Radia Show 652: Igitur Flotsam (from Radio Worm/Klangendum in Rotterdam in the Netherlands). A stream of deserted anthems, disembodied voices, morse signals, crank calls, corroded tapes, radio statics, counting games and wanderings through empty buildings. This radio play is based on the unfinished gothic tale Igitur - a collection of texts abandoned by its writer Stéphane Mallarmé in 1869. A man wakes up in the middle of the night. Is there something there? or has something disappeared? Outside are opaque constellations of stars, the radio plays random sounds from beyond and the phone is dead. It seems as if something has been accompanying him already all the time, stealing his identity by being a double. Trying to escape this double he leaves his room and outside on the stairs he happens upon more reflections, shadows and doubles. He tries to conjure these multiples by counting steps and doors on the way. Finally downstairs everything vanishes in the dark when all the sounds of the world enter the large open space. Credits, music: Reinier van Houdt; text: Stéphane Mallarmé/Reinier van Houdt; voice: David Tibet. Thank you: David Tibet, Ossian Brown, Rita Knuistingh Neven, Andere Baustelle, Simon Lenski, Susanne Fröhlich, Sascha Sulimma.

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