Radia Show 1057: martiensgohome – “I really should have seen through the airwaves” (Radio Campus Bruxelles)

The inspiration for this piece came from the idea of treating the radiowaves as a living environment, a complex landscape just waiting to be explored. Applying field-recording methods to the shortwave signals of the radio highlights its various sceneries, and its diverse inhabitants. From radio amateurs to state propaganda, and from entertainers to religious freaks, all types of discourses can be found here competing for attention. Surrounding these voices is an equally fascinating ocean of electronic sounds : magnetic storms, carrier waves, interferences, radio-jamming, hum and buzz. The aether is an infinite synthesizer. The natural tones and human-made noises of the airwaves represent an inexhaustible source of sound material and inspiration.

This piece has been composed with the help of the scordinator, a computer program devised by martiensgohome during a residency in the Q-O2 workspace in 2023. The program generates a graphic score for multiple musicians to follow, suggesting dynamics, entry points and pauses for each performer. Designed for live performance as well as for decision making in the studio, it is both a game and a tool. It reconciles conducting and improvisation insofar as it doesn’t tell the musician what to play, or how, but lets him make creative choices within a timeframe.

martiensgohome is a radio-art collective based in Brussels and has been active on the air since 1996. They operate every week on Radio Campus 92.1 FM where they produce a one hour-long improvised show, using field-recordings, electronics, objects and guitar. They also perform live whenever possible, preferably in special settings, composing site-specific interventions or playing unconventional venues. You can find and use the scordinator here: https://sublymediagonal.net/scoredinator/

Each week one member of the Radia Network produces 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: 22 partners in 14 countries and growing all the time.

Radia Stations

* Duuu (Paris, FR)
* ∏node (Mulhouse, Paris, FR)
* Diffusion (Sydney, AU)
* JET FM (Nantes, FR)
* Kanal 103 (Skopje, MK)
* Orange 94.0 (Vienna, AT)
* Radio Campus (Brussels, BE)
* Radio Grenouille (Marseille, FR)
* Radio Helsinki (Graz, AT)
* 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)
* Usmaradio (San Marino, SM)
* Wave Farm WGXC 90.7-FM (New York, USA)

Affiliates

* Kunstradio (Vienna, AT)
* Mobile Radio (Ürzig, DE)
* Radioart106 (Haifa, PS48)

More information at http://radia.fm