Part one of a radio suite in three parts, traversing alternately sibillant and sonorous seas of static. Sailors and dreamers encountered. Maps are lost. FM transmissions modulated live, using two micro-watt FM transmitters and a muster of radios. 

This is a mix made from a live performance about radio, made with radio, broadcast to radios. I use micro-watt FM transmitters to broadcast on two frequencies to a series of receivers suspended from the ceiling in the venue, thus enabling the low-fidelity radios to dialogue with one another, and with deeper sounds emanating from a set of the speakers in the ceiling. Sound sources include voice, accordion, electronics, and live sampled radio noise and programming.

Anna Friz: Radio is everywhere in their dreams #1

Radio CRTX began as a live performance for voice, accordion, electronics, walkie-talkies, and micro-watt FM transmitters and receivers, created for the Third Coast Audio Festival in Chicago 2003. This recording was composed especially for "Radio Territories", an anthology of new writing on radio and radio art, published by Errant Bodies Press, 2006. Indoor/outdoor/in-car field recordings of sonar and other radio debris recorded at free103point9 Wave Farm in Acra, NY.

Radio CRTX.mp3

A radiophonic piece for live performance, radio intervention, and broadcast as an ersatz radio play. When I was young I half-believed that there were little people living inside the radio--what happens if they decide to try to communicate with one another when we, the Ears, are asleep? What do they do when I turn off the radio?
This version created in 2002, remixed in 2011. For more info check out nicelittlestatic.com

The Clandestine Transmissions of Pirate Jenny (excerpt)

Part 1 of a longer piece entitled For the time being: clock radio mix (2010), commissioned by Aanen Lumo festival of sound, and YLE radio, Helsinki Finland. For more details:
http://nicelittlestatic.com/sound-radio-artworks/for-the-time-being/ 



For the time being: clock radio mix (part 1)

One of an ongoing series of pieces about radio and timekeeping. http://nicelittlestatic.com

Uncoordinated Universal Time

Excerpt from the suite of pieces "Dancing Walls Stir the Prairie", by Anna Friz and Eric Leonardson. Created at the free103point9.org Wave Farm, 2007.

Waltz of the Parking Meters (Anna Friz + Eric Leonardson)

Vacant City Radio explores vacancy and abandonment in the urban center, and the rare pause in activity surrounded by the otherwise churning urban soundscape. I focused on these moments of transition between the monumental industrial past and the generic, gentrifying present, and the highly evocative nature of the sounds found in these empty buildings. Vacant City Radio considers ebbs in place and memory through ephemeral sonic and radiophonic representations of city, through lost sounds found in the dark halls of the factory and the radio dial.

From 2001-2002 I recorded the soundscapes of abandoned factories and wharehouses along the Lachine Canal in Montréal. In the intervening years, all of these unique acoustic spaces are now lost – either demolished entirely or renovated into condominiums. I linked these field recordings touring specific empty places with more ethereal cities of radio and memory: the ‘lost’ cities on the shortwave dial. Many transistor radios, particularly from Europe, were designed with the names of cities in place of frequencies on the dial, but as shortwave broadcasting is in decline and as stations migrate to other positions on the dial, tuning to these frequencies often yields only static.

Vacant City Radio was developed during an artist residency at the Western Front, Vancouver in 2005. It first aired on ORF Kunstradio(Austria) on May 29, 2005. It has subsequently been featured on independent radio stations across Canada, as well as WKCR (New York City),free103point9 (Brooklyn), DeutschlandRadio Berlin, Ars Sonora, Spain, and many others. It was released as a limited edition of 350 CDs (now sold out).

Vacant City Radio

Anna Friz is a radio, sound and media artist, who creates broadcasts, compositions, installations, short films, and live performances. She continually returns to themes of transmission ecologies and the intimacies of signal space, environment and land, infrastructures, time perception and durational performance, and critical fictions. Anna is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow, and has been a Rydell Visual Arts Fellow, a Hellman Fellow, and a Prix Palma Ars Acoustica awardee, along with numerous grants and commissions. Her radio artworks have been commissioned by national public radio in Canada, Australia, Austria, Finland, Germany, Denmark, and Spain, and heard on public and independent airwaves all over the world. Presentation in recent years include Ars Electronica Festival (Linz, Austria), The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, the New York Times Magazine, esc Median Kunst Labor (Graz, Austria), Tsonami Festival de Arte Sonoro (Valparaíso and Santiago, Chile), Heroines of Sound Festival, Berlin Germany), Soundhouse at the Barbican (London UK), Espace Multimedia Gantner (Belfort France), and RE:SOUND Festival (Aalborg, Denmark), and Bienal Sur, Argentina. Anna is currently Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media at University of California, Santa Cruz. 
http://nicelittlestatic.com

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