Joseph Kamaru (who styles his artist name as KMRU) is based in Nairobi and Berlin. In Variations, we hear field recordings from both these cities as well as from St. Petersburg. Voice announcements and mechanical sounds locate us clearly in airports and train stations across the three settings, but as the piece unfolds the sounds grow more rhythmic and less easy to place. “Variations” shares its name with Kamaru’s monthly music radio show and also with an installation work that spatializes this set of field recordings. In the radiophonic iteration of the work, a type of distance unique to broadcasting interacts with Kamaru’s compositional touch to shuttle us through the cities’ atmospheres and through our ideas of transit itself.
- Described by Wave Farm Radio Artist Fellow 2021/2022, Andy Stuhl.

External link to audio: https://kmru.bandcamp.com/track/variations-radiophonic

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.