WGXC-90.7 FM

From the Radio Art Archive: "What Touches Us Most" (2017) by Mwangi Hutter

Feb 23, 2025: 7pm - 8pm
WGXC 90.7-FM: Radio for Open Ears

90.7-FM in NY's Upper Hudson Valley and wgxc.org/listen everywhere
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Produced by Wave Farm Radio.

"What Touches Us Most" is by Mwangi Hutter, an artist duo based in both Berlin and Nairobi producing work under the combination of their surnames and biographies. They describe their combined identity “as a creative strategy to resist fixed notions of identity based upon gender, race, and cultural backgrounds.... Their works can be seen as a vision of unification and the pacification of contrasts: female-male, African-European, black-white and the borders separating you and me.” Mwangi Hutter produced "What Touches Us Most" in 2017 – the piece was commissioned and broadcast as part of Documenta, the German contemporary art exhibition that takes place every 5 years. Documenta 2017 was unique in its showcasing of radio art including seventeen commissions of new radio art works broadcast in partnership with local radio stations in Greece, Cameroon, Colombia, Lebanon, Indonesia, the United States, and Germany, creating a worldwide exhibition on air. Here is Documenta’s description of the piece: "'What Touches Us Most' brings together many of the vocal characters, soundscapes, and acoustic themes developed by Mwangi Hutter over the past two decades. Earlier sounds and characters speak of wildness and isolation, experiences arising from a dualistic splitting of the self and the Other. A babble of voices resounds, intent on humorous discussion. Newer themes convey an atmosphere of yearning and rapture. The piece renders audible the spaces of memory and expression, moving from the past into the future. It is an invitation to wander through these indefinite locations, awakening an awareness of the possibility of going beyond difference to express oneness.”
- Described 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:
  • The Dogs / Animal Words
  • Died A Long Time / Marlboro
  • Follow the River / Song Supply Co.
  • GOODMORNING / GREENHOUSELAKE