WGXC-90.7 FM

From the Radio Art Archive: Maria Chavez on Triangulation (2007)

Dec 15, 2025: 10pm - 11:30 pm
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Produced by Wave Farm Radio.

Avant-garde sound-sculpturist Maria Chavez broadcasts live as a guest-turntablist on June 5, 2007 for Radio Ruido's Triangulation. This weekly show streamed live from free103point9's* online radio studio at 338 Berry Street, Brooklyn, NY. Triangulation, which focused on presenting a live weekly forum for experimental sound cultures, featured solo and collaborative radio projects piloted by artist Tmm Mulligan aka Radio Rudio.

Maria Chavez opens with a series of combination tones that call to ear extraordinary space events. Tuning in is like dialing up the WOW radio signal detected by SETI on 8/15/1977, via Oklahoma’s “Big Ear” Radio Telescope, or like decoding the audio from the Voyager Golden Records sent into space for extraterrestrial viewing by NASA in 1977. Chavez's broadcast is an improvisational buffet of divergent sound including a bluesy excerpt from Jeff Beck’s People Get Ready ballad, a German radio play circa 1918, and a traditional Mexican-American Corrido (or Tragedia). Chavez brings a tender gathering of folk memories to the edges of her legendary turntablist practices, in which instructional audio by a veterinarian/psychologist, unassuming whole notes, expositions on restlessness and sensuousness, No-Wave, 90’s hip-hop, slow disco, and funk tunes are chipped away and broken down in an electronic loop of seeming anthropomorphic textures, moving back and forth along an inter-dimensioning galactic timeline, offering a hearty plate of exponential growth and decay.
- Introduced by Wave Farm Radio Art Fellow Desiree Mwalimu-Banks.

The Wave Farm Broadcast Radio Art Archive is an online resource and broadcast series on Wave Farm’s WGXC 90.7-FM, which is syndicated to stations across the country through The Radio Art Hour. It aims to identify, coalesce, and celebrate historical and contemporary international radio artworks created specifically for terrestrial AM/FM/Shortwave broadcast, whether it be via commercial, public, community, or pirate transmission. The archive is a product of Wave Farm's Radio Artist Fellowship.

Radio artists explore broadcast radio space through a richly polyphonous mix of practices, including poetic resuscitations of conventional radio drama, documentary, interview and news formats; found and field sound compositions reframed by broadcast; performative inhabitations/embodiments of radio’s inherent qualities, such as entropy, anonymity and interference; playful celebrations/subversions of the complex relationship between senders and receivers, and the potential feedback loops between hosts and layers of audience, from in-studio to listeners at home to callers-in; use of radio space to bridge widely dispersed voices (be they living or dead), subjects, environments and communities, or to migrate through them in ways that would not be possible in real time and space; electroacoustic compositions with sounds primarily derived from gathering, generating and remixing radiophonic sources. Note: Wave Farm continues to expand this definition of radio art through engagement with contemporary practices including those revealed by Wave Farm Artists-in-residence, and the Radio Art Fellowship program.

Playlist:
  • Vexations / Tortoise
  • Real Song / Unspecified
  • Veridis Quo (Edit) / Daft Punk
  • Seven Year Ache / Rosanne Cash
  • New Years Prayer, Chalchiuitan / Two Chalchiuitan men praying