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From the Radio Art Archive: "Resetting The Record" (2020) by Onyeka Igwe and "Dispatches from Radiotopia" (2023) by Adriana Knouf

Jul 19, 2025: 1pm - 2pm
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Produced by Wave Farm Radio.

Onyeka Igwe's Resetting The Record (2020) is a soundscape that opens a radiophonic third space, in which people from pre-colonial West Africa are brought into conversation with people in modern-day London through music, voice and rhythm.

In collaboration with the Art Assassins, a young people’s art forum, "Resetting The Record" samples digitized versions of wax cylinder recordings accessed through the British Library that preserve the spoken word, storytelling, song, and musical instruments of Nigeria and Sierra Leone. Recognizing that it is impossible to divorce colonial images from the regimes of power that created them, the artists use sound to ‘make a space for themselves,’ following the Black diasporic tradition of ‘the sounds, the statics, and the grooves’. They offer a reflection on anthropology as a discipline. Noting and working beyond the limitations of technology, and how it often shapes anthropological research, the artists ask 'What does that mean, of how we draw conclusions of the people we’re not a part of?' For example they note, when wax cylinders were used to capture sound in Australia and the pacific islands, the technology couldn’t register large groups of people or women’s voices, so researchers drew conclusion that large groups of people and women just didn’t sing.

Led by the questions: What would it mean to make anthropology of ourselves? and, If we were doing field recordings of our life today what would we record?, the artists archived their own sound, by sampling and flipping their their everyday lives. The sounds of transportation along commutes, banter, and conversations with elders, offer a sonic snapshot of how a young person from South London and their multigenerational connections might be understood in 100 years time."
- Described by Wave Farm Radio Art Fellow 2023, Iru Ekpunobi

"Dispatches from Radiotopia" (2023) by Adriana Knouf was recorded during a four-day radio summer camp with radio transmission artists on board the MS Stubnitz in the waters of Hamburg in 2022. These four pieces guide shortwave frequencies into a portable modular system for signal transmutation. Understanding or decoding is not the point, but rather these signals act like any other voltage in the system: one to be manipulated, one that can travel through the wires to modulate another parameter. Paired with algorithmic generation of melodies, the piece manifests a merging of generated and captured voltages from around the world.
- Introduced by Wave Farm Radio Art Fellow 2023, Lia Kohl.

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:
  • 13730: What Happened to Radio Austria International? / selestra
  • 13560: Noisy RFID Devices Made Noisier / selestra
  • 14550: Anti​-​Imperialist Dancing to STANAG / selestra
  • 7074: Lullaby in the Key of FT8 / selestra
  • Goin' Nowhere / Of the Atlas
  • Super 8 / Ginger Winn