This week: First, "Mediterraneo," by Anna Raimondo. Introduced by Karen Werner. This piece packs a wallop as a form of witness and all the more so in its spare approach. Anna Raimondo produced "Mediterraneo" in 2014 as both a radio artwork and video installation. Introduced by Wave Farm Radio Artist Fellow Karen Werner. Second, "The Piano Tuning" by Chantal Dumas (2010). Introduced by Karen Werner. "The Piano Tuning" by Quebecois radio artist Chantal Dumas is a sonically delicious experience of and meditation on listening and sound in space. Chantal Dumas produced "The Piano Tuning" for German radio in 2010. The Quebec audio arts centre Avatar has created an online solo exhibition of Chantal Dumas’ radio work, worth checking out at http://avatarquebec.org/en/projects/residency-chantal-dumas/. Introduced by Wave Farm Radio Artist Fellow 2019/2020, Karen Werner. Finally, New Zealand-based radio artist Sally Ann McIntyre created "three variations on a study for a data deficient species (grey ghost transmission)" in 2017. The piece focuses on a New Zealand bird species, the South Island kōkako, which may or may not be extinct, no one knows for sure. The bird species was nicknamed the grey ghost for its hauntingly beautiful, mournful, slow, loud song. The only existing recordings of the kōkako, included in the piece, are fragmentary and elusive--more of an absence than a presence. McIntyre writes, “In these recordings, the bird hovers on the edge of audibility, refusing to be pinned down to monumental extinction narratives, just as it destabilizes...imperial ecology, by remaining outside Western scientific forms of knowing which rely on the verification of empirical evidence. The piece includes a musical score based on written documentation of the kōkako’s song as described in private letters and publications. This score is performed on piano, violin, clavichord and harpsichord. Another notable element of the piece is Maori musician Rob Thorne improvising on traditional instruments. He does a “call-and-response to a field recording I sent him of the ‘data deficient’ bird's endangered cousin, the North Island kōkako, which I made on the bird sanctuary Kapiti Island. My recording remains inaudible in the final piece, making Rob's haunting playing of the traditional instrument a space in which only the ghosts of the missing bird are left to respond.”

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 and Jess Speer. 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.