Radia Show 1111: Schisma Gulf, Isogloss & Lament for the Old Clock By Harvey Young (Resonance)

Three works for radio by composer and sound artist Harvey Young. First, Schisma Gulf: “In September 2024, I traced ethnographer Maurice Born’s journey to the island of Spinalonga, a former leper colony in the Gulf of Elounda, Crete. Buoyed by foggy iterations of Saint Panteleimon and mid-50s atrium film nights, I set about sonifying his initial investigations, from his arrival in a blow-up dinghy to the final survey of the admission and disinfection buildings.” Secondly, Isolgoss, a composition for five loudspeakers: “I’d been reading linguist James Burridge’s work on dialectal formation and spread. He applies surface tension dynamics to the interaction between language groupings. I thought it would be tasteful to interpret these mechanics using extended vocal techniques (trills, ululation, phonetically varied vowel shapes) and granular synthesis to capture the kineticism that underpins linguistic evolution. Mixed into spatial audio at Piel View House, Cumbria.” Thirdly, Lament for the Old Clock which tells the story of an 18th-century agricultural worker plunged into the vicious new frontier of industrial capitalism who must leave his simple agrarian existence behind and submit to the callous and dehumanising demands of the factory floor. The piece documents the change in temporality from the feudal notion of cyclical, reverential time to the concept of future-oriented progress that defined the beginning of the industrial revolution. Through extended vocal techniques, found instruments and granulation, Lament for the Old Clock explores this transient yet profound period of temporal and spiritual upheaval.

Harvey composer-in-residence at the Abeceda Institute, Ljubljana (2025), and has presented electroacoustic installations in Europe and North America. His experimental opera and poetry works have been commissioned by Resonance Extra and Whitechapel Gallery, and he writes at presents Pitch-Complex on Radio Worm. He has contributed research to Oscar-nominated producer Jaimie D’Cruz’s Acme Films, and assisted John Akomfrah on the video installation In the Hour of the Dog for the Baltimore Museum of Art.

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Each week one member of the Radia Network produces a show for all the others. 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: 22 partners in 14 countries and growing all the time.

Radia Stations

* Duuu (Paris, FR)

* ∏node (Mulhouse, Paris, FR)

* Diffusion (Sydney, AU)

* JET FM (Nantes, FR)

* Kanal 103 (Skopje, MK)

* Orange 94.0 (Vienna, AT)

* Radio Campus (Brussels, BE)

* Radio Grenouille (Marseille, FR)

* Radio Helsinki (Graz, AT)

* Radio One 91 FM (Dunedin, NZ)

* Radio Panik (Brussels, BE)

* Radio Papesse (Firenze, IT)

* Radio Student (Ljubljana, SI)

* radio x (Frankfurt/Main, DE)

* Rádio Zero (Lisboa, PT)

* RadioWORM (Rotterdam, NL)

* Reboot.fm (Berlin, DE)

* Resonance FM (London, UK)

* Soundart Radio (Dartington, UK)

* TEA FM (Zaragoza, ES)

* Usmaradio (San Marino, SM)

* Wave Farm WGXC 90.7-FM (New York, USA)

Affiliates

* Kunstradio (Vienna, AT)

* Mobile Radio (Ürzig, DE)

* Rádio Zero (Lisboa, PT)

* Radioart106 (Haifa, PS48)

Syndicated By

* Campus Paris (Paris, FR)

* Harrogate Community Radio (North Yorkshire, UK)

* KZradio (Tel Aviv, IL)

* Noise Radio (Zwolle, NL)

* Radio ARA (Luxembourg, LU)

More information at http://radia.fm