Radia Show 1012: "Sonic Hugs" by Colin Black for This Sonic Live (Guest Slot)

No matter where we live in the world, we all feel alone from time to time, some of us more than others, some of us to the point we can’t bear it anymore … this collection of new works entitled Sonic Hugs is a reminder that we are not alone. With this objective at hand, I invited nine of Australia’s most distinctive & esteemed artists to create original new works that express their interpretation of a “sonic hug.” At the time, I remember wondering, just how will these artists combine the ideas of “sonic” and “hug” into their new works? If we explore the word “hug” by itself, then we usually start to think of the following: hug … to anticipate a hug, to be hugged, to have been hugged, and that research has shown that a hug can reduce feelings of loneliness and the harmful physical effects of stress. A hug can also boost feel-good hormones such as dopamine and serotonin, the antidepressant hormone that reduces feelings of loneliness, controls anxiety and elevates mood. Psychologically, a hug builds trust, boosts self-esteem, and creates a sense of safety, creating a pathway towards a deeper connection.

But this was not just a hug, but a Sonic Hug … then I also remembered a quote from an interview I did for my PhD with Andrew McLennan about his experiences as an ABC radio producer working with artists at The Listening Room program where he explained, “But artists don’t always do expected things …”[1] In this context, McLennan is discussing the potential awkwardness between the public media programming directives and the artist’s desire for creative, uncensored, boundless possibilities. While with the Sonic Hugs collection, there are differences (e.g. there is no overarching government programming directive other than the request to compose a sonic hug), artists both delivered works that met and challenged my expectations, all of which I found sonically highly stimulating and was touched by. What emerged from this diverse mix and treatments of the subject matter is a multi-faceted creative exploration of embrace, connectedness, and community.

If we listen deeper into these individual new works, in the order that they will be presented, we can hear that with Cat Hope’s 7 Options (as performed by The Low Tone Orchestra), we are listening to how musicians empathize with each other during a live recording as they are “moving in and out of each other’s timbre,” in effect exploring varying degrees of sonic connections. With Ros Bandt’s Sonic Hugs, we enter a personal autobiographical soundscape of tenderness that, as Bandt explains, “metamorphose into a new magical energy empowering love, kindness, sharing, community, co-operation and selflessness, a larger hug from nature and the cosmos.” In Eve Klein’s Mantra of Enfolding we imagine our first embrace and connection as a zygote in our mother’s womb. Robert Sazdov’s “I Cried” Spasovden, electroacoustic compositional structure is based on “20-second sonic sections that aim to deliver 12 sonic hugs.” Next, Stephen Adams brings us Close To Your Ears in which a single vocal gesture develops and is augmented with other elements to create intimacy, as Adams asks the question, “What is a sonic hug?” With, Claire ‘Furchick’ Pannell’s Berjalan, amongst other things, reaches across cultural boundaries by using music as a type of universal language. In Jim Denley’s Mixmaster Troposphere we explore embracing the Australian environment and place and is intended as a sonic hug to the Aboriginal people (Wayilwan, Gamilaraay and Wiradjuri) who had previously gathered on the remote site in the Warrumbungle National Park where the work is recorded. With David Chesworth’s Cohesion Calisthenics we are listening to the “personal experiences of embodied hugs and being in larger social gatherings, which we sometimes struggle to be part of.” Finally, with Colin Black’s Embosomed, we are exploring the light and shades of embrace, a reaching out for connection and fragility.

I now invite you all to open your ears to this new collection of works that affords vulnerability, speaks from different levels and dimensions and brings focus to the need for more interpersonal/social connectedness and cohesion.

Colin Black, August 2024

www.thissoniclife.com

Download the album from https://thissoniclife.bandcamp.com/album/sonic-hugs

Find more info here (pdf).

Artwork by Nuša Smolič / Instagram: nusa.smolic

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: 17 partners in nine countries and growing all the time.

Radia Stations

* Campus Paris (Paris, FR)
* CFRC 101.9 FM (Kingston, CA)
* CKUT (Montréal, CA)
* JET FM (Nantes, FR)
* Kanal 103 (Skopje, MK)
* Orange 94.0 (Vienna, AT)
* Radio Campus (Brussels, BE)
* Radio Corax (Halle, DE)
* Radio Grenouille (Marseille, FR)
* Radio Helsinki (Graz, AT)
* Radio Nova (Oslo, NO)
* 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)
* Wave Farm WGXC 90.7-FM (New York, USA)
* XL Air (Brussels, BE)

Affiliates

* Kunstradio (Vienna, AT)

More information at http://radia.fm