"three variations on a study for a data deficient species (grey ghost transmission)" (2017) by Sally Ann McIntyre

New Zealand-based radio artist Sally Ann McIntyre created three variations on a study for a data deficient species (grey ghost transmission) in 2017. The piece focuses on a New Zealand bird species, the South Island kōkako, which may or may not be extinct, no one knows for sure. The bird species was nicknamed the grey ghost for its hauntingly beautiful, mournful, slow, loud song. The only existing recordings of the kōkako, included in the piece, are fragmentary and elusive--more of an absence than a presence. McIntyre writes, “In these recordings, the bird hovers on the edge of audibility, refusing to be pinned down to monumental extinction narratives, just as it destabilizes...imperial ecology, by remaining outside Western scientific forms of knowing which rely on the verification of empirical evidence. The piece includes a musical score based on written documentation of the kōkako’s song as described in private letters and publications. This score is performed on piano, violin, clavichord and harpsichord. Another notable element of the piece is Maori musician Rob Thorne improvising on traditional instruments. He does a “call-and-response to a field recording I sent him of the ‘data deficient’ bird's endangered cousin, the North Island kōkako, which I made on the bird sanctuary Kapiti Island. My recording remains inaudible in the final piece, making Rob's haunting playing of the traditional instrument a space in which only the ghosts of the missing bird are left to respond.”

You can also hear recordings of natural radio played back through very unstable microcast transmitters and “flocks” of radios. three variations on a study for a data deficient species (grey ghost transmission) was commissioned by Radiophrenia, an annual pop-up radio station in Glasgow, Scotland. Read Sally Ann McIntyre’s more detailed description of the piece at http://radiocegeste.blogspot.com. - Introduced by Wave Farm Radio Artist Fellow 2019/2020, Karen Werner.

"The Burdened Land" (2020) by M.B. Al-Rahim

Originally commissioned by Constellations for an episode entitled Feel the Sky, in which Al-Rahim was prompted to create new work from a 1992 amateur field recording of trumpeter swans on an icy lake, The Burdened Land spins archival sound into a boundless meditation on ecological degradation, temporal disjunction, and how capitalism shapes our concept of the natural world. The forlorn bird calls and footsteps crunching on frozen terrain from the original recording are stretched, smeared, and juxtaposed with industrial noise, invoking a spectral aviary that shimmers with elusive thresholds, binaries, and migratory patterns. Eventually, the echoed whisper of the question “Am I falling?” implies breaking through the barrier of the icy lake. Upon revisiting the piece four years after its initial release, this repeated question speaks to the ambience of dysphoria, transition, and reembodiment that lingers at the outer limits of The Burdened Land. - Described by Wave Farm Radio Archive Contributor 2024, Kamikaze Jones.

Curatorial statement for "The Burdened Land" (2020) by M.B. Al-Rahim

Radio has a rich legacy of deliberate misuse. From the mobilization of the Black Panther Party via CB Radio, to the subversive dissemination of pirate broadcasts, the insurrectionist potential of the airwaves and their propensity for revolutionary action is well documented. How does a queer affect, one marked by loss, resistance, subterfuge, transformation, and rebellion, map onto these radiophonic spaces? What paradigms of audiological intervention are implicitly queer? What can we learn from exploring the immaterial queer archive: an amorphous collection unsanctioned by the state, transmitted through utterance, gesture, noise, and paralinguistic activity?

This addition is part of an ongoing curatorial series entitled Pink Noise, which investigates contemporary strategies of queer sonic resistance and counter-archival methodology across transmission arts.-Kamikaze Jones

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.