Radia Show 920: Co-regulating the spectrum: Meanwhile, the wave by José Alejandro Rivera (proxemia) for Wave Farm

I have undone the sob of the lost echoes…
I have the deep infinite playing in my hands


Become the caress. I don’t want you to limit
your eyes in my body. My road is space.
To travel me is to flee from all paths…
I am the dancing imbalance of the stars.


excerpts from a Julia de Burgos poem entitled, Mi senda es el espacio / My Road is Space

Writes Rivera,“Co-regulating the spectrum: Meanwhile, the wave is a radiophonic river of shifting reflections across neurodivergence and consciousness studies, radio and radar via the electromagnetic spectrum, language and communication, ufology and ET lore, and diasporic musings regarding the political and cultural history of Puerto Rico. Through a dense assemblage of sound design and field recordings, and cut-up bilingual samples from poetry, personal reflections, interviews and archival documentaries, the electromagnetic landscape becomes an imagined extrasensorial, polymorphic, carrier of consciousness; a pulsating presence that is inhabited, and that inhabits, in a myriad of Other ways.

What do you mean when you say “spectrum”? What of “being on another wave-length,” or “the same frequency”? Like tuning a radio, bats from a cave, or flying saucers from the deep waters beneath the island, possible meanings emerge via aqueous transmissions and various slippages of language and meaning. Moving between English and Spanish, the piece utilizes common tropes such as contacts with extra-terrestrials, and autistics and other neurodivergent minorities as aliens with the felt experience of being an other and being othered. At the same time, the piece references a 1901 US Supreme Court ruling (Downes vs. Bidwell) that, in response to categorizing shipments for tax purposes, determined that Puerto Rico and the “new” island territories like Guam and the Virgin Islands were “inhabited by alien races” and “foreign, in a domestic sense.”

In addition, the work is equally inspired by the radical Neuroqueer Theory of Dr. Nick Walker (she/her), an autistic trans scholar and writer, the diasporic longings of Puerto Rican poet, Julia De Burgos, Ida M. Kanneberg’s book, UFOs and the Psychic Factor, and the science fiction of Octavia Butler.

What does is it mean to experience communication differences, sensory sensitivities, or other ways of being? How might these communication differences serve as opportunities to experience time and space differently and/or connect in other ways? How can a bodymind listen to, regulate, and communicate with itself, others, and the environment? Do bodyminds receive and transmit signals to and from beyond the local, and like radio and radar, can the diasporic experience be related?

At times, the listener’s attention is signaled outwardly towards the stars through ominous drones and radio feedback. Simultaneously, a notion of embodiment and grounding is alluded to with the samples of yoga nidra and tai chi explanations, and sounds of shelling habichuelas (Puerto Rican beans) recently grown in Vermont. Woven throughout the piece are field recordings captured while camping across the island in the July of 2022. Serving as textural markers and place-holders of memory, the recordings feature bomba performances, conversations, city ambience during an apagón (black out), and street protests, as well as various environments such as farms, forests, beaches, and caves.

Though a spectrum is defined as “a condition that is not limited to a specific set of values but can vary, without gaps, across a continuum,” the piece ultimately lies in the curious space between the gaps of the spectrum; among the edits, along the time shifts and losses, and across the possible waves and feeling frequencies of meaning and energy."

Special thanks to: Wave Farm (Galen Joseph-Hunter and Tom Roe), Gregory Whitehead, Anna Friz, Joan Schuman, Neil Verma; Dr. Mel Houser, Sierra Miller, and the Neurodivergent Community of All Brains Belong VT; Vermont Art Council; and PR, the land and its people across the island and diaspora.

José Alejandro Rivera is a 2022 Wave Farm Radio Art Fellow. Rivera (he/they) is a Puerto Rican, Ohio-born artist, composer, designer, and researcher currently based in SW Vermont. Their layered, place-based practice is informed by a background in music, architecture, and tending land. Working through sound and space to draw on critical cartography, technological ubiquity, systems, and flows of temporalities, José creates evocative, experimental soundworks, geo-notational maps, sound design for podcasts and the moving image, and multichannel, audiovisual installations and performances.

Each week one member of the Radia Network produce 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: 17 partners in nine countries and growing all the time.

Radia Stations

* Campus Paris (Paris, FR)
* CFRC 101.9 FM (Kingston, CA)
* CKUT (Montréal, CA)
* JET FM (Nantes, FR)
* 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 Nova (Oslo, NO)
* 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)
* Wave Farm WGXC 90.7-FM (New York, USA)
* XL Air (Brussels, BE)

Affiliates

* Kunstradio (Vienna, AT)

More information at http://radia.fm