Homeschool Radio Intensive, Pond Station Sounds, Live from Musical Ecologies, Help keep WGXC on the air.Wave Farm Fellow Jess Speer is leading a radio workshop for teens. Tune in for all sorts of ecologies, musical and otherwise. Help keep WGXC afloat.
Artist, teacher, and Wave Farm Fellow Jess Speer will lead this free homeschool intensive over the course of two weeks fall 2020. Working both in a large group and in smaller teams, participants will produce a radio project of collective choosing. Participants will have the opportunity to create poetry, sound art, or radio dramas, conduct research and interviews, produce audio in many formats, experiment with form and sound, and get weird, go deep, and listen deeply. The emphasis will be on process and experience rather than a “perfect” final product.
Interested in joining? Contact info@wavefarm.org. The workshop schedule will be designed to best accommodate the schedule of all interested participants.
Transmit Partners on WGXC 90.7-FM
During 2020, as many venues have been forced to pivot to remote audiences, Transmit Partners use Wave Farm's streaming server to transmit live performance and events, which are often accompanied by radio broadcasts on WGXC 90.7-FM. Upcoming examples include:
Wave Farm is pleased to present a radio broadcast of this live performance, which took place at Fridman Gallery in New York City on July 14 as part of their SO⅃OS: a space of limit as possibility series. Headphone listening is recommended.
C. Lavender presents a new site-specific work: “The Impulse Chamber,” that will utilize Fridman Gallery as an unique reverberation room. “The Impulse Chamber” features rapidly moving recordings of tuning forks with percussion and brass instruments made in the anechoic chamber at Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey less than two weeks before the pandemic was declared in the U.S. The nature of the recordings being made in an anechoic chamber and then played out into a reverent space, naturally modifies these recordings into how they sound only within the confines of Fridman Gallery.
Bell Labs, where the recordings were made, was also at the forefront of research and technological innovation for telepresence; a current pervading part of our world that we have learned to adapt to quickly to sustain communication through the pandemic.
This presentation of “The Impulse Chamber” will also feature the debut of the film “Reflections: Azul” created by C. Lavender in May 2020 playing throughout the duration of the performance.
The Impulse Chamber was developed with assistance from the Harvestworks Technology Immersion Program. More information at clavender.net and lavenderhealer.com.
Musical Ecologies returns Thursday, September 17th for a live radio event featuring composer, performer, producer, and scholar Alex Waterman. The event will be broadcast live from the Old Stone House in Park Slope, Brooklyn on Wave Farm’s WGXC 90.7-FM Radio for Open Ears in New York’s Upper Hudson Valley. Due to Covid-19 there will be no in-person audience attendance. This event was originally scheduled for March 12th but was postponed due to the pandemic.
Working in a variety of contexts and media, including sound installations, television operas and film and video works, Waterman is perhaps best known as a cellist and performer. For tonight’s program, he will present an evening of new solo works titled Towards a Typology of Realities We Coincide With(in) for cello, electronics, and mixed media, as well as a selection of new stories and songs. The evening will begin with a conversation hosted by series curator Dan Joseph.
Now in its seventh season, Musical Ecologies is a monthly symposium on music and sound held at the Old Stone House in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Curated and hosted by composer Dan Joseph, each event typically focuses on a single artist who presents a work or project either in the form of a talk or lecture, a multimedia presentation, a performance, or combination thereof. Each presentation is preceded by an extended conversation between the artist and curator.
About the artist: Alex Waterman is a composer, performer, producer, and scholar, exploring how social bodies can live and interact with one another in more musical ways. He has created a diverse body of works including sound installations, television operas, film and video works, exhibitions, amateur choral works, radio and film scores, and solo performances as a cellist, electronic musician and storyteller. His installation works, films and music productions have been exhibited throughout the US and Europe including at the ICA London,The Kitchen, the Swiss Institute,The Rotterdam Film Festival, the St. Louis Museum, and the Whitney Museum and many others. In a collaboration with Robert Ashley for the 2014 Whitney Biennial, he built a television studio and installation space inside the Whitney Museum and produced three operas by Ashley. In November 2017 he presented his first solo opera at the Donaueschingen Musiktage in Germany. Waterman has recorded over thirty records in multiple genres, as a performer, arranger, and producer, including many contemporary classical and avant-garde albums, grammy-nominated jazz albums, and rock records. Waterman has taught at Bard College (MFA program), NYU, Bloomfield College, and the Banff Centre for the Arts. He was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Wesleyan University from 2015-18 and currently teaches at Ramapo College of New Jersey.
Wave Farm Property Installation News
Updates From The Pond
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to seize the world economy, some anthropogenic sounds have dramatically receded, revealing the sonic artifacts of more-than-human ecologies that go un-noticed in “normal” times. Research projects like Silent Cities are gathering data to quantify these ecoacoustic changes, and field-recordists have been uploading constantly to the Soundscapes in the Pandemic project on the Radio Aporee sound map.
Here at Wave Farm, live streaming projects like Soundcamp's TSAC1 (Test Site of Acoustic Commons 1) and Pond Station mark these changes in real time. Pond Station is a floating platform that has been broadcasting the underwater sounds of Wave Farm's pond since 2015, giving voice to the lifecycles of many hidden invertebrates, plants, and the occasional beaver. The station itself has endured many cycles of freezing, thawing, breaking, fixing, and breaking again. This Spring we discovered that water had infiltrated the electronics, rendering it mute just in time for the increased activity of summer.
Over the summer I took advantage of the pause in Wave Farm's programming to self-isolate with Pond Station and perform some long-overdue maintenance: I cleaned and repaired the floating chassis, installed a new electronics enclosure (with a leak sensor this time!), replaced the flooded dynamic-range compressor with a new design, moved the light sensor to a better position, and made the telemetry system more reliable (to track the long-term health of the station). Under the water I installed new hydrophones and upgraded the aluminum tripods that anchor them to the bottom.
As I type this on a late summer day in Brooklyn, Pond Station is sounding better than ever, broadcasting an interspecies dialog that I've come to find as fascinating as any human composition. Helping the station endure the weather is my small gesture toward helping us all endure our entanglement with the viral ecology that surrounds us.
Please help us keep WGXC transmitting on your FM dial!
Don't let us fade away.
Wave Farm's WGXC needs your financial support. In these extraordinary and unprecedented times we know there are many worthy organizations in need. We hope that you consider Wave Farm among them.
Wave Farm remains tirelessly committed to making the airwaves a participatory medium, and WGXC: Radio for Open Ears is one way we achieve this important mission.
Wave Farm programs are made possible, in part, from state and federal art grants, foundation support, earned income derived from curatorial/consulting engagements, but private, tax-deductible, support from individuals like you is a critical part of how we keep WGXC on the air.
We are grateful to the many individuals who have shown their generosity past, present, and future.
Your charitable contributions make a world of difference, now more than ever!
If you value WGXC, and want to keep it a part of your daily life, we ask that you make a tax-deductible contribution to keep local and adventurous content freely available on the Upper Hudson Valley radio dial. Thank you so much for keeping independent voices and sounds on your radio dial.
Wave Farm programs are made possible, in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; the National Endowment for the Arts; the Greene County Legislature through the County Initiative Program, administered in Greene County by the Greene County Council on the Arts; the Alexander and Marjorie Hover Foundation; the T. Backer Fund; the Joseph Family Charitable Trust; and hundreds of other generous individual donors, including WGXC Sustaining Supporters, who provide critical monthly support to Wave Farm's radio station WGXC 90.7-FM.
