Radia Show 661: Dirar Kalash from radioart106. Dirar Kalash is a musician and sound artist whose work spans a wide range of musical and sonic practices within a variety of compositional and improvisational contexts. His performative and compositional approaches to instruments, techniques, and aesthetics are highly political as they challenge dichotomies, hierarchies, and binary logics of new/old and west/east as tools of cultural imperialism and hegemony. The methods he uses are based upon his research into the intersections and relationships of music and sound with other contexts such as language, architecture, mathematics, visual arts and further social and human sciences. His regular solo and collaborative performances include but are not limited to audio-visual performances, free jazz groups, string ensembles, solo piano, and live electronics. Silence measured with blood “… I did this piece along one other in 2009, during the assaults on Gaza, not much thought was done during / before I did it, so it’s totally improvised using short samples from different sources, some were sent by friends, some from news broadcasts.. I remember i just plugged in my equipment and started playing, the thoughts i had in my mind were of persistence against the evil and shameful forms of silence: moral silence, ethical silence, impotent silence, corrupt and innjust silence… but at the same time that persistence was also directed inside, as a form of resistance.” “wily dancing with twenty one passing winds” “Holding onto the will // wily dancing with twenty one passing winds” is a no-input-mixer piece, mostly improvised, but with a direction in mind, moving from ambient drone sounds to harsher sounds, not simply as an attempt to structure a certain form, but rather as a focus on content an expression which are essentially poetic, as the starting point for the work was the title as a poetic expression that gravitates close to a human gesture. However, the choice of a no-input mixer setup, as a purely machinic-electronic setup, which essentially contrasts a human gesture with a machinic one, came out of the need of a live and interactive setup that could allow a variety of sounds and noises which could be approached as raw and primal, however commonly heard as “feedback noises”, yet they allow for a particular tension that constitutes a creative framework which is able to merge experiment with experience, due to the unexpected “feedback based” nature of this setup, the choice of such musical and sonic tools also raises questions on the possibilities of sonic and poetic condensation.” https://albayan.bandcamp.com

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: 17 partners in nine countries and growing all the time.

Radia Stations

* CFRC 101.9 FM (Kingston, CA)
* CKUT (Montréal, CA)
* free103point9 WGXC 90.7-FM (New York, USA)
* Kanal 103 (Skopje, MK)
* Orange 94.0 (Vienna, AT)
* Radio Campus (Brussels, BE)
* Radio Corax (Halle, DE)
* Radio Grenouille (Marseille, FR)
* Radio Helsinki (Graz, AT)
* Radio One 91 FM (Dunedin, NZ)
* Radio Panik (Brussels, BE)
* Radio Papesse (Siena, IT)
* radio x (Frankfurt/Main, DE)
* Rádio Zero (Lisboa, PT)
* RadioWORM (Rotterdam, NL)
* Reboot.fm (Berlin, DE)
* Resonance104.4fm (London, UK)
* Soundart Radio (Dartington, UK)
* TEA FM (Zaragoza, ES)
* XL Air (Brussels, BE)

Affiliates

* Kunstradio (Vienna, AT) More information at http://radia.fm