Show 984: A los cuatro vientos by Félix Blume (Guestslot, Radio Campus Paris)

“Nature is an aeolian harp, a musical instrument whose tones are the re-echo of higher strings within us.” – Novalis

In ancient civilizations, the god of wind (Eole, Aiolos, Aeolus) has an important place. He manifests himself through aeolian harps built for him. In his piece “A los cuatro vientos”, French sound artist and sound engineer Félix Blume presents wind sounds being played in four different places of America, recorded between 2011 and 2014. In one case only it is an aeolian harp (Chile), built with the purpose of interacting with the wind. In other cases, there are power posts of low and high voltage (California, Chile, Mexico) or posts of an old ski lift (Bolivia). The electrical wires are the ropes; posts and steel structures are the resonant body; tubes are the organ… Are these modern buildings the aeolian harps of our times?

For Radia, Félix Blume remixes the recordings used for “A los cuatro vientos” in order to present a new, continuous 28-minute sound work under the same name.

As R. Murray Schafer comments in “The Soundscape”, the installation of electricity in the houses at the beginning of the nineteenth century changed the rural soundscape with the high voltage power lines. Dr Philip Dickinson from the “Research Institute of Sound and Vibrations” mentions the case of a woman who attempted suicide because she continually heard a sound inaudible to others. After several tests, they discovered that some power lines resonated and produced sound between 30 and 40 Hertz. This same sound has been recorded in other places, depending on temperature, humidity and wind.

Félix Blume is a sound artist and sound engineer. He currently works and lives between Mexico, Brazil and France. He uses sound as a basic material in sound pieces, videos, actions and installations. His process is often collaborative, working with communities and using public space as the context within which he explores and presents his works. His practice involves an extended understanding of listening, as a way to encourage the awareness of the imperceptible and as an act of encounter with others. His work incorporates the sounds of different beings and species, from the buzzing of a bee, the steps of a turtle or the chirp of a cricket, as well as human dialogues both with natural and urban contexts. He is interested in myths and their contemporary interpretation, in what voices can tell beyond words.

Each week one member of the Radia Network produce a show for all the others. The Radia Network emerged from a series of meetings, clandestine events, late-night club discussions and a lot of email exchanges between cultural radio producers across Europe. The topics vary and the reasons for forming a network are many, but Radia has become a concrete manifestation of the desire to use radio as an art form. The approaches differ, as do the local contexts; from commissioned radio art works to struggles for frequencies to copyright concerns, all the radios share the goal of an audio space where something different can happen. That different is also a form in the making – radio sounds different in each city, on each frequency. Taking radio as an art form, claiming that space for creative production in the mediascape and cracking apart the notion of radio is what Radia does.

It is producing radio stuff that is hard to describe. Some of it can be labeled radio art, or experimental radio, or creative radio. Sometimes it talks, sometimes it doesn’t. It can be noisy, or a kind of soundscape, or a documentary, a document, a talk, a performance. Each and every week, one of the partners will provide the network program, commissioned and produced especially for this purpose: being broadcast by all the partners and made available online.

Some things have to be said about all those partners. They are radio stations, of the independent, non-commercial, community, cultural species. They all speak different languages, and this should create interesting problems. Although initially they were all European radio stations this has changed over time and Radia has become not only larger but also more diverse: 17 partners in nine countries and growing all the time.

Radia Stations

* Campus Paris (Paris, FR)
* CFRC 101.9 FM (Kingston, CA)
* CKUT (Montréal, CA)
* JET FM (Nantes, FR)
* Kanal 103 (Skopje, MK)
* Orange 94.0 (Vienna, AT)
* Radio Campus (Brussels, BE)
* Radio Corax (Halle, DE)
* Radio Grenouille (Marseille, FR)
* Radio Helsinki (Graz, AT)
* Radio Nova (Oslo, NO)
* Radio One 91 FM (Dunedin, NZ)
* Radio Panik (Brussels, BE)
* Radio Papesse (Firenze, IT)
* Radio Student (Ljubljana, SI)
* radio x (Frankfurt/Main, DE)
* Rádio Zero (Lisboa, PT)
* RadioWORM (Rotterdam, NL)
* Reboot.fm (Berlin, DE)
* Resonance FM (London, UK)
* Soundart Radio (Dartington, UK)
* TEA FM (Zaragoza, ES)
* Wave Farm WGXC 90.7-FM (New York, USA)
* XL Air (Brussels, BE)

Affiliates

* Kunstradio (Vienna, AT)

More information at http://radia.fm