ARCHIVE

This week: Radio art works from Steve Roden and Nicholas Collins. First, "The Radio," a 1996 composition from Roden. The album cover saysm "The piece was created in response to the idea of composing a piece specifically for radio transmission that has as its main sound source the actual sounds of a radio. For this work, I used the following radio transmission sounds: 1.5 seconds of choral music under static; five seconds of shortwave radio static, captured on cassette in Japan in 1994; eight seconds of talking with random fading in and out; eight seconds of talking under static with random fading in and out; and two seconds of birds beneath static. I also used my grandfather's old Toshiba transistor radio to create the following acoustic sounds: bowing the tiny battery cables with a violin bow; clicking the on/off switch; turning the tuning knob back and forth; plucking the battery holder spring; and striking the radio speaker screen against a microphone." Then tune in a work from the New American Radio archive at wavefarm.org. "The Spark Heard 'Round the World" is from 1989 created by Nicolas Collins. The work is a sonic portrait of the world as revealed through electromagnetic phenomena. It is shaped out of the tremendous buzz, hum, and squawk of the international communications systems: commercial FM and AM, short-wave and long-wave transmissions, HAM and CB radio, public service bands, Morse code, telex and other coded signals. A frenzied noisy striving for communication that thickens into an almost tangible morass of sound, then loosens into sound patterns and light textures. The human voice and its messages seem strangely lost in this environment—distorted, barely audible—while the transmission system itself sounds vibrant and amazingly alive. Commissioned by New American Radio.

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 and Jess Speer. 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.