Anton Mobin & Denis McCarty
Lost Frequencies
24:14

Lost frequencies is a sound art composition that started with a project called Bye Bye FM. Bye Bye FM responded to a political announcement that threatened to cancel the small and free radio stations in France.

The collective H.A.K. (Ayato, Denis McCarty and Anton Mobin) began recording AM and FM commercial French radio stations. All radio sources were collected through a common sound bank and traded by email. All of the short sequences were placed sequentially, one after the other, to assemble the 24 minute composition.

http://theradius.us/episode06

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Episode 06: Anton Mobin & Denis McCarty

Osvaldo Cibils
h88h
28:25

h88h was made using radio field recordings (Rovereto, Italy, 2010), desk recordings (Trento, Italy, 2011), cassette (POLE music fragment, 2001), CD-R (computer sounds experiments, 1997-2001), software sounds (Linux MultiMedia Studio, RolloSonic, Mixxx, Acid v1.0.), and a Midi keyboard controller.

http://theradius.us/episode08

Episode 08: Osvaldo Cibils

Noé Cuéllar
Quiver 1
30:44

Quiver 1 is a conceptual composition for solo voice transecting original vibrations over present, past, and future notions of transmission. The text-based score draws imaginary and concrete references, to be interpreted by means of the performers’ premeditated imagination, immediate intuition, and underlining knowledge; and be used as receptacles for autonomous, formulaic, oracular, and/or abstract prompts for vocal explorations. Composed for and executed by vocalist Kristin Hayter.

The program will be prologued by the graphic score Harrow/Dormant (2010) performed by Jeff Gburek (guitar & electronics), and epilogued by Karolina Ossowska (violin), sound artists and musicians currently based in Poznań, Poland.

http://theradius.us/episode09

Episode 09: Noé Cuéllar

Sara Pinheiro
Quem Contra Um Conto, II
08:06

Quem Conta Um Conto, II is a study in narrative, Pinheiro’s main subject of research. The individual sounds in the piece grow as characters, based on film theorist Chris Vogler’s twelve stages of the Hero’s Journey. Pinheiro juxtaposes sound spaces to join together disparate times and places; she ignores the physical impossibilities of their junction in order to potentiate the conflict that can emerge from their friction.

http://theradius.us/episode14

Episode 14: Sara Pinheiro

Radio Cegeste
dear friends who have died are all talking to me tonight / all at once
24:55

Continuing the "species of spaces" series of programs which spatially sonifies gallery spaces via small-scale transmission, Radio Cegeste set up a mini FM radio programme after midnight in the empty room of artist-run space Rice And Beans, run throughout 2011 by a small collective in the inner city of Dunedin, New Zealand, on the final day of the space’s lease.

As a site-specific, spectator-less, solo performance, "dear friends who have died are all talking to me tonight / all at once" re-constructs and re-imagines personal and public memory through the medium of transmission, as an appropriate framework for uncertain, shifting structural and social realities. Small clusters of radio receivers, constantly shifted around the space, pick up the signal from a stationary mini FM transmitter. These receivers also engage with each other, chattering and heterodyning, becoming analogous to groups of people talking, and the social space of a gallery opening. Such chatter interjects the night airwaves of Dunedin, full of noise, clashing frequencies, and etheric vocal infiltrations, into what is usually perceived as the bounded space, silence and temporal amnesia of the ‘white cube’.

The piece narrowcasts back a sound library of 5 minute recordings collected during a single afternoon (March 18, 2009) spent wandering around the gallery sector of another New Zealand city, Christchurch. These were originally transmitted as a five minute mini FM event score called gallery attention conglomerate for a project at Christchurch artist-run space marsupial gallery. The recordings, originally intended as a series of ‘blank’ gallery silences, everyday, ephemeral phonographies, now have unintended archival, documentary and emotional grit, due to the fact that the 8 spaces they captured now literally do not exist, one consequence of the earthquakes which have devastated Christchurch since late 2010, and have rendered the gallery district of High Street, alongside the entire inner city, inaccessible, in a limbo of amnesiac stasis, uncertainly awaiting new spatial configurations.

The traces of the Christchurch spaces’ architectural and social specificities, including footsteps, familiar voices, and the silences of the particular artworks they contained at the time of recording, become imperfectly audible in Dunedin’s airwaves for an hour, revealing the irrepeatable specificties of the original recordings, their silences’ absence of homogeneity and blankness. The spatial memories of the eight lost Christchurch art spaces in question together comprise a sound archive, which infiltrates in a synergistic manner into another space with its own specific memory, as Rice and Beans, as well as being a gallery, has been a living space and studio for artists and musicians for decades. encouraging a meta-reflection on the ways in which non-profit art project spaces and groups function as a mercurial part of the urban built environment, often tucked away up three flights of stairs inside older architecture, or flourishing in temporary configurations, the field recordings’ cyclic loops, broken off-frequency oscillations, doppler effects, and garbled spatial conglomerations created a mapping of the city of Christchurch inside the Dunedin space, and further conflated the everyday sounds of Rice And Beans’ last night of existence in its current form, to create a “graveyard shift” live radio program of poignant materialities, an un-monumental memorial. Calling attention to such historic, if invisible palimpsests, seems important to counter the drive toward urban gentrification after disaster events, the re-writing of a map which privileges commercial infrastructure, at the expense of the older places where not-for-profit spaces flourish.

http://theradius.us/episode23

Episode 23: Radio Cegeste

Joseph Kramer
Porous Notion: Index Fragments and Interpretations
30:14

"Porous Notion: Index Fragments and Interpretations" is the presentation of select recordings from the ongoing sonic/material archive, "Imperfect Index". These are private snapshots of home, simultaneously captured on and created by a system consisting of a specialized tape recorder and customized cassettes.

