Radia: Vigìlio Oliveira

Mar 07, 2021: 4:30 am - 5am
WGXC 90.7-FM: Radio for Open Ears

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Standing Wave Radio

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https://audio.wavefarm.org/transmissionarts.mp3

Produced by a different "Radia" station each week.

“The Borderguard's path” was recorded in the Sumava forest between the Czech and German borders on the 2nd of January 2021. I set out to explore the sounds that can be heard inside some of the 1st and 2nd World War bunkers in the area, which are said to total around 2000 in number, most of them forgotten and still to be re-discovered. After an hour walk through a snow covered path I managed to find and crawl into to one of these bunkers. It was a very damped and dark space, where the only source of light was a small shaft window. I had with me a couple of synthesisers (Gakken SX-150 and the DRC running on a tablet) which I placed inside two separate rooms and recorded short improvisations with them, along with some “ghosty” sounds coming from the inside of the bunker's rusty pipes. Two microphones were placed not far from each other in another corner of the space. This audio piece was quite a personal experience in self-isolation and overcoming an unavoidable fear of being alone in a dark unknown space. I will never forget the exhilarating feeling of crawling back out, from the darkness into the light. (Vigìlio Oliveira)

Each week one member of the Radia Network produce 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
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