WGXC-90.7 FM

From the Radio Art Archive: "Blue Black Abyss" (2021) by Blu Bone

Feb 01, 2025: 4pm - 5pm
WGXC 90.7-FM: Radio for Open Ears

90.7-FM in NY's Upper Hudson Valley and wgxc.org/listen everywhere
http://www.wgxc.org/

Produced by Wave Farm Radio.

"Blue Black Abyss" (2021) by Blu Bone is an auditory excavation of the Blues, and a chronicling of its spiral into the abyss of the past, present, and future of Black sound and cultural production. Artist, curator, and Mississippi River indigen Blu Bone, hosts and MCs this hour-long radio program in which he threads sounds across and through the Black Atlantic, highlighting the use of melismatic technique from the call to prayer to Southern American Blues, Black Gospel soloists, the Kora string music of Toumani Diabate, to the Black American fiddle. These connective tissues grow and blossom throughout the piece as Blu offers an education in generations of Black sonic tradition and each styles' compounding influence on the other.
- Introduced by Wave Farm Radio Art Fellow 2023, Iru Ekpunobi

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:
  • Beginning / The Durutti Column
  • Adhan (Opening Call To Prayer) / Elijah The Messenger
  • Murder's Home / Alan Lomax
  • A Mighty Fortess feat. I Tried Him / Twinkie Clark
  • Bi Lambam / Toumani Diabaté
  • Preaching Blues / Robert Johnson
  • Good Intentions / Meshell Ndegeocello
  • Just Can't Let Go / Sir Charles Jones
  • Necessary / Brandy
  • If I Back It Up / Nellie Tiger Travis
  • Sunshine / Luster Baker
  • God Centipede / 42
  • I'm Feeling Love / Raphael Saadiq
  • Metronomy Late Night Tales Continuous Mix / Late Night Tales
  • Lucid Dreams / Brandy