“The Whole World Stopped…” is a collaborative compilation of field recordings, a patchwork of making music and narrating, underedited ad hoc experiment, and also a celebration of friendship, a soundscape where two friends meet—Joana and Stefan, both of them colleagues at Kanal 103.

Joana is a multi-instrumentalist, though her main focus is classical guitar. She does use both classical and electric guitar throughout the recording, as well as bontempi electro-acoustic keyboard and goblet drum. Three minutes into this experimental piece, you can hear Stefan’s voice, first telling about a street scene he witnessed downtown Skopje, then reading a poem from Elizabeth Bishop (“At the Fishhouses”) and a short story from Franz Kafka (“Before the Law”). Finally, in the conclusion, a fusion of washing machine centrifuge and a mandola played with a violin bow.

The work is an undisguised communication between music and storytelling, scarcely premeditated, if at all. Most of it is recorded at Partizan Print, a studio of independent artists in Skopje, and very good friends and collaborators with Kanal 103.

Created by Joana Risteska, classic guitar master and multi-instrumentalist, and Stefan Alijevikj, fiction writer and sound seeker. You can follow their radio shows on Kanal 103 Sunday and Tuesday evenings respectively.

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