Two soundpieces, multiple languages, one producer.
Chloé Despax is a producer and sonic author able to balance herself in between reality and imagination, documentary and poetry in a multilingual texture that blends voice, electracoustic sounds and soundscaping. Guided by Chloé Despax’s voice we dive into the listening of Ardesia and El Gat opening a window onto her own production process.
Ardesia [2017-2018, 10’41”]
Ardesia is a piece that brings a tactile, poetic and sensorial approach to the mediterranean landscape. The listener is taken into a constant movemente between a mineral space – represented by the Slate stone typical of the Ligura region in Italy – and an encounter with the Genius Loci, talking through the natural elements. The ligurian soundscape blends in with its inhabitants’ voices and the black slate stone becomes a vehicle for social interaction and imagination for the whole Mediterranean area. For months Chloé has travelled with three pieces of ligurian slate stone: one taken from the mountains, one from the beach and one from the sea; she put them in the hands of several people and asked them to give their own personal and tactile reading of the slate. Common thread among these people: they all came from the mediterranean area. Ardesia puts them together in a voyage where sounds and voices from eastern Liguria, entwine with the Mediterranean languages and imaginations. Ardesia is thought in several different forms: as and interactive installation, as a polyphonic piece and as a radio piece.
Production, recordings and editing : Chloé Despax
Piece finalized during Phonurgia Nova 2017 residency at Groupe de Recherches Musicales de l’INA, Paris (FR). Mix : Benoît Bories
The sound installation (2017) has been pruduced by Biennale des Jeunes Créateurs d’Europe et de la Méditerranée (BJCEM).

El Gat [2016, 9’38″]
In the middle of the Rambla del Raval in Barcelona, you will meet El Gat: a monumental bronze sculpture by artist Botero. 
El Gat listens to its surrounding soundscape, the passers-by’s voices, their secrets…and he spills them. El Gat was conceived as a polyphonic installation, here we can listen to its radiophonic version.

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