ARCHIVE

This week tune in for radio songs from MU and Lia Kohl, a performance from Jeff Lolar and Anna Friz, and a Rick Prelinger. First, from the 1981 album "Motion in Tune" Dutch experimental/improvisational underground band MU asks you to "Turn Your Radio Off." Then tune in for a performance from April 30, 2023 at The Radio Preservation Task Force of the Library of Congress Conference for "A Century of Broadcasting." The "Useful Radio Part 2" performance by artists Anna Friz and Jeff Kolar in Response to Rick Prelinger’s “The Other Spectrum: Useful Radio” was at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. Taking a deep dive into Rick Prelinger’s radio listening archives as well as their own, Anna Friz and Jeff Kolar compose across shortwave, UHF and VHF bands, from air traffic control to citizen’s band, from encrypted security systems to emergency scanners. Employing live and sampled radio together with electronic instruments, the artists tune in to the ordinariness, the urgencies, and the intimacies of everyday radio communications, exploring the musicality of this transmission ecology. After that, stay tuned for a Q&A with the artists and Rick Prelinger, hosted by Walter Forsberg, Alison Reppert Gerber, and Dave Walker. Finally, the show ends with a track from Chicago-based sound artist Lia Kohl's 2023 album "The Ceiling Reposes," with Kohl's cello and sampled sounds of static on "the moment a zipper."

Anna Friz is a radio, sound and media artist, and media studies scholar. She has exhibited and performed widely across North America and internationally; her radio artworks have been commissioned by national public radio in Canada, Australia, Austria, Finland, Germany, Denmark, and Spain, and heard on public and independent airwaves all over the world. Anna is Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Jeff Kolar is a composer, sound artist, and founder of Radius, an experimental radio broadcast platform established in 2010. His work has been exhibited internationally at The Kitchen, Museum of Arts and Design, CTM Festival for Adventurous Music, and reviewed in The New York Times, The Wire Magazine, Red Bull Music Academy.