Radia Show 1118: Aether (Usmaradio)

Aether continues a field recording discipline that extends listening beyond the limits of human perception, revealing electromagnetic environments that exist alongside the audible world. Recorded in three remote locations – the Nevada Desert (2016), St Agnes in the Isles of Scilly (2021) and the Pyrenees (2023)—the works were created using a Stephen P. McGreevy VLF receiver. The environments were chosen for their lack of technological interference, where human-made electromagnetic activity recedes and the Earth’s own radio environment emerges. 

Stephen Shiell is a London-based sound artist, improviser, composer and field recordist working across experimental music, radiophonic art and site-responsive practice. His recorded works, live performances, sound walks, and workshops explore listening, gathering and performing as social, ecological and political acts, engaging with sound as a means of understanding place and environment. Drawing on field recordings, found and self-built instruments, electromagnetic sound and live electronics, he creates immersive works spanning solo and collaborative performance, radio and participatory projects. He is a certified Deep Listening practitioner and one half of the duo Blanc Sceol. He works collaboratively through Surge Cooperative on listening-based projects along the Channelsea River in East London.

http://www.stephenshiell.co.uk

Usmaradio – Centro di Ricerca Interdipartimentale per la Radiofonia (CRIR) / Interdepartmental Research Centre for Radio Studies, is a workplace of The School of Radio to develop an innovative radio pedagogy. Workshops, work sessions, meetings, presentations of live performance as sections of the project. Produced by UNIRSM | Università degli Studi della Repubblica di San Marino. usmaradio.org / theschoolofradio.org / unirsm.sm

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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)

* Rádio Zero (Lisboa, PT)

* Radioart106 (Haifa, PS48)

Syndicated By

* Campus Paris (Paris, FR)

* Harrogate Community Radio (North Yorkshire, UK)

* KZradio (Tel Aviv, IL)

* Noise Radio (Zwolle, NL)

* Radio ARA (Luxembourg, LU)

More information at http://radia.fm