WGXC-90.7 FM


From the Radio Art Archive: "Anosmia" (2013) by Aurélie Nyirabikali Lierman
90.7-FM in NY's Upper Hudson Valley and wgxc.org/listen everywhere
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Produced by Wave Farm Radio.
"Anosmia" was produced in 2013 by Aurélie Lierman. Lierman was born in Rwanda and has spent much of her life in Belgium and the Netherlands, where she currently lives. The title "Anosmia" refers to a condition where a nose has been injured and cannot smell. Lierman writes: “Anosmia is an abstract reflection on the absurd fact that a tiny part of the body, the nose, played a key role in the Rwandan Genocide In 1994. In the early 1990’s Hutu extremists started broadcasting hate messages via public radio, against Tutsi people...[I]f you had a long and thin nose you were considered a Tutsi, so you had to hide or run for your life. Nowadays it is by law forbidden to use the word Tutsi or Hutu” [in Rwanda]. The text you hear in the piece is a poem by David Mwambari entitled "Politics Of The Nose." "Anosmia" is an example of what Lierman calls Afrique concrète, a reference to musique concrète, an experimental collage approach to sound and radio composing that emerged in the 1940s. "Anosmia" was commissioned for the Austrian radio program Kunstradio as part of a series called Fearless Radio curated by Anna Raimondo and Younes Baba-Ali. Composition, Concept & Realisation: Aurélie Nyirabikali Lierman. Performers: Francisco Couto (trb), Momoko Noguchi (prep pno), Aurélie Nyirabikali Lierman (prep pno, voice, electronics). Text: Politics Of The Nose by David Mwambari.
- Introduced by Wave Farm Radio Artist Fellow 2019/2020, Karen Werner.
The Wave Farm Broadcast Radio Art Archive is an online resource and broadcast series on Wave Farm’s WGXC 90.7-FM, which is syndicated to stations across the country through The Radio Art Hour. It aims to identify, coalesce, and celebrate historical and contemporary international radio artworks created specifically for terrestrial AM/FM/Shortwave broadcast, whether it be via commercial, public, community, or pirate transmission. The archive is a product of Wave Farm's Radio Artist Fellowship.
Radio artists explore broadcast radio space through a richly polyphonous mix of practices, including poetic resuscitations of conventional radio drama, documentary, interview and news formats; found and field sound compositions reframed by broadcast; performative inhabitations/embodiments of radio’s inherent qualities, such as entropy, anonymity and interference; playful celebrations/subversions of the complex relationship between senders and receivers, and the potential feedback loops between hosts and layers of audience, from in-studio to listeners at home to callers-in; use of radio space to bridge widely dispersed voices (be they living or dead), subjects, environments and communities, or to migrate through them in ways that would not be possible in real time and space; electroacoustic compositions with sounds primarily derived from gathering, generating and remixing radiophonic sources. Note: Wave Farm continues to expand this definition of radio art through engagement with contemporary practices including those revealed by Wave Farm Artists-in-residence, and the Radio Art Fellowship program.
Playlist:
- On ne change pas / Céline Dion
- Fallen Fool / Gayle Donnelly
- Second Rodeo (feat. Bing & Ruth, The Antlers & Port St. Willow) / Cowboy Sadness
- Bhimpalasi / Mustafa Bhagat