WGXC-90.7 FM

From the Radio Art Archive: "Radio Play" (2023) by Elizabeth Flood, "Happy Birthday, Darling" (2014) by Dmitriy Nikolaev, and "Free Radio Linux" (2002) by r a d i o q u a l i a

Jan 16, 2026: 3pm - 3:45 pm
WGXC 90.7-FM: Radio for Open Ears

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Produced by Wave Farm Radio.

"Radio Play" (2023) by Elizabeth Flood
Writes Flood, "'Radio Play' is an improvised recording of me tuning between three shortwave radios in my bedroom. The title Radio Play is meant to have the double meaning of the piece being a result of me playing with radios, as well as nodding towards the idea that radio not only crosses space, but is a space in and of itself - a stage. "Radio Play" is meant to be a theatrical demonstration of radio as space, beginning with me in my bedroom and the listener in their space, as the edges my room fall away and into the radio, I am curious about the moment where we both meet in this third space, inside the radio."
- Introduced by Wave Farm Radio Art Fellow 2023, Lia Kohl.

"Happy Birthday, Darling" (2014) by Dmitriy Nikolaev
In "Happy Birthday, Darling" Russian radio artist Dmitry Nikolaev took on the challenge of creating a radio drama entirely through sounds, not using single word. He describes the piece with his Russian sense of humor: “People very easily break human relations, connections and start to kill others who do not follow their rules. It's a story about how love turns into hatred that destroys everything and kills everybody.”
- Introduced by Wave Farm Radio Artist Fellow 2019/2020, Karen Werner.

"Free Radio Linux" (2002) by r a d i o q u a l i a
Commissioned by the Walker Art Center in 2002, r a d i o q u a l i a's "Free Radio Linux" entailed a text-to-speech program reading the entirety of the central code base for Linux, the popular open source operation system. The computer voice was aired over FM radio and through streaming audio online, with participating FM, AM, and shortwave stations relaying parts of the broadcast in other parts of the world. Calling the work an "audio distribution of the Linux Kernel," r a d i o q u a l i a implied that a receiver could copy down the spoken source code and thus obtain the software. While implausible across the 593.89 days that it took for the program to read through all 4,141,432 lines of source code, this idea signaled the group's simultaneous investments in broadcasting and in free and hackable software – specifically that software might become available through transmission in order to facilitate further artistic transmission. As an experiment in treating code as broadcast content, "Free Radio Linux" served up surprising moments when the long, breathless strings of computer-interpretable characters would give way to full English sentences: annotations that the Linux developers had left to explain their work. (Reference: (Reference: http://gallery9.walkerart.org/radioqualia)
- Introduced by Wave Farm Radio Artist Fellow 2021/2022, Andy Stuhl.

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.