WGXC-90.7 FM

From the Radio Art Archive: "Ligature" (2009) by Joan Schuman

Mar 09, 2025: 3:30 pm - 4pm
WGXC 90.7-FM: Radio for Open Ears

90.7-FM in NY's Upper Hudson Valley and wgxc.org/listen everywhere
http://www.wgxc.org/

Produced by Wave Farm Radio.

American radio artist Joan Schuman produced "Ligature" in 2009. Listening to a number of Joan Schuman’s pieces Wave Farm Radio Art Fellow Karen Werner was struck by the sensuality and dreamy surrealism in her work; she combines documentary poetics with radio drama and radio poem. "Ligature" is loosely based on the lives of Daisy and Violet Hilton, conjoined twins born in the UK in 1911. They were part of the European circus and sideshow circuit in the 1920s and 30s. Setting up the piece, Joan Schuman writes, “They’re retired now. They whisper themselves to sleep while conjuring what death will feel like when it comes to them both...Their single knotted torso extends beyond immediate relationship out to the world.” "Ligature" is part of a pair of pieces called "Catalogue of Mourning."
- 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.