Radia Show 996: Three Rules of Discipline and Eight Points for Attention by Hali Palombo (Wave Farm)

“Interval Signals” are short pieces of musical phrasing, a sound effect or recorded speech that shortwave radio stations use to “introduce themselves” when broadcasting. The signals announce the start of a broadcast and create an identifiable touchstone for listeners old as well as those hearing the station for the very first time. Three Rules of Discipline and Eight Points for Attention (named for the title of China radio station’s Voice of the Strait’s highly recognizable interval signal) is a work that restructures interval signals from eight different countries into miniature compositions played on instruments and in styles that are significant departures from their original form. Hali Palombo is a composer, visual artist, and filmmaker from Chicago, Illinois. Born in Northfield, Minnesota, she has had a natural curiosity about the Midwestern United States since a young age. Her work often weaves the absurd and mundane beauty of Illinois into her records, short films, drawings, and paintings. Palombo is an avid practitioner of “plunderphonics”: sampling existing musical/aural works and intertwining them into something brand new, whether its shortwave radio and CB radio samples, wax cylinder audio, or field recordings taken from Midwestern points of interest. She also draws great inspiration from endless adventures around the country—be they on Google maps or in her car—often photographing, filming, or drawing her findings.

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