Radia Show 1091: Tiny Sounds Around Us by Radio Študent

Silence is never actually silent. Even in a recording studio at a radio station, there is a multitude of quiet sounds, constantly present, unintentionally produced, often unnoticed, which nevertheless make up the basic sonic environment we work out of.

By using the studio itself as an instrument, and its various noisy technological inhabitants as collaborators, this piece brings out the ambient voices which underlie all of the shows, jingles and tracks we produce on a daily basis. Condenser and contact microphones collect the hums of equipment, ticking of clocks, clacking of keyboards, etc, which are then passed through routine processes of effect chains in audio production software, as if they were any human voice or musical instrument.

In turning our attention to these tiny sounds around us, we are acknowledging and exploring the inextricable sonic nature of the studio itself from the audio products we craft within it. As Eno said, “Recording is not the same as reproducing – it’s producing something that couldn’t exist any other way” – sounds are brought into the studio and leave there in another form, with its presence imprinted; the studio has its own life, activity and agency, which co-authors the works made in it. Therefore, we can say that its voices are not necessarily annoying contingencies to be removed; rather, we can see them as intrinsic qualities, fundamental to the objects we produce, like a sonic DNA, or a distinguishing leitmotif, to be worked with rather than against.

Oliver Wagner (2002) is a sound, lighting, and stage technician, programmer and electrical engineer, based in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He works at the community radio station Radio Študent as a member of both the audio technical and IT teams; in addition to routine broadcast and production studio work, he manages infrastructural development projects and performs advanced technical tasks. He regularly provides technical support for lighting, sound and stage at concerts, intermedia art performances, cabaret and theater events in alternative venues. In 2024, he co-authored one transmission of the open radio investigative platform RADAR, as well as one for radia.fm (#997). Additionally, he collaborated creatively and technically in the production of the RAD+ART 15 and 16 events in 2024 and 2025, respectively, at Cirkulacija2, Ljubljana.

Robbie Hopper (1991) is a musician, biologist, audio technician, curator and sound artist who lives in Ljubljana but hails from Scotland. As a sound researcher and collaborator in the performing arts, they have completed artistic residencies at PIF Camp (Slovenia, 2023), Kino Šiška (Slovenia, 2024), the National Center for Dance in Bucharest (CNDB, 2024), the Independent Dance Stage in Talinn (STL, 2024) and the University of Applied Arts Vienna (dieAngewandte, 2025). They are an active member of experimental electronic collective Clockwork Voltage as an artist, of the culturo-artistic association Anarhiv as a workshop facilitator, and of Radio Študent as a broadcast/production technician and co-curator of the open radio investigative platform RADAR.

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