WGXC-90.7 FM


From the Radio Art Archive: "From My Window: Dreams, Hopes and Disappointments" (2020) by Rena Anakwe and "Mourning Good" (2020) by Black Siren Radio
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Produced by Wave Farm Radio.
Rena Anakwe aka DJ Lady Lane's From My Window: Dreams, Hopes and Disappointments aired as part the 2020 Radiophrenia program, a temporary art radio station broadcasting live from Glasgow's Center for Contemporary Arts, on 87.9-FM. Rena Anakwe’s luminous sound creation is an assemblage of field recordings taken during the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic vis-a-vis the windowsills of the artists home, and various New York City locales. A phonographic cocoon leads listeners through urban groves where sound ebbs and flows through myriad channels. Footsteps in motion, birds chattering, a door opening, steady rain, and a New Orleans-style birthday serenade, give way to dreamy ambient synth and gentle transfers of harmonic vocals. Tapering off through cavernous tunnels of wailing sirens, we find ourselves again in the procession of a gospel brass medley, a series of chord modulations, and the sound of the artist’s own dystopian voice. Anakwe leaves us to our own mirrors as she reflects on the inevitability of time and loss, resilience and false currencies, and the possibility of breath, and imagination within a collective annihilation.
- Introduced by Wave Farm Radio Art Fellow Desiree Mwalimu-Banks.
“Mourning Good” is the work of Black Siren Radio, which is one outlet for the We Be Imagining initiative. We Be Imagining combines academic research and the performance arts to propel “critical conversations around race, gender, class, and disability.” “Mourning Good” exemplifies this approach by collaging music and archival audio including academic work. A keystone source for the remix is a 2017 talk by sociologist Ruha Benjamin, but we also hear Pauline Rogers, Joshua Bennett, Mamie Till, Kendrick Lamar, Geto Boys, 2Pac, and others. The producers of Black Siren Radio, which airs on Columbia University station WKCR-FM, intend for the piece to advance an artistic practice of remixing and re-amplifying Black scholarship.
- Introduced by Wave Farm Radio Artist Fellow 2021/2022, Andy Stuhl.
The Wave Farm Broadcast Radio Art Archive is an online resource and broadcast series on Wave Farm’s WGXC 90.7-FM, which is syndicated to stations across the country through The Radio Art Hour. It aims to identify, coalesce, and celebrate historical and contemporary international radio artworks created specifically for terrestrial AM/FM/Shortwave broadcast, whether it be via commercial, public, community, or pirate transmission. The archive is a product of Wave Farm's Radio Artist Fellowship.
Radio artists explore broadcast radio space through a richly polyphonous mix of practices, including poetic resuscitations of conventional radio drama, documentary, interview and news formats; found and field sound compositions reframed by broadcast; performative inhabitations/embodiments of radio’s inherent qualities, such as entropy, anonymity and interference; playful celebrations/subversions of the complex relationship between senders and receivers, and the potential feedback loops between hosts and layers of audience, from in-studio to listeners at home to callers-in; use of radio space to bridge widely dispersed voices (be they living or dead), subjects, environments and communities, or to migrate through them in ways that would not be possible in real time and space; electroacoustic compositions with sounds primarily derived from gathering, generating and remixing radiophonic sources. Note: Wave Farm continues to expand this definition of radio art through engagement with contemporary practices including those revealed by Wave Farm Artists-in-residence, and the Radio Art Fellowship program.
Playlist:
- Vitis Labrusca / Ben LaMar Gay
- BLUE (feat. JaySpizzyy) / IssueHigh
- i / Kendrick Lamar
- WORK HARDER (feat. Ricky Ruckus) / Glueazy
- Mind Playing Tricks on Me / Geto Boys
- Black is Beautiful (feat. Rich Notch & Yohimbe Sampson) / Tall Genius
- Nós Por nós / Nova Era
- Feelin' Good / Cleen
- Call Away / Gracie and Rachel
- Small Time / LUAH