"Voices in the Dark" (1991) by Jacki Apple is a radio work for outer and inner space, in four sections. The cosmos is an audio archive of information broadcast to the stars, a repository of human (and perhaps other) histories in which time melts and language dissolves into signals. All those "voices" traversing the universe looking for a pick-up! Imagine gridlock in the big data bank in outer space. Voices in the Dark is about interstellar conversations, radio waves, and sonic archaeology. Is there anyone listening and how do they interpret what they hear? How do we/they distinguish between real events and people, and media-generated fictions? Are we the "they"? We say we want to make contact with the Other, when in fact what we search for is a mirror of ourselves. This composition combines a narrative text with various musical, vocal, and sound components snatched from the airwaves, overdubbed, sampled, remixed, and electronically orchestrated.

In "The Garden Planet Revisited" (1992) by Jacki Apple, past and present history resonate through ruins of the future as American astronaut Captain Charlie, a paragon of late twentieth century technological man, hurtles through time and space. Stranded on a station, abandoned and alone, he is on a mission without end. Simultaneously, the Inhabitants of an unnamed place search amongst the architectural remains, gather stories, rumors, myths from Messengers and Witnesses, as they try to reconstruct what happened in the time before "the cities shifted and the Earth turned." Is it a memory, a dream, a hallucination, a prophecy? Originally presented in 1982 as a thirteen scene, hour-long multimedia performance written with music by trombonist Bruce Fowler, the audio was edited and remastered by Apple as a twenty-eight minute work for radio in 1992.

In its ten years as a weekly national series, 1987-1998, New American Radio (NAR) commissioned and distributed over 300 original works: conceptual new drama, associational documentary, language explorations, sonic meditations, environmental compositions, musical explorations and works that pioneer new dimensions in acoustic space. Wave Farm is thrilled to be partnering with New American Radio to ensure these works remain available to listeners today and into the future.

New American Radio was organized by Helen Thorington, Executive Producer and Regine Beyer, Associate Producer. A special thanks to both Helen Thorington and Jo-Anne Green for their generous support and collaboration of this partnership, and their contribution to the field at large!

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