Radia 0827: The Midnight Drive (Radio Papesse) “Breaking news: a severe snow storm is headed this way. There have been multiple closures on I 76 and if you’re headed that way please be safe…” There’s a snow storm headed your way. From the car speakers, the weather forecast calls for bad weather coming. The driver, whose name we do not know, is returning or heading to or from an undisclosed destination. A night show is aired, it might be a local radio she or he has just tuned in; its show host, while meditatively lingering around big topics like time, nature, human vs nature… acknowledges the driver directly – not to the metaphorical driver out there, the invisible listener – and points out different moments that happen outside of the vehicle for the driver to perceive. During this night drive, the weather begins to pick up and change into a snow storm. With it, strange and anonymous voices are heard in the backdrop, bringing back distant sounds and moments in time that don’t seem to add up... Joe Cimino is an Italian American visual artist, musician and producer living and working between New Jersey (USA), and Florence (Italy). Growing up traveling back and forth from the United States to Italy, he holds on to his dual cultural identity and which remains present in his artistic practice. He holds a BFA in studio art from Rowan University and is currently in the middle of his MFA in studio art at Studio Arts College International, Florence Italy. Besides his visual arts career, Joe works as a producer and electronic musician, with his music located on Soundcloud. He is also the producer and co host of the Podcast, The Uncanny County Museum. In the last five months Joe has been working with Radio Papesse and while The Midnight Drive was produced, a specific aesthetic emerged. The central plot builds up expectations that are never fulfilled: what are we listening to? what’s the story? what’s happening and when is it happening? Joe plays around with the language and the tropes of both radio and podcast and he manages to have never them sound how are expected to do. Something is always off… It is in what Joe calls the peripheries of The Midnight Drive that the story lies. This is an invitation to not only pay attention to what’s in front, but what is also happening in the background. The Midnight Drive is a four part series and this Radia Show includes the first two episodes of it. To listen to the piece in its entirety: www.radiopapesse.org

Each week one member of the Radia Network produce 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: 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