Listening's Urgency In times of contact restrictions the radio is all the more an instrument to bridge the isolation. What role does listening play in times of crisis? In his project “Listening’s Urgency” the composer and sound artist Hardi Kurda explores this question, searching for the in-between sounds of the medium and the gaps in the social order: Do we overstep the borders of legality by listening? What does illegality mean? Can illegality make noise? Is noise illegal? For the second performance in the course of the project, Kurda asked musicians, artists and writers from different parts of the world to answer those questions. Their voices and narrations were the basis for a one hour live radio performance with a six-member radio ensemble which came together on Radio Corax on April 26 2020. For radia.fm Kurda made an edited version of the live radio performance. Listening Urgency – live radio performance by Hardi Kurda, with: Andre Damiao, live from São Paulo; Maximilian Glass, live from Leipzig; Kamil Korolczuk, live from Berlin; Hardi Kurda, live from London; Soheil Soheili, live from Teheran; Ralf Wendt, live from Halle; and with the voices of: I-ID from Teheran, Kani Kamil from London, Peshraw Mohammed from Berlin, and Niga Salam from Slemani. Hardi Kurda is currently stipendiary of the Radio Art Residency, an international fellowship program by Radio Corax and the Goethe-Institut.

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