ARCHIVE

Tune in satellites on "The Radio Art Hour," with works from Heidi Neilson, Annie Gosfield, and Steve Roden. The show begins with a Heidi Neilson recording of a satellite passing over Wave Farm in New York, with an audible approach and exit. Then tune in the 2004 work "Lost Signals and Drifting Satellites" from Annie Gosfield. The track includes satellite sounds, static, machine noise, microtonality, and includes violinst George Kentros. Finally, this episode features Steve Roden's "Transmissions (Voices of Objects and Skies)." The work was created for the exhibition "Transmissions From Space" at the Fresno Metropolitan Museum, inspired by John Glenn’s first transmission from space, as well as Rimbaud’s poem “Vowels” in which each vowel is given a color equivalent. Roden's installation in the exhibit consisted of 102 color coded tin cans hanging in a dark room – one for each vowel in Glenn’s text, with 64 of the cans containing small audio speakers playing an eight-channel soundwork, while other cans contained small four-watt colored lightbulbs. The source material was recordings of satellites by amateur astronomers from the 1960’s through the 1980’s, processed and transformed electronically.