ARCHIVE

Tune in today for "Chorus Duet for Radio" by Kate Donovan (2016) and "Ligature" by Joan Schuman (2009), both introduced by Karen Werner. And also featured is Victoria Shen and Aaron Dilloway's "Inhaled Yowls Machine" (2022). Kate Donovan’s radio art decenters us humans. She has an ongoing interest in elements and natural radio. Also noteworthy is her ideal listening situation for this piece: “It's supposed to be broadcast on microFM...amplified through multiple radios to an audience sitting on the floor in the (near)dark. My dream listener actually is listening at home alone in the dark, right before daybreak...!” Another of Kate Donovan’s recent pieces, Nightcall Radio, also has instructions for listening in the dark, and I have found that it’s worth following this instruction if you can. You can hear Kate Donovan’s radio show elements here: https://www.mixcloud.com/elements_with_kd/ - The second work featured today is "Ligature" by Joan Schuman. American radio artist Joan Schuman produced "Ligature" in 2009. Listening to a number of Joan Schuman’s pieces I’m struck by the sensuality and dreamy surrealism in her work; she combines documentary poetics with radio drama and radio poem. Ligature is loosely based on the lives of Daisy and Violet Hilton, conjoined twins born in the UK in 1911. They were part of the European circus and sideshow circuit in the 1920s and 30s. Setting up the piece, Joan Schuman writes, “They’re retired now. They whisper themselves to sleep while conjuring what death will feel like when it comes to them both...Their single knotted torso extends beyond immediate relationship out to the world.” "Ligature" is part of a pair of pieces called "Catalogue of Mourning." And the last work featured today is an excerpt from a live performance July 23, 2022 at Wave Farm in New York by Victoria Shen and Aaron Dilloway. Inhaled Yowls Machine is the name of a project and novel tape instrument which will be used for composing, recording, and broadcasting during the Wave Farm Residency by the artist duo Victoria Shen and Aaron Dilloway. The instrument will consist of hacked 8-track tape players that will function like a motorized Mellotron. This novel approach to tape manipulation presents the opportunity for multichannel sound collage and a unique sounding instrument. Dilloway/Shen will use recorded samples from the local radio as the chief material for the tape compositions. These compositions will be broadcast over local radio during the course of the residency and culminate in a live performance with a quadraphonic sound configuration. Dilloway co-founded the industrial noise group Wolf Eyes, and is an improviser and performer who works with 1/4" tape loops in 8-track cartridges as well as other obsolete electronic equipment. Victoria Shen is a sound artist, experimental music performer, and instrument-maker based in San Francisco.

Welcome to "The Radio Art Hour," a show where art is not just on the radio, but is the radio. "The Radio Art Hour" draws from the Wave Farm Broadcast Radio Art Archive, an online resource that aims to identify, coalesce, and celebrate historical and contemporary international radio artworks made by artists around the world, created specifically for terrestrial AM/FM broadcast, whether it be via commercial, public, community, or independent transmission. Come on a journey with us as radio artists explore broadcast radio space through poetic resuscitations and playful celebrations/subversions of the complex relationship between senders and receivers in this hour of radio about radio as an art form. "The Radio Art Hour" features introductions from Philip Grant and Tom Roe, and from Wave Farm Radio Art Fellows Karen Werner, Jess Speer, and Andy Stuhl. The Conet Project's recordings of numbers radio stations serve as interstitial sounds. Go to wavefarm.org for more information about "The Radio Art Hour" and Wave Farm's Radio Art Archive.