WGXC-90.7 FM

From the Radio Art Archive: "Antipodes" (2019) by Frédéric Acquaviva

Jun 13, 2025: 2pm - 3pm
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.

Awarded the Karl Sczuka Prize in 2020, "Antipodes" is a three-act radio opera for voice, “dead electronics” (in contrast to live improvisation) and video, composed by French artist, composer, and scholar Frédéric Acquaviva based on a text written by poet Joël Hubaut. Partially composed during a residency at EMS in Stockholm, the opera moves through three acts, “Hell,” “Purgatory,” and “Paradise.” Beginning with what sounds like a slightly disjointed interview, the piece quickly becomes a swirling sonic stew of trilling vocalizations, electronics, and spoken words--often a single word repeated, sometimes even just a single sound or syllable. The composer recommends that the piece is listened to through high quality sound equipment to pick up some of the subtleties of the composition. Vocal performers include Joël Hubaut, Dorothy Iannone, and Loré Lixenberg. Sourced from and inspired by poetry and drawings, the piece explores the mutations and evolution of music as art, and in addition to being broadcast for radio, it has been released as an album digitally (though the purchase does include an empty LP sleeve), a video, and a work on canvas.
- Introduced Wave Farm Radio Artist Fellow 2020/2021, Jess Speer.

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:
  • Toa Moja / El Androide
  • Broken Fingers (Bleed Mix) / KAVARI
  • Geekcore / Xanax