Radia Show # 1081: The Wind of Heaven, by Jim Denley (Radio One 91FM, NZ)

Hidden Valley seems to be far removed from our worlds. There, a musical encounter with Flies, Cicadas, Wombat Poo, and a little Waterfall unfolds. These characters become my Musickin—through the musicking—as the wind of heaven blows through the pipes of every critter.

Later in my studio: A contemplation re-enfolds on the affordances of identity and identitylessness.

The originary recording was made 2020, in the Budawang Mountains, southwest of Nowra, on the east-coast of Australia. This Country is the lead author of this work, and respects are paid to the Yuin people, who have been singing up these Mountains everywhen. My studio is on Gadigal Country.

– Jim Denley, December 2025

Born in the Illawarra, Dharawal Country south of Sydney in 1957, Jim Denley has been active with experimental and improvised musicking since the 1970s.

He has performed in Australia, Europe, Japan and the US with artists such as Chris Abrahams, Clare Cooper, Keith Rowe, Joel Stern, Robbie Avenaim, Jon Rose, John Butcher, Otomo Yoshihide, Fred Frith, Phil Niblock, Trey Spruance, Clayton Thomas, Tess de Quincy, Axel Dörner, Adam Sussman, Ami Yoshida, Oren Ambarchi, Tony Buck, Ikue Mori, Sachiko M, Malcolm Goldstein, Michael Sheridan and Annette Krebs.

He is interested in what his music instinct might learn from language. From 1989 to 2009 he worked with the text/music group Machine for Making Sense, (Amanda Stewart, Stevie Wishart, Rik Rue and Chris Mann). Jim co-formed 180º with Amanda Stewart and Nick Ashwood in 2018 to continue the pursuit of text/music intra-activity. He’s been involved with the radically inclusive Splinter Orchestra since 2001.

He often records around the coves and beaches of Sydney Harbour, where for thousands of years the Dharug people would have played ngaramang (music).

His radio work Collaborations, produced by ABC Radio National won the 1989 Prix Italia for radio production.

Bloomsbury will be publishing his PhD research as the book, Towards ecological musicking: As Weather Improvisation.

Jim Denley

Each week one member of the Radia Network produces a show for all the others. The Radia Network emerged from a series of meetings, clandestine events, late-night club discussions, and a lot of email exchanges between cultural radio producers across Europe. The topics vary and the reasons for forming a network are many, but Radia has become a concrete manifestation of the desire to use radio as an art form. The approaches differ, as do the local contexts; from commissioned radio art works to struggles for frequencies to copyright concerns, all the radios share the goal of an audio space where something different can happen. That different is also a form in the making––radio sounds different in each city, on each frequency. Taking radio as an art form, claiming that space for creative production in the mediascape and cracking apart the notion of radio, is what Radia does.

It is producing radio stuff that is hard to describe. Some of it can be labeled radio art, or experimental radio, or creative radio. Sometimes it talks, sometimes it doesn’t. It can be noisy, or a kind of soundscape, or a documentary, a document, a talk, a performance. Each and every week, one of the partners will provide the network program, commissioned and produced especially for this purpose: being broadcast by all the partners and made available online.

Some things have to be said about all those partners. They are radio stations, of the independent, non-commercial, community, cultural species. They all speak different languages, and this should create interesting problems. Although initially they were all European radio stations this has changed over time, and Radia has become not only larger but also more diverse: 22 partners in 14 countries and growing all the time.

Radia Stations

* Duuu (Paris, FR)
* ∏node (Mulhouse, Paris, FR)
* Diffusion (Sydney, AU)
* JET FM (Nantes, FR)
* Kanal 103 (Skopje, MK)
* Orange 94.0 (Vienna, AT)
* Radio Campus (Brussels, BE)
* Radio Grenouille (Marseille, FR)
* Radio Helsinki (Graz, AT)
* Radio One 91 FM (Dunedin, NZ)
* Radio Panik (Brussels, BE)
* Radio Papesse (Firenze, IT)
* Radio Student (Ljubljana, SI)
* radio x (Frankfurt/Main, DE)
* Rádio Zero (Lisboa, PT)
* RadioWORM (Rotterdam, NL)
* Reboot.fm (Berlin, DE)
* Resonance FM (London, UK)
* Soundart Radio (Dartington, UK)
* TEA FM (Zaragoza, ES)
* Usmaradio (San Marino, SM)
* Wave Farm WGXC 90.7-FM (New York, USA)

Affiliates

* Kunstradio (Vienna, AT)
* Mobile Radio (Ürzig, DE)
* Rádio Zero (Lisboa, PT)
* Radioart106 (Haifa, PS48)

Syndicated By

* Campus Paris (Paris, FR)
* Harrogate Community Radio (North Yorkshire, UK)
* KZradio (Tel Aviv, IL)
* Noise Radio (Zwolle, NL)
* Radio ARA (Luxembourg, LU)

More information at http://radia.fm