Radia Show 1022: "Brushbox Mountain by Richard Kennedy (Diffusion)

At Diffusion, one of our favourite activities is introducing people who’ve never worked with audio before to the wonderful world of sonic arts and composition! This time, we had the pleasure of bringing Richard into the fold.

Richard was planning a trip to the stunning Northern Rivers region of NSW, Australia, so I handed him a ZOOM recorder and encouraged him to give it a go. His reaction? “What do I do with this?” But since he’s got a knack for snapping gorgeous photos on his iPhone, I told him to think of it the same way—just capturing beautiful snaps, but with sound.

When he returned, we sat down, set up Audacity on his laptop, and I guided him through some basic editing and listened to his piece come to life. Now, why not join Richard on his journey? It starts at the Brunswick Heads breakwater, heads up river towards Mullumbimby, then meanders around the High Street and Market at the Showgrounds. From there, we head up Left Bank Road towards Mullumbimby Creek, stop by to visit Barry Reeves at his place, “Brushbox Mountain”, and enjoy drinks on the balcony during a tropical downpour. We wrap up by wandering through the bush and garden, and finally ending our adventure at the beautiful beach of Byron Bay.

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: 17 partners in nine countries and growing all the time.

Radia Stations

* Campus Paris (Paris, FR)
* CFRC 101.9 FM (Kingston, CA)
* CKUT (Montréal, CA)
* JET FM (Nantes, FR)
* Kanal 103 (Skopje, MK)
* Orange 94.0 (Vienna, AT)
* Radio Campus (Brussels, BE)
* Radio Corax (Halle, DE)
* Radio Grenouille (Marseille, FR)
* Radio Helsinki (Graz, AT)
* Radio Nova (Oslo, NO)
* 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)
* Wave Farm WGXC 90.7-FM (New York, USA)
* XL Air (Brussels, BE)

Affiliates

* Kunstradio (Vienna, AT)

More information at http://radia.fm