ARCHIVE

Today's show features a song, The Foremen's "Privateers of the Public Airwaves," plus Lia Kohl's "when glass is there, and water," and "Need to Know" by Lawrence Weiner, and introduced by Tyler Maxin. Chicago-based sound artist Kohl has been playing cello along with the radio on her 2022 release "Untitled Radio (Futile, Fertile), and the 2023 album "The Ceiling Reposes." On this show we sample, "when glass is there, and water." Then the show finishes with "Need to Know" by Lawrence Weiner from 1978, and introduced by Tyler Maxin. In this unconventional radio play staged by Lawrence Weiner, a group of players that include filmmaker Michael H. Shamberg, writer Ann Sargent-Wooster, musician Peter Gordon, and the artist himself weave in and out of overlapping conversations and monologues, which range in tone from turgid party chatter to intimate pillow talk. Occasionally, the dialogue seems to comment on itself: one character describes having watched a movie with “no identifiable characters,” resigning herself to eventually just “identify with the landscape,” and later, two readers have a debate about if all art aspires to the immediacy of music. A narrator (Weiner), whose booming voice cuts through the clamor, posits that the titular “need to know,” a particular orientation towards media and time, was inaugurated with the televised riots at the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention. A sustained, deconstructed riff on Sam Cooke’s “Wonderful World” (1960) floats throughout, performed live by Peter Gordon. Produced as a real-time multitrack broadcast, Weiner arranged and “conducted” these moving parts from the sound booth, live-cueing players and directing a technician to amplify and fade with hand motions. Described by Weiner as a “sound structure,” the piece parallels his noted typographic works that treat language as a sculptural material, using the arc and texture of the broadcast to experiment with the fundamentals of form. Although unique for the artist as a rare foray into radio, Need to Know resonates with his dramatic video works A First Quarter (1973) and Do You Believe in Water? (1976), and later repetitious doo-wop collaborations with Ned Sublette and the Persuasions. The work aired on WBAI-FM on a Sunday afternoon program hosted by James Umland, a sound artist whose weekly show featured interviews with figures such as John Cage and Dave Brubeck, and who participates here as a voice actor. - Introduced by Wave Farm Radio Art Fellow 2022-2023, Tyler Maxin.

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, Andy Stuhll, José Alejandro Rivera, Tyler Maxin, and Iru Ekpunobi. 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.