ARCHIVE

On this episode of The Radio Art Hour, we'll listen to recent additions to Wave Farm's Radio Art Archive selected by Kamikaze Jones, a 2024 Archive Contributor. The Burdened Land by M.B. Al-Rahim and Community of Grieving by Zosia Hołubowksa and Julia Giertz are part of Kamikaze Jones' ongoing curatorial series entitled Pink Noise. Pink Noise investigates contemporary strategies of queer sonic resistance and counter-archival methodology across transmission arts. Then, we'll hear John Rieger's 1989 work Windows, originally commissioned by New American Radio.

Curatorial Statement by Kamikaze Jones

Radio has a rich legacy of deliberate misuse. From the mobilization of the Black Panther Party via CB Radio, to the subversive dissemination of pirate broadcasts, the insurrectionist potential of the airwaves and their propensity for revolutionary action is well documented. How does a queer affect, one marked by loss, resistance, subterfuge, transformation, and rebellion, map onto these radiophonic spaces? What paradigms of audiological intervention are implicitly queer? What can we learn from exploring the immaterial queer archive: an amorphous collection unsanctioned by the state, transmitted through utterance, gesture, noise, and paralinguistic activity? These additions are part of an ongoing curatorial series entitled Pink Noise, which investigates contemporary strategies of queer sonic resistance and counter-archival methodology across transmission arts.

The Burdened Land by M.B. Al-Rahim

Originally commissioned by Constellations for an episode entitled Feel the Sky, in which M.B. Al-Rahim was prompted to create new work from a 1992 amateur field recording of trumpeter swans on an icy lake, The Burdened Land spins archival sound into a boundless meditation on ecological degradation, temporal disjunction, and how capitalism shapes our concept of the natural world. The forlorn bird calls and footsteps crunching on frozen terrain from the original recording are stretched, smeared, and juxtaposed with industrial noise, invoking a spectral aviary that shimmers with elusive thresholds, binaries, and migratory patterns. Eventually, the echoed whisper of the question “Am I falling?” implies breaking through the barrier of the icy lake. Upon revisiting the piece four years after its initial release, this repeated question speaks to the ambience of dysphoria, transition, and reembodiment that lingers at the outer limits of The Burdened Land. - Described by Wave Farm Radio Archive Contributor 2024, Kamikaze Jones

Community of Grieving by Zosia Hołubowksa and Julia Giertz

Originally commissioned for Unsound 2020 as a collective listening experience, Community of Grieving is a radiophonic ceremony that prioritizes sonic healing, communal catharsis, and mourning as resistance. Released in the midst of stringent COVID-19 lockdowns around the world, Community of Grieving incorporates a series of electronically-augmented vocalizations, drawing from lineages of vesper, lament, and open throat singing, to bemoan the systemic negligence, profound isolation, and massive loss of life that occurred at this stage of the pandemic. Throughout the piece, Hołubowska and Giertz use digital distortion to signify the delirium of illness, while the foundational sounds of the respiratory apparatus are deployed to evoke both meditation and mortality. Equally focused on remediation and confrontation, Community of Grieving presents a queer sonic activism that is rooted in practices of respite, refuge, wrath, and regenesis. - Described by Wave Farm Radio Archive Contributor 2024, Kamikaze Jones