Radia Show 1029: FAST REWINDS (TEAFM RADIO WORKSHOP)

Time travel has long been a tantalizing concept in both science fiction and theoretical physics. While we often imagine time travel as a physical journey through past and future landscapes, it can also be experienced in a more abstract yet profound way—through sounds.

Sounds of the Past
The past resonates with echoes that we can sometimes recreate or reimagine. Ancient musical instruments, historical recordings, and even the ambient noise of a bygone era—such as the clatter of horse-drawn carriages or the crackle of early radios—allow us to immerse ourselves in history. Time capsules of sound, like phonographs and vinyl records, are portals to another time. Through these, we don’t just hear the past; we feel its texture and rhythm.

Imagine walking into a cathedral where Gregorian chants are sung exactly as they were centuries ago. In that moment, the separation between now and then dissolves. Similarly, technologies like audio restoration bring forgotten voices and music back to life, giving us a sensory experience of eras we’ve never lived.

Sounds of the Future
The future, by contrast, is harder to predict. What will the world sound like in 50 or 100 years? Speculative sound design in films and media offers some possibilities—mechanical drones, synthetic symphonies, and alien languages. Advances in technology might also bring us auditory experiences we can’t yet conceive, like music tailored to our emotions in real-time or soundscapes of entirely virtual worlds.

The idea of time travel through sound becomes even more fascinating when paired with concepts like acoustic archaeology or audio synthesis. Could we someday accurately recreate the voice of a long-dead figure based on historical data? Could we design sounds that represent the potential noises of a future city or a space station?

Living Between Past and Future
We live at an intersection of temporal sounds. While digitized archives allow us to dive into historical audio, modern soundscapes are already capturing this era for future generations. Every recording, from a bustling city street to a personal podcast, becomes a thread in the fabric of history.

Time travel, then, doesn’t require a machine. It requires listening—tuning into the echoes of the past and the imagined vibrations of what’s to come. Sounds are a bridge, a timeline written not in years but in waves and frequencies. What does your time sound like? What echoes will you leave behind?

TEA FM

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Each week one member of the Radia Network produces a show for all the others. 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: 22 partners in 14 countries and growing all the time.

Radia Stations

* Duuu (Paris, FR)
* ∏node (Mulhouse, Paris, FR)
* Diffusion (Sydney, AU)
* JET FM (Nantes, FR)
* Kanal 103 (Skopje, MK)
* Orange 94.0 (Vienna, AT)
* Radio Campus (Brussels, BE)
* Radio Grenouille (Marseille, FR)
* Radio Helsinki (Graz, AT)
* Radio One 91 FM (Dunedin, NZ)
* Radio Panik (Brussels, BE)
* Radio Papesse (Firenze, IT)
* Radio Student (Ljubljana, SI)
* radio x (Frankfurt/Main, DE)
* Rádio Zero (Lisboa, PT)
* RadioWORM (Rotterdam, NL)
* Reboot.fm (Berlin, DE)
* Resonance FM (London, UK)
* Soundart Radio (Dartington, UK)
* TEA FM (Zaragoza, ES)
* Usmaradio (San Marino, SM)
* Wave Farm WGXC 90.7-FM (New York, USA)

Affiliates

* Kunstradio (Vienna, AT)
* Mobile Radio (Ürzig, DE)
* Radioart106 (Haifa, PS48)

More information at http://radia.fm