WGXC-90.7 FM

From the Radio Art Archive: "Magneto Mori: Vienna" (2019) by Mark Vernon

Aug 23, 2025: 12pm - 1pm
WGXC 90.7-FM: Radio for Open Ears

90.7-FM in NY's Upper Hudson Valley and wgxc.org/listen everywhere
http://www.wgxc.org/

Produced by Wave Farm Radio.

"Magneto Mori: Vienna" (2019) was produced by Scottish radio artist Mark Vernon. Mark Vernon has been creating a series of radio pieces, including this one, out of semi-degraded audio tape. Using a portable reel-to-reel tape recorder, he records sounds from a place, in this case Vienna, Austria. Then he cuts up the tape and in Vienna buried it in a muddy garden with local souvenir fridge magnets to further erase parts of the tape. After a few days he exhumed the tape and spliced it back together in random order. Meanwhile Mark Vernon went to Viennese flea markets collecting cassettes and Dictaphones and the like. Out of all this material he created “a portrait of Vienna in both place and time; an archaeological excavation of found sounds, lost fragments, buried memories and magnetic traces.” Mark Vernon’s Magneto Mori: Vienna was commissioned by Kunstradio in Vienna and first broadcast in 2019.
- Introduced 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:
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