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The Radio Art Hour: Elvis Costello, Negativland, Iru Ekpunobi, Chris Brookes, Mercury Rev (Audio)

Aug 12, 2023
Produced by Wave Farm Radio Artist Fellows and Artistic Director Tom Roe.

This week tune in radio works from Negativland, Iru Ekpunobi, and Chris Brookes, and radio songs from Elvis Costello and Mercury Rev open and close the show, respectively. Those songs are "High Fidelity" by Costello, and "Continuous Trucks" by Mercury Rev. The show also features Negativland's "The Worst Programming Ever, Mind Jamming, A Report By Rex Everything, etc." Next is Iru Ekpunobi's "Comfort Noise." Writes Ekpunobi, "Comfort noise, or comfort tone, is synthetic background noise used in radio and wireless communications to fill the artificial silence in a transmission in which low volume levels are ignored by the transmitting device. In a system that disregards sound under a designated threshold, the absence of that sound must be reintroduced to ‘comfort’ the listening ear." The show also includes Chris Brookes' "The Moratorium." Chris Brookes is based in Newfoundland and has done a series of memorable radio pieces about the loss of the fishing industry and the impact of this loss on local lives and culture in Newfoundland. The Moratorium refers to a 1992 government decision to put a moratorium on fishing. This ended up putting 30,000 people in the fishing industry out of work and was not a successful policy for helping fish repopulate. Chris Brookes created this radio piece in collaboration with a dancer, and you can hear the rhythm and repetition and three part structure. - Described by Wave Farm Radio Artist Fellow 2019/2020, Karen Werner.