Radia Show 1125: Impro8 by Grand8 (Radio Grenouille)

In 2016, a handful of musicians, an encounter, a sharing around improvisation, a desire and a pleasure to play together. 

Grand8 was born. 

Grand8 came out of a hurry, improvising, together, in a big ensemble, without an orchestra conductor. Grand8 first worked, built his music, crossed his spaces, built his community, initiated his history. 

Grand8 has grown to reach a membership of about fifteen musicians:nts. 

Grand8 carries improvised music, in a large ensemble, without an orchestra conductor. Based in Marseille, the ensemble brings together musicians from the southern region, both national and European. 

Grand8 has been in residence at GMEM-CNCM-Marseille since 2018. 

The ensemble works on annual creations with multidisciplinary guests and explores the intersections of musical improvisation with dance, text, image, and landscape. 

He also positions himself as an actor on the stage in the Southern Region with the organization of the multidisciplinary festival Grand Vertige, as well as music and dance-music sessions. 

Bastien Boni (double bass), Olivier Bost (trombone), Sébastien Bouhana (drum, objects), Laurent Charles (Soprano saxophone), Emmanuel Cremer (cello), Joao Fernandes (digital instruments), Catherine Jauniaux (voice, objects), Soizic Lebrat (cello), Magali Rubio (clarinets), Geneviève Sorin (accordion), Katherine Sowerby (percussion, vibraphone), Nicolé Terrasi (guitar), François Wong (baritone saxophone). 

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Each week one member of the Radia Network produces 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: 22 partners in 14 countries and growing all the time.

Radia Stations

* Duuu (Paris, FR)

* ∏node (Mulhouse, Paris, FR)

* Diffusion (Sydney, AU)

* JET FM (Nantes, FR)

* Kanal 103 (Skopje, MK)

* Orange 94.0 (Vienna, AT)

* Radio Campus (Brussels, BE)

* Radio Grenouille (Marseille, FR)

* Radio Helsinki (Graz, AT)

* 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)

* Usmaradio (San Marino, SM)

* Wave Farm WGXC 90.7-FM (New York, USA)

Affiliates

* Kunstradio (Vienna, AT)

* Mobile Radio (Ürzig, DE)

* Rádio Zero (Lisboa, PT)

* Radioart106 (Haifa, PS48)

Syndicated By

* Campus Paris (Paris, FR)

* Harrogate Community Radio (North Yorkshire, UK)

* KZradio (Tel Aviv, IL)

* Noise Radio (Zwolle, NL)

* Radio ARA (Luxembourg, LU)

More information at http://radia.fm