Show 1045: Breathing Rotations in the Imaginary Radio Station by Stephen Adams with the Music Box Project (Diffusion)

Four musicians of The Music Box Project deliver synchronised breath-length phrases to microphones, their presence doubled by the simultaneous lo-fi local broadcast diffusion of their music through the domestic radios they carry. The radios also diffusing field recordings played to air by a fifth performer, composer-producer Stephen Adams, operating the mixing desk of the Imaginary Radio Station. The installation looping in on itself when the musicians shift to using their radios to play the microphone feedback. All five artists interacting within a shared space of improvised sound-making and intense listening.

Breathing Rotations is a framework for improvising within the Imaginary Radio Station – a networked instrument-cum-sound-installation.

The installation enables a kind of live radio-making and hyper local broadcast to the performance venue and its immediate surroundings, with the performers both creating content for the station, and operating its lo-fi sound diffusion for the audience.

Breathing Rotations takes a mediative approach to the potentials of the Imaginary Radio Station. Four musicians are invited to improvise synchronised breath-length phrases to the four microphones at four corners of the room. With long pauses between phrases as the musicians move from one microphone to the next. Their sound-making and their movements are framed and potentially influenced by a fifth performer, the broadcast controller, who sits at a small mixing desk with FM transmitter, looking after the live mix as well as adding low-key field recordings and other audio files to the ‘program’ of live music-making broadcasting to the four radios which the musicians carry.

Over the course of the performance (which might last anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours), as well as rotating around the room in one direction or another (and occasionally choosing to remain at one mic for a while), the musicians gradually shift, one at a time, from playing their chosen musical instruments to playing microphone feedback with their radios, and finally to using their voices. The musicians cannot know what each other will play in each synchronised phrase. They know only what each played previously, and what they know of each other’s musical approaches and inclinations. Plus whatever may be suggested by their ways of moving between microphones, and the atmospheres created by the field recordings and that share the broadcast and acoustic space with them.

I created the Imaginary Radio Station (IRS) for Sydney-based collective The Music Box Project (TMBP), with the intention of composing a concert length work for TMBP, envisaged as built around an imaginary broadcast schedule, with opportunities to respond and incorporate material from the environments and audience members at each venue where it is installed/performed. While that concept is still in development, in March 2025 during a Bundanon artist residency with TMBP and dramaturg Nikki Heywood, an improvisation exercise I introduced proved to be particularly generative and exciting for all of us, emerging through further exploration and dialogue as a fully-formed model for a more abstract structured improvisational work, Breathing Rotations.

This program is a 28-minute radio edit and mix of a 50-minute workshop performance of that work by The Music Box Project and me, Stephen Adams, in the Dorothy Porter Studio at Bundanon to an audience of one – our collaborating dramaturg Nikki Heywood.

The opening field recording is of the sounds of dawn at Bundanon, as recorded on the verandah of the cottage next door to the studio at first waking on the morning of the performance. The final ‘field recording’ is the sounds from outside through the open studio door.

Performed by Elizabeth Jigalin (recorder, radio, voice), Naomi Johnson (flute, radio, voice), Jane Aubourg (violin, radio, voice), Joseph Lisk (trumpet, radio, voice), and Stephen Adams (live mix, field recordings and other pre-recorded material)

Concept developed by Stephen Adams for and in in dialogue with The Music Box Project and collaborating dramaturg Nikki Heywood. Produced by Stephen Adams

https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephen-adams-1777025b/
https://www.themusicboxproject.com/

Each week one member of the Radia Network produces 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: 22 partners in 14 countries and growing all the time.

Radia Stations

* Duuu (Paris, FR)
* ∏node (Mulhouse, Paris, FR)
* Diffusion (Sydney, AU)
* JET FM (Nantes, FR)
* Kanal 103 (Skopje, MK)
* Orange 94.0 (Vienna, AT)
* Radio Campus (Brussels, BE)
* Radio Grenouille (Marseille, FR)
* Radio Helsinki (Graz, AT)
* 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)
* Usmaradio (San Marino, SM)
* Wave Farm WGXC 90.7-FM (New York, USA)

Affiliates

* Kunstradio (Vienna, AT)
* Mobile Radio (Ürzig, DE)
* Radioart106 (Haifa, PS48)

More information at http://radia.fm