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The Radio Art Hour: Roberto Paci Dalo, Aubry Gilles (Audio)

Jan 28, 2023
Produced by Wave Farm Radio Artist Fellows and Artistic Director Tom Roe.

Tune in today to hear "Napoli" by Roberto Paci Dalo and "Under the Ahwach Moon" by Aubry Gilles. Plus a radio advertisement for radio from the 1960s from actor, author, comedian, puppeteer, and radio personality, Stan Freberg. And just about every reference Bruce Springsteen has made to radio in his songs. Tune in for "Napoli" by Roberto Paci Dalo. In spare, deliberate "snap shots," "Napoli" explores the sounds of one Italian city: steps and screams, songs and invocations, a celebration at Mount Vesuvius, traffic noise...A t times, the microphone is used as a lens to enlarge acoustical fragments otherwise almost inaudible. In this way, micro-listening and macro listening exist side by side, adding to a sense of mystery: An immersion in the city through the mystery of hearing. Originally produced as an 8 channel sound installation produced for Kunstradio/ORF, Vienna, in collaboration with Audiobox/RAI, Rome. Then hear "Under the Ahwach Moon" by Aubry Gilles, introduced by José Alejandro Rivera. "Under the Ahwach Moon," created in 2014, is a sound-collage made of various ‘sound-check’ recordings in Morocco. Together with Zouheir Atbane, Gilles Aubry spent several weeks traveling the country in 2013 for their project, “An Anthology of Ears Preservation,” which included research on cultural preservation through listening practices and the sonic materialities of traditional music. Aubry writes, “I consider the ‘sound-check’ as a special moment of the music practice, not yet part of the music ‘spectacle,’ but rather a necessary preparation for it, in which all the elements are tuned together: instruments, voices, amplification technique, musicians’ mind, and space.” In essence, Under the Ahwach Moon reveals the social, material, and spatial dimension of music through the recording of sound-check situations. In this piece Aubry says listeners can hear “traditional Moroccan music instruments mostly from Berbere (or rather Amazigh) regions including the lutar, the rebab, the bendir, the zamar, the raita, the qsbah, voices, as well as excerpts from the Paul Bowle’s collection of traditional Moroccan music from 1959.” Also heard, are Aubrey, Zouheir Atbane and Robert Millis rehearsing with this material for a performance which took place in Marrakech in April 2014. The piece was broadcast in 2014 for Picnic Radio, a collection of stations that operate in ethereal and physical space collaborating with people around the world; and a radio art project curated by European-based organization, Zonoff.- Introduced by Wave Farm Radio Art Fellow 2022, José Alejandro Rivera.

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.