Radia Show 1018: "Worm Tracks" by Richard Scott (Radio Worm)

The first electronic music I ever played as a teenager was on a Hammond organ. The drum machine and rhythm generators in particular fascinated me; simplistic devices but somehow very creative, and something in the sound was strangely compelling. I heard Lee Scratch Perry, Sly and the Family Stone, Cabaret Voltaire and Suicide do some remarkably enduring music with such drum boxes, which of course later went on to become a basic element of electronic dance music in general. With this piece I revisit some of these dusty old machines and also some of the other vintage instruments in the studio at Worm, plus my modular synthesiser and sampler, instruments from Rob Hordijk and some occasional blasts of modulated radio.

Richard Scott is a Berlin-based creator and performer of forward-leaning electronic and electroacoustic music. Once a saxophonist focused on free jazz and group improvisation, for the past two decades he has been working intensely with a variety of technologies, methods and musical forms. In recent years he has concentrated his energies on creative composition, improvisation and production, with a particular emphasis on analogue modular synthesisers; including those remarkable instruments created by Don Buchla, EMS, Serge Tcherepnin, Émilie Gillet and Rob Hordijk.

https://www.richard-scott.net/

Recorded and composed in the Worm/Klangendum Studio, Rotterdam, July 2024, a Worm/Klangendum/Concertzender production.

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: 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