Radia Show 902: Crown Quartet - A Natural Contract live at NaturArchy Resonance IV (Usmaradio)

Crown Quartet: Croatia: Zahra Mani - double bass, bass & electric guitars, field recordings, live electronics Italy: Roberto Paci Dalò - clarinet, bass clarinet, voice, live electronics Hungary: Tibor Szemző - voice, bass flute, flute Austria: Mia Zabelka - electric violin, vocals, live electronics Station Manager and sound engineer: Alessandro Renzi Technical direction at JRC: Denis Novello and Andreas Aschberger We are pleased to announce the new sound art project A Natural Contract by the Crown Quartet. The project is supported by the festival Resonances IV - NaturArchy: Towards a Natural Contract. To know the world is to breathe, to breathe is to savour the world. An interspecies dialogue where you find yourself human, vegetable, animal and mineral, in the name of fusion. A world composed not of objects but of streams that penetrate us and that we penetrate, of waves of varying intensity and in perpetual movement. We can no longer perceive the world as a simple collection of objects or as a universal space containing all things, but as the site of a veritable metaphysical mixture. Towards a “multispecies storytelling” (Donna Haraway). A Natural Contract is created for Resonances IV and it crosses borders through the simultaneity of music and language in a musical exchange between four different European countries. The four countries in the Alps-Adriatic-Region have been barely accessible due to the Corona pandemic. The idea of this live sound art concert at a distance is to invoke notions of memory, a discourse, a call to the most basic elements of humanity and society. A Natural Contract is a new project for the Crown Quartet, conceived and directed by Usmaradio. In addition to the rich instrumentation of the quartet, A Natural Contract has a textual layer embedded in the compositional structure (which leaves room for spontaneous improvised exchange). As with field recordings in music, the linguistic elements are subjected to selection, processing, reproduction and abstraction of text fragments that acquire new significances in connection with the sounds and the music.The multilingualism of the text fragments reflects the diversity of the musical languages and approaches of the four musicians. Hungarian, Italian, various German accents, English and Croatian meet the abstract vocal sound art of Zabelka and Szemző. Thus vocal modes of expression are explored and contrasted in their diversity. There is a musical transformation of semantics, reflecting the absurdity that arises when you repeat a word for a long time, highlighting the transitions between language and sound, from noise to music. These processes in turn reflect the shifting meanings of terms such as borders and freedom in theCorona-shaped cultural-political landscape. All four ensemble members have been working in the field of radio art for many years and have participated in diverse live stream project formats. So far, due to the technical challenges and complexity, these projects have always been implemented in cooperation with public institutions. The radio as an artistic stage or platform is a unique performance and communication space. It is always a special moment to play live on the radio and to come into intimate contact with listeners in their own four walls. In times of physical distancing, the radio in connection with the internet offers a new enhanced platform for communicative exchange. A Natural Contract is about overcoming borders through music and language. A Natural Contract overcomes boundaries that have closed at an astonishing speed due to Covid-19. The long-term social, economic, socio-political implications of the events of the last few months are not yet foreseeable - just as little as we know how the virus and its mutations will affect our futures. In this respect, A Natural Contract is also a memory, a discourse, a reflexion of the most fundamental elements of humanity and society. The four artists have been connected via internet stream from their studios in Austria, Hungary, Italy and Croatia in an acoustic exchange consisting of music, language and sound. The piece revolves around questioning acoustic materials, their manipulation, meaning, application and aesthetics. within Resonances IV - “NaturArchy: Towards a Natural Contract “ A Natural Contract is produced by Resonances IV in collaboration with Usmaradio and Giardini Pensili.

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