This 27 minute radio version of When We Bow Down Our Heads was created by John Roach specifically for radia.fm. The work celebrates the resonance of wind and its promiscuous and borderless nature by combining 10 years of spatialized field recordings, live intervention of performers Wolf Robert Stratmann (double bass) and Inbal Hever (voice), and fragments of interviews that provide contextual turbulence. Two voices are heard in this edit, the interdisciplinary artist and composer Raven Chacon and the Geophysical Scientist Joonsuk Kang.

A graphic score that places the various field recordings temporally, and guided Strattman and Hever’s performance, can be found here

John Roach is an interdisciplinary artist with a particular interest in sound and multisensory experience who builds environments that blur the line between what we see and what we hear. His work moves fluidly between intermedia installation, radio transmission, performance, object-making, and image-making. It is guided by a playful embrace of uncertainty – something that is often fully activated through collaboration. Many projects focus on themes related to ecological systems, biodiversity, and climate, such as the installation Scorched Honey Archive about the complex interconnections between humans and pollinators that was exhibited at NARS and BioBAT galleries in Brooklyn, NY.

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)
* Rádio Zero (Lisboa, PT)
* Radioart106 (Haifa, PS48)

Syndicated By

* Campus Paris (Paris, FR)
* Harrogate Community Radio (North Yorkshire, UK)
* KZradio (Tel Aviv, IL)
* Noise Radio (Zwolle, NL)
* Radio ARA (Luxembourg, LU)

More information at http://radia.fm