“I have made a mark, and I do not know whether I am drawing or writing. I am thinking about marks and how they collect on a surface. I have accumulated marks, and I believe that this accumulation is at once a drawing, a text, and an archive.”. –Steffani Jemison

Writes Ekpunobi, "Comfort noise, or comfort tone, is synthetic background noise used in radio and wireless communications to fill the artificial silence in a transmission in which low volume levels are ignored by the transmitting device. In a system that disregards sound under a designated threshold, the absence of that sound must be reintroduced to ‘comfort’ the listening ear.

Drawing on Saidiya Hartman’s process of critical fabulation, comfort noise reintroduces speakers and practitioners of love, freedom, and memory in conversation with one another. In this sonic third space, audio samples originating from 1976 to 2023 not only coexist, but collaborate. "

playlist:
Free, Deniece Williams (1976)
Relation, Anaïs Maviel (2018)
Speaking Freely, bell hooks (2002)
welcome, i are u (2023)
Iru’s Introduction, Bongo Herman (2022)
I Love Myself When I'm Laughing...And Then Again When I'm Looking Mean and Impressive (Zora Neale Hurston Tribute), Imani Uzuri (2016)
DNA Activation, Witch Prophet (2022)
Neptune Frost Q&A: Techno-Spiritual Overtones, Neema Githere + Saul Williams (2022)
Creative Matriarchy, Shantrelle P. Lewis (2022)
Slow tv, Thomas Hellum [Invisibilia Podcast, Season 7 Episode 5] (2021)
Hvnli, KeiyaA (2020)
Theater of the Black Church, Serpentwithfeet [reinventing gospel with complex visions of gay black love] (2018)
Neptune Frost Q&A: Encryption, Saul Williams + Anisia Uzeyman (2022)
How do you preserve freedom?, Anisia Uzeyman (2022)
blessings mantra, iru ekpunobi (2023)
Happy Birthday EmmaB, KillMovesNate (2016)
Othership 23, KMNate + MC Maggley + Aleon + Angel (2023)
Grandma E’s Wishes, Esther Igboko (2019)
Can I Hold The Mic (interlude) + Stay Flo, Solange (2019)
The Phone is a Confessional, Miss Cleo (2022)
Are We African Gods or African American Gods?, Jordan Gallimore + Kristin Dodson [Flatbush Misdemeanors, Season 2 Episode 4] (2022)
Gladys is With Me Right Now, Shantrelle P. Lewis [In Our Mother’s Gardens] (2021)
Grandma E’s Wishes: Remixed, Esther Igboko (2019)
We Wear The Mask / That Survival Apparatus, Maya Angelou (1988)
HAHA, Charlotte Adigéry + Bolis Pupul (2022)

Iru Ekpunobi is Wave Farm's spring 2023 Radio Art Fellow, a deep listener, DJ, and audiofuturist. A recent graduate of New York University, Ekpunobi began their journey in FM radio as an DJ and show host at WNYU 89.1-FM, where they synthesized Black musicology, revolutionary history, and futurist transmission on a weekly, 90-minute broadcast. Culminating in their undergraduate thesis, Ekpunobi launched Third Space Radio, a digital media project and community radio station exploring sonic transmission as a ‘third place’ where community, education, and love can persist.

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