On this week's episode of The Radio Art Hour, we will hear works by Neo Muyanga, Po B. K. Lomami, and Sherre DeLys.

Neo Muyanga's The thing that happened wades into the Black Atlantic by weaving together community memory and composed/designed sounds to explore the complex cultural resistances central to the African diaspora. The piece is often vague in its chronology, and by creating an “out of time” space, Muyanga reifies the continuing struggles that require everyday resilience. While rooted in South African liberation and post-apartheid contexts, The thing that happened encourages listeners to re-think the grand narratives that frame their own lives. -Introduced by Wave Farm Radio Art Fellow 2024, Austin T. Richey

In The House of Kinshasa, Po B. K. Lomami uses transmission to emphasize the struggle between their roots in the Congo and their lived experience in diaspora. Through discussions with and excerpts from their parents, diasporic Congolese living in Belgium, themes of memory and cultural loss come to the fore in otherwise mundane conversations. In this way, Lomami highlights the everyday violence that is part and parcel of Black Atlantic negotiations; as perceived standards of modernization necessitate cultural hybridization, the result is damage to original practices and the adoption of new norms. -Introduced by Wave Farm Radio Art Fellow 2024, Austin T. Richey

Sherre DeLys produced From Scratch (Fidelity) for The Listening Room, a celebrated radio art program at the Australian Broadcast Corporation. Sherre DeLys’ describes the piece, "[From Scratch (Fidelity) is] a meditation on two archival recordings, Zulu's Ball by King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band in 1923, and a 1948 interview with Helen Keller and her assistant Polly Thompson by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Peter McGregor on the occasion of Keller's 1948 tour of Australia. [The piece] also features a recording from around 1976 of Clara Rockmore playing Tchaikovsky's Valse Sentimentale on the theremin, an instrument played without touch. Tony Baldwin as narrator." From Scratch (Fidelity) is a piece I listen to again and again for its associative structure, its musicality and way it plays with themes of recording and touch. - Described by Wave Farm Radio Artist Fellow 2019/2020, Karen Werner.