radio/broadcast work composed to accompany a documentary on choreographer Gwen Noah.

This episode of The Radio Art Hour was produced by 2025 Radio Art Research Fellow Luna Galassini. Luna Galassini is a musician, artist, and bodyworker based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her performances explore the somatic qualities of sound and the vernacular range of the voice through improvisation with found objects, handmade oscillators and receivers, and traditional instruments exploited for their resonant potential as speaker objects. She is the co-founder of Santa Fe Noise Ordinance, an experimental concert series founded in 2023 that has ranged from small DIY shows to large warehouse installations, wilderness sound walks, collaborative community-led performances, and hybrid audio-visual works.