WGXC-90.7 FM

The Radio Art Hour: Kaffe Matthews, Kamikaze Jones, Scanner

Nov 30, 2021: 3pm - 4pm
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/

Standing Wave Radio

wavefarm.org/listen and 1620-AM at Wave Farm
https://audio.wavefarm.org/transmissionarts.mp3

Produced by Bianca Biberaj, in collaboration with Wave Farm Radio Art Fellows and Artists-in-residence.

Today, mobile radio signals are explored. First, Kaffe Matthews' "Radio Cycle 101.4FM" work is featured. Commissioned by INTERFERENCE:PUBLIC SOUND, Matthews installed a radio transmitter on the roof of Annette Works Studio in London’s East End, where it broadcast continuously from July 13-20, 2003. Bikes outfitted with radios followed mapped routes as “scores” and performed the pieces by riding while broadcasting the radio station. Community members were invited to workshops to make their own radio programs and help create the map scores for their pieces. Among the first of her radio-related projects, Radio Cycle 101.4 FM explored the dynamic relationship between sound, place, audience, performer, and the members of a community. Then we feature a new work created by Wave Farm artist-in-residence, Kamikaze Jones, interviewed by Wave Farm's Tom Roe. This is the premiere his radio artwork "Over and Out," an experimental radio play that mines the history of—and utilizes—CB radio to sonically investigate the underrepresented legacies of gay cruising culture in the trucker community. CB radio in the United States has historically subversive connotations: primarily as a tool to evade police detection during the 1973 oil crisis, in which a nationally mandated speed limit hindered truck drivers’ productivity and earnings. CB radios were further implemented as a means of organizing blockades to protest the speed limit and, concurrently, to discreetly facilitate sex work. The implicit risks of chance homosexual encounters on the open road (exposure, arrest, persecution) were significantly reduced by the ‘misuse’ of these devices. For this piece, in addition to the manipulation of archival and field recordings, Kamikaze will quite literally ‘cruise the airwaves’ of the Hudson Valley and incorporate the raw recordings of his encounters to explore the innately queer hauntologies and dissident materialities of CB radio. How does CB radio, an arguably outmoded tool that is nevertheless still used today, continue to inform sexual ideologies? Has the lineage of these technologies moved further away from—or closer to—a homosocial syntax? To what extent have these devices permanently sculpted the semiotics of queer consciousness? It is Kamikaze’s objective to immerse himself in these conceptual inquiries as both an active participant and a sonic medium, to receive and transmit some of the spectral mysteries that exist within these obscured correspondences. Finally, we tune in two tracks from British radio artist Scanner's 2021 album "Earthbound Transmissions."

Welcome to "The Radio Art Hour," a show where art is not just on the radio, but is the radio. "The Radio Art Hour" draws from the Wave Farm Broadcast Radio Art Archive, an online resource that aims to identify, coalesce, and celebrate historical and contemporary international radio artworks made by artists around the world, created specifically for terrestrial AM/FM broadcast, whether it be via commercial, public, community, or independent transmission. Come on a journey with us as radio artists explore broadcast radio space through poetic resuscitations and playful celebrations/subversions of the complex relationship between senders and receivers in this hour of radio about radio as an art form. "The Radio Art Hour" features introductions from Philip Grant and Tom Roe, and from Wave Farm Radio Art Fellows Karen Werner and Jess Speer. The Conet Project's recordings of numbers radio stations serve as interstitial sounds. Go to wavefarm.org for more information about "The Radio Art Hour" and Wave Farm's Radio Art Archive.