ARCHIVE

This week, two works from Jacki Apple from the New American Radio archives are featured. First, "Voices in the Dark" is a radio work for outer and inner space, in four sections. The cosmos is an audio archive of information broadcast to the stars, a repository of human (and perhaps other) histories in which time melts and language dissolves into signals. All those "voices" traversing the universe looking for a pick-up! Imagine gridlock in the big data bank in outer space. "Voices in the Dark" is about interstellar conversations, radio waves, and sonic archaeology. Is there anyone listening and how do they interpret what they hear? How do we/they distinguish between real events and people, and media-generated fictions? Are we the "they"? We say we want to make contact with the Other, when in fact what we search for is a mirror of ourselves. This composition combines a narrative text with various musical, vocal, and sound components snatched from the airwaves, overdubbed, sampled, remixed, and electronically orchestrated. Then tune in "Swan Lake." A satiric, ironic film noire "ballet" for radio, the original Swan Lake narrative is recast and resituated amidst the glittering surfaces and dark underside of late eighties Los Angeles where dreams are manufactured in medialand, art and entertainment tongue kiss, the third world coexists in a parallel realm, and the weather is unnatural. Using radio as a cinematic medium, Apple's remake employs various pop genres including Raymond Chandler's detective novels, TV fashion commercials, and a sensational murder trial. This filmic version is about seduction, voyeurism, and the consumption of images, with the Swan playing the part of Art. The lush romanticism of Tchaikovsky's original ballet music is juxtaposed against a percussive, techno-eclectic, edgy filmscore by L.A. composers Joseph Berardi and Kira Vollman. Commissioned by New American Radio.

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.