Radia Show 592: THE JOURNEY OF THE EARTHWORM (RR) by GABI SCHAFFNER for radio x The earthworm travels on radio frequencies, earthy hacks and conglomerates of audio matter. S/he passes through mosquito clouds (yes, this earthworm can fly!), bird songs, thunderstorms, attends a Finnish summer theatre show, listens to a boy and his mother singing, visits the acoustic remnants of a German garden show, finds happiness in the ringing of porcelain bells and, finally, merges into silence and is gone. Voices by: Teuri Haarla, on occasion of his exhibition at Galerie Hilbertraum, January 16, 2016, Berlin, Germany – Unknown but stunningly convincing actors of a “kesäteatteri” in Mid Finland, 2010 – Gibrain and Virpi Nurmi in their garden in Gießen, Germany, 2014. Teuri Haarla is a Finnish self-taught artist who works with drawings, performance and architecture. For his performances he goes into a state he calls “bio drunk”. He also built the “Plantheon” tower, 17 metres high and based on the geometry of nature. During the opening we had a talk in which he explained some of this work and philosophy. Find out more at biodrunk.com Field recordings by raw audio/Gabi Schaffner with snippets and remixes taken from: momoscas1 by galeko, freesound.org – vartioh__loud-transmissions, freesound.org – spectrm__radio-interference, freesound.org – noisecollector__magnetorcradio, freesound.org – singing saw “fake birds” by Mimosa Pale, Berlin, Germany, 2011 – guitar in “Birdcage” and flute improvisation by FX Schroeder, Hamburg, Germany 2011 – kompost20140711_2047.0.25s, programmed by Pit Schultz, 2014. RR = RADIA RAW = This piece is a special pre-edit for radia by raw audio.

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