The Joy Channel, is Anna Friz's and Emmanuel Madan's foray into the radio of the future which the two worked on over the years (2007-2017) through several iterations, this being the third and final. Writes Friz, "This radio art piece was supposed to be about the future a century from now, but at some moments I feel like the present has caught up rather quickly to where we imagined we might end up… or rather, the ‘business as usual’ which results in a transformed New North America seems to be rather imminently taking place. But no matter—the theme is still ultimately one of optimism, as we consider the prospect of tele-empathy versus corporate emo-casting.

Here’s what The Joy Channel is all about: Over a century from now, business as usual has rendered the nation states of Canada, the United States and Mexico extinct. Approximately 40 million people remain in New North America who are mainly concentrated on the west and east coasts in city-states such as Van and Turnpike, or in the walled-in corporate state strongholds of Fortress Alaska and the Protectorate of Utah. Inland, sparse but emergent communities persist. In this future, the radio ecology still includes community radio, CB and ham radio as technologies which have survived the social and environmental cataclysms by being relatively easy to salvage, fix, and modify, and therefore remain useful to improvised new societies that tend towards local systems, nomadism and scavenging. But radio in the future is not only a sonic medium: it also becomes a means of transmitting neural information in the form of standardized human emotions (corporate ’emo-casting’), or for tele-empathic communion without devices practiced by dispersed nomadic communities. We tune across the territories of the future radio to learn of the transforming geopolitics and the emerging EM (empathy modulation) band, from the transmissions of a lone ham radio operator or ‘wavefinder’ to the ongoing conversations of a group of hams radioing across the continent, to corporate shills, pundits, religious figures, the seductive sounds of emocast channels, and among them, something new being felt across the spectrum. This speculative radio art piece explores tensions between the neurological manipulation of emotions and empathic realization, the interaction between the listeners as active or passive subjects, and the renewed struggle over access to the airwaves. The Joy Channel was originally commissioned by Radio Tesla, Berlin for RadioVisionen: 250 Jahre Radio in 2007. This release is a completely new version of the work with a new script, characters, and scenario, and was chosen as a finalist for the Phonurgia Nova Awards in the category of Sound and Radiophonic Art in 2017. released September 4, 2018 Produced: /Undefine, Montréal Recorded : PRIM, Montréal Mastered: Stéphane Claude, Oboro, Montréal Design: Jesse Purcell + Fairypunk + s* Production Assistance: Canada Council for the Arts ORF Kunstradio (Vienna) Wave Farm, Acra NY Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin) PRIM (Montréal) Oboro (Montréal) Voices: Sarita Ahooja, Leslie Baker, Alexis Bhagat, Matt Bua, Brian Dewan, Lorrie Edmonds, Danielle Frank, Anna Friz, Gina Grotelueschen, Justin Grotelueschen, Darsha Hannah Hewitt, Ricardo Lira, Emmanuel Madan, Randy Peters, Tom Roe, Victoria Stanton, Vince Tinguely, Rufo Valencia Special thanks to Galen Joseph-Hunter and Tom Roe (Wave Farm), Stéphane Claude and Claudine Hubert (Oboro), Steve Bates (Hexagram), and tobias c. van Veen (IO SOUND). Thanks to all those involved with earlier incarnations of this work, especially Martina Groß, Andreas Hagelüken, Séamus O’Donell, Moritz von Rappard and Johannes W.

Welcome to "The Radio Art Hour," a show where art is not just on the radio, but is the radio. "The Radio Art Hour" draws from the Wave Farm Broadcast Radio Art Archive, an online resource that aims to identify, coalesce, and celebrate historical and contemporary international radio artworks made by artists around the world, created specifically for terrestrial AM/FM broadcast, whether it be via commercial, public, community, or independent transmission. Come on a journey with us as radio artists explore broadcast radio space through poetic resuscitations and playful celebrations/subversions of the complex relationship between senders and receivers in this hour of radio about radio as an art form. "The Radio Art Hour" features introductions from Philip Grant and Tom Roe, and from Wave Farm Radio Art Fellows Karen Werner, Jess Speer, and Andy Stuhl. The Conet Project's recordings of numbers radio stations serve as interstitial sounds. Go to wavefarm.org for more information about "The Radio Art Hour" and Wave Farm's Radio Art Archive.