Radia Show 663: a radio séance for Vera Wyse Munro, by Celeste Oram from Radio One 91FM, New Zealand. Vera Wyse Munro (1897-1966) was a pioneering New Zealand ham radio broadcaster, improviser, and sonic experimenter. Her primary media were amateur radio broadcasts, Morse poetry, and sono-topographical scores. Via her broadcasts, which were frequently received by amateur radio operators as far afield as the United States and Europe, Munro initiated some of the earliest telematic performances, in which she would perform prepared violin in structured improvisations with other musicians broadcasting from elsewhere in the world. Munro’s work was often necessarily clandestine, as a result of legislation curbing amateur radio activity in New Zealand. As a result of this, as well as the absence of extant documentation about her life and her ephemeral practice, Munro’s work is only now starting to be regarded amidst New Zealand’s cultural history. ++++ this improvisational radio play is part-homage, part-seance, part-instructional score for the home listener. it joins an ongoing series of broadcast re-enactments relating to Vera Wyse Munro by artist and researcher Celeste Oram. here, the radio is a medium through which we channel the lost histories of Vera Wyse Munro’s pioneering radio experiments back into audibility, utilising the opportunity provided by the global reach of the international radia network as a way of calling on radio artists and enthusiasts around the globe to collectively keep vigil on the ionosphere. the hope is to summon the spirit of Vera Wyse Munro by attempting to receive her final radio broadcasts. ++++ improvisation re-constructions by Keir GoGwilt & Alex Taylor starling poems by Keir GoGwilt written & produced by Celeste Oram http://verawysemunro.nz/

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