ARCHIVE

Today, mobile radio signals are explored. First, Kaffe Matthews' "Radio Cycle 101.4FM" work is featured. Commissioned by INTERFERENCE:PUBLIC SOUND, Matthews installed a radio transmitter on the roof of Annette Works Studio in Londons East End, where it broadcast continuously from July 13-20, 2003. Bikes outfitted with radios followed mapped routes as scores and performed the pieces by riding while broadcasting the radio station. Community members were invited to workshops to make their own radio programs and help create the map scores for their pieces. Among the first of her radio-related projects, Radio Cycle 101.4 FM explored the dynamic relationship between sound, place, audience, performer, and the members of a community. Then we feature a new work created by Wave Farm artist-in-residence, Kamikaze Jones, interviewed by Wave Farm's Tom Roe. This is the premiere his radio artwork "Over and Out," an experimental radio play that mines the history of"and utilizes"CB radio to sonically investigate the underrepresented legacies of gay cruising culture in the trucker community. CB radio in the United States has historically subversive connotations: primarily as a tool to evade police detection during the 1973 oil crisis, in which a nationally mandated speed limit hindered truck drivers productivity and earnings. CB radios were further implemented as a means of organizing blockades to protest the speed limit and, concurrently, to discreetly facilitate sex work. The implicit risks of chance homosexual encounters on the open road (exposure, arrest, persecution) were significantly reduced by the misuse of these devices. For this piece, in addition to the manipulation of archival and field recordings, Kamikaze will quite literally cruise the airwaves of the Hudson Valley and incorporate the raw recordings of his encounters to explore the innately queer hauntologies and dissident materialities of CB radio. How does CB radio, an arguably outmoded tool that is nevertheless still used today, continue to inform sexual ideologies? Has the lineage of these technologies moved further away from"or closer to"a homosocial syntax? To what extent have these devices permanently sculpted the semiotics of queer consciousness? It is Kamikazes objective to immerse himself in these conceptual inquiries as both an active participant and a sonic medium, to receive and transmit some of the spectral mysteries that exist within these obscured correspondences. Finally, we tune in two tracks from British radio artist Scanner's 2021 album "Earthbound Transmissions."