Tune in for a special broadcast featuring "Trans-Temporal Echoes" (2021) by AWU Radio.

"Trans-Temporal Echoes" (2021) by AWU Radio
In her guidebook, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, queer black feminist love evangelist and self described marine mammal apprentice Alexis pauline gumbs asks: "How can we listen across species, across extinction, across harm? How does echolocation, the practice many marine mammals use to navigate the world through bouncing sounds, change our understandings of 'vision' and visionary action? Is social media already a technology of bounce, of throwing something out there and seeing what comes back?"

Created by AWU Radio, a feminist radio station based in Senegal, Trans-Temporal Echoes is a technology of bounce, in the words of Alexis Pauline Gumbs. It is an ensemble of voices, a deep, dear dialogue between women and whales echoing each other. Telling stories of the deep, deep tones, deep time, deep entanglements, and deep trans-generational transmission.

This piece is a soundscape built upon an oceanscape. With seawater, bubbles, and underwater frequencies woven throughout the piece, the general order of appearances is as follows:

1. Whalesong blends into
2. a composition by multi instrumentalist Sona Jobarteh, played on the kora—the 21 string West African instrument.
3. Curator Fatou Kine Diouf references Parlons Grandmère (Let's talk Grandmother) or, Lets Talk Grandmother, by the late poet, director, and orator Djibril Diop Mambéty,
4. echoed by artist Binta Diaw and her mother, Adam Diongue as they chant the mourning of Bay Dembaa Waar
5. and artist Fatou Kiné Ndiaye as she invokes her mother.
6. Griotte Binel Mboum sings Yela, the rhythmic music of women that resonates with the beat of pounding grain, traditionally used to call people for historical events.
7. the oceanscape continues to flow with artist Imann Gaye and Akinbode Akinbiyi’s conversation
8. into the voice of ‘slammer’ Black Yaye Fall as she names genealogies in both Wolof and English
9. Soul singer Aminata Fall laughing in the 1973 film Touki Bouki
10. Mamy Victory rapping of self determination
11. Chiara Figone tracing time and asking questions of water and memory (collapsing the past, present, and future, in linear time. The presence of the dead remains in the oceans, in the whales, in our bodies. The ocean whispers our secrets. tears in time. tear time apart.)
12. Griot Yandé Codou Sène leading a Serer ritual."

- Introduced by Wave Farm Radio Art Fellow 2023, Iru Ekpunobi

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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.