WGXC-90.7 FM

From the Radio Art Archive: "Qualia" (2016) by Charo Calvo

May 16, 2025: 3pm - 4pm
WGXC 90.7-FM: Radio for Open Ears

90.7-FM in NY's Upper Hudson Valley and wgxc.org/listen everywhere
http://www.wgxc.org/

Produced by Wave Farm Radio.

Qualia is a word that refers to the intangible internal feelings and memories we get from sensory perception. Calvo, who works with sound in an intuitive and skillful way, sound designs the stories of five women, evoking what can’t be said in words. Each of the five women in this piece is, like Calvo, an artist based in Belgium but is originally from somewhere else. Calvo invites each woman to tell a story in her mother tongue. Calvo who is from Spain is the fifth storyteller in the piece. Charo Calvo produced Qualia for the Australian Broadcast Corporation show Soundproof in 2016 and the piece has won numerous awards. Qualia features the voices of Kitty Crowther, Zahava Seebald, Meryam Bayram, Caroline Daish, and Charo Calvo. For an online article about Qualia, see: https://www.uowoajournals.org/rdr/article/id/23/.
- Introduced by Wave Farm Radio Artist Fellow 2019/2020, Karen Werner.

The Wave Farm Broadcast Radio Art Archive is an online resource and broadcast series on Wave Farm’s WGXC 90.7-FM, which is syndicated to stations across the country through The Radio Art Hour. It aims to identify, coalesce, and celebrate historical and contemporary international radio artworks created specifically for terrestrial AM/FM/Shortwave broadcast, whether it be via commercial, public, community, or pirate transmission. The archive is a product of Wave Farm's Radio Artist Fellowship.

Radio artists explore broadcast radio space through a richly polyphonous mix of practices, including poetic resuscitations of conventional radio drama, documentary, interview and news formats; found and field sound compositions reframed by broadcast; performative inhabitations/embodiments of radio’s inherent qualities, such as entropy, anonymity and interference; playful celebrations/subversions of the complex relationship between senders and receivers, and the potential feedback loops between hosts and layers of audience, from in-studio to listeners at home to callers-in; use of radio space to bridge widely dispersed voices (be they living or dead), subjects, environments and communities, or to migrate through them in ways that would not be possible in real time and space; electroacoustic compositions with sounds primarily derived from gathering, generating and remixing radiophonic sources. Note: Wave Farm continues to expand this definition of radio art through engagement with contemporary practices including those revealed by Wave Farm Artists-in-residence, and the Radio Art Fellowship program.

Playlist:
  • Vitis Labrusca / Ben LaMar Gay
  • Peaceful Underwater Ambience, Pt. 3 / Elijah Wagner
  • Swamp Ash / Strange Magic
  • Asteroid Transformation / Abby Travis & Anubian Lights