Today tune in for "Towards an Amicable End" by Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, and "Ostentatio Vulnerum_ A Dead Language Study (Remix)" by Gregory Whitehead. First, from Chattopadhyay, composed in 2020, "Towards an Amicable End" is anchored by a moment of globally widespread fear and anxiety – “a sense of impending doom in the air,” as artist Budhaditya Chattopadhyay (who is also a writer and theorist on sound and listening) describes it. The gap between the immediate sense of panic that the COVID-19 pandemic has spurred and the needed reckoning that the climate emergency has not forms one contrast that animates Chattopadhyay’s piece. Archival field recordings that capture climate-related phenomena from water, wind, and wood provide much of the sound in Towards an Amicable End, with custom-built radio sets interceding in their collection. The work also draws out a second contrast: between, on one hand, an impulse toward universal hearing and mastery of problems that Chattopadhyay attributes to the global North and, on the other, a philosophy of Fatalism that he sees emerging from the global South. The double bass that interweaves other sound samples gives an opening into western sound traditions, while the Fatalistic position organizes the surrounding radio artwork. Chattopadhyay asks, “What if we accept the impending doom as a natural course of human civilization? What if acceptance of an ending opens the door for emancipation from fear and loathing for the present?… Can there be an auditory equivalence to the gleam of acceptance against the darkness of fear and anxiety?” - Described by Wave Farm Radio Artist Fellow 2021/2022, Andy Stuhl. Then Whitehead's short piece ends the hour.

Welcome to "The Radio Art Hour," a show where art is not just on the radio, but is the radio. "The Radio Art Hour" draws from the Wave Farm Broadcast Radio Art Archive, an online resource that aims to identify, coalesce, and celebrate historical and contemporary international radio artworks made by artists around the world, created specifically for terrestrial AM/FM broadcast, whether it be via commercial, public, community, or independent transmission. Come on a journey with us as radio artists explore broadcast radio space through poetic resuscitations and playful celebrations/subversions of the complex relationship between senders and receivers in this hour of radio about radio as an art form. "The Radio Art Hour" features introductions from Philip Grant and Tom Roe, and from Wave Farm Radio Art Fellows Karen Werner, Jess Speer, and Andy Stuhl. The Conet Project's recordings of numbers radio stations serve as interstitial sounds. Go to wavefarm.org for more information about "The Radio Art Hour" and Wave Farm's Radio Art Archive.