Radia Show 1041: "The Voices Are Burning" by Gerarda Evenbeen (Radio Worm)

Gerarda Monster grew up in the hamlet of Mookhoek in a liberal Christian family of 12 children. A dominant, cigar-smoking mother and a father whose fervent nudism did not go down well in the small Mookhoek community, not to mention his tendency to sometimes disguise himself as a woman. Mother had a clothing repair service in Strijen, father worked at the office of Piet Klerkx in Waalwijk. In his spare time he supported refugee work in the Netherlands and was conductor of the choir ‘De Zevende Hemel’ (a project of Humanitas for mildly handicapped children). Gerarda went to study law in Leiden where she met her future husband, Gert Evenbeen at the law firm where she did an internship. Gert played an important role in her decision to hang up her robe and devote herself to creating avant-garde compositions for a very select audience, acting as a kind of manager and generating some interest in her work, despite the fact that Gerarda was self-taught and was driven more by an inner urge than by a desire to show her work to an audience.

After her divorce she barely left her house in the north of Rotterdam, but continued to write & record music until her premature death of malnutrition in 2017.

Gerarda made the mixture of a collage and electronic composition ‘The Voices Are Burning’ not long before she died, it could have been the last big piece she was working on. It was made on her only electronic device, an Arp 2600, recorded and overdubbed on 4 old Uher taperecorders, using all available tapes about voice related subjects that she collected through the years. It has never been released or broadcasted before.

This is part of an ongoing project called SHADOWSIDE OF SOUND, dedicated to works by Rotterdam composers, known and unknown, who have fallen into oblivion. Progressive or conservative. Fairly or unfairly; that will determine history. As you know, there are various points of view regarding whether or not acceptance is there. In general, it can be assumed that the circuit must have the power to handle the work. The other view is a chimera of the one who gives himself a stunning victory before playing time is up.

Composition; Gerarda Evenbeen

Production; Worm Radio/Dr Klangendum in collaboration with Coolhaven

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)
* Radioart106 (Haifa, PS48)

More information at http://radia.fm