This mechanism, typically employed as a performance instrument, both records onto the custom tape and plays it back in turn. The result is a system that makes a record of the sonic space that also reproduces the recording from moments ago while simultaneously recapturing its own output. The system continuously collects new bits of sound that have either originated in the space, passed in through the window or electrical wiring, or leaked into the electronic circuitry of the device. These new sounds join the already recorded sounds in the accumulating sonic image as certain parts of the spectrum are reinforced while others are smeared away.

Documentary fragments, iterative overlappings, and intuitive reorganizations from this set of archival cassettes will be presented over the course of multiple broadcasts emanating from the gallery space at 6018NORTH as part of the exhibition "Home: Public or Private?".

http://theradius.us/episode31

Episode 31: Joseph Kramer

ShortWaveMusic
«ALL NIGHT FLIGHT»
01:10:58

«ALL NIGHT FLIGHT» is an immersive nocturnal ambient sound excursion in honor of World Listening Day 2013. «ALL NIGHT FLIGHT» is a wide-ranging sonic odyssey which reflects ecologies of many kinds: environmental (ocean sounds, wildlife, atmospheres), religious (calls to prayer and ritual singing), radiophonic (data transmissions, Morse code, folkloric music), and beyond. The listener experiences “natural” sounds juxtaposed with “unnatural” sounds, robotic speech mixed with human speech, field recordings of electronic amplification carrying human sound across rural environments. Weiskopf’s hope is that the listener will be able to hear the world as he does: an endlessly recombinant sonic field where every noise, song, and sound, regardless of its source, takes its place in a perfect, haunting, and eternal arrangement.

Performances started between 9 and 10 PM PST and run all night, mixed continuously, until 5 or 6 AM. Weiskopf rejects traditional concert settings in favor of remote, rural, desert, or undocumented areas.

This edition, produced exclusively for Radius, is a 73-minute distillation of the inaugural «ALL NIGHT FLIGHT» performed, created, and mixed live by Myke Dodge Weiskopf in the desert of Joshua Tree, California, on 20 July 2013, 10 PM - 5 AM PST.

Myke Dodge Weiskopf / Waves of Waves
2013-05-21 - Barrington Hills, IL - Mower and Birdsong
Radio Cairo / 11885 kHz, 5/22/2005 (xxxxUTC)
Myke Dodge Weiskopf / BBC
Myke Dodge Weiskopf / Dark Radio
Soft Sea of Radioteletype: 6363 kHz, 11/13/2003 (0635UTC)
BBC Early NICAM Test, 1980s
Myke Dodge Weiskopf / Song of Encouragement
2013-05-28 - Barrington Hills, IL - Late Night Storm with Airplane
VNG Australia / 5000 kHz, x/xx/2001 (1036UTC)
Myke Dodge Weiskopf / Three Note Oddity (All Night Flight Remix)
NHK Nagoya Broadcasting JOCB / 2011-03-11 - Nagoya, Japan - Emergency Tsunami Evacuation Warning
Myke Dodge Weiskopf / Incipit Vita Nova (JP Jones Split Infinitives RMX)
2013-03-16 - Hilham, Socotra - Waves over gravel beach
Fuzz Noise Drone: 8677 kHz, 5/17/2005 (2355UTC)
RA-1 Channel One / 1991 - Rockford, IL - Mysterious Telephone Loop
Myke Dodge Weiskopf / Attack Warning (All Night Flight Remix)
Stephen Barncard / 2011-07-16 - San Francisco, CA - Foghorns of the Golden Gate
Radio Ukraine International / The Dream by Valentin Silvestrov: 7440 kHz, 5/20/2005 (0200UTC)
2013-01-26 - Phelan, CA - Distant Trains at Mormon Rocks
Myke Dodge Weiskopf / Radio Tone Piece (All Night Flight Remix)
M08: 10715 kHz, 7/22/2003 (0210UTC)
Myke Dodge Weiskopf / Interlude 2: Faders
Radio Stations WWV & WWVH / New Station IDs, 1972 (0358–0403 GMT)
Frequency Intermingling: 6185 kHz, 11/13/2003 (0345UTC)
Myke Dodge Weiskopf / AF447
WFAA-TV, Dallas-Ft. Worth, TX / Station Sign-Off, early to mid-1970s

All pieces recorded, collected, and/or composed by Myke Dodge Weiskopf (1991-2013) except:

“Foghorns of the Golden Gate” recorded by Stephen Barncard (San Francisco, CA 2011)
“WFAA-TV, Dallas-Ft. Worth, TX / Station Sign-Off, early to mid-1970s” by Kosan Chim

http://theradius.us/episode42

Episode 42: ShortWaveMusic

Anna Friz
Radiotelegraph
16:08

Friz’s Radiotelegraph is a sending of a radiotelegraph in spoken morse code from the Skaftfell Center for Visual Art in the small town of Seyðisfjörður on the east coast of Iceland where she is undertaking a two-month residency. Seyðisfjörður is located in a deep fjord off the Atlantic Ocean just shy of the Arctic Circle, and was the site of the first telegraph cable connection between Iceland and Europe in 1906. 1906 was also the year of the first audio transmission of the human voice by wireless means undertaken by Reginald Fessenden on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean at Brant Rock, Massachusetts.

Radiotelegraph is a beacon simulcast by a private low-watt transmitter in Seyðisfjörður (on 107.1 FM) and by Radius Chicago (88.9 FM) at sundown Seyðisfjörður time, for a period of five days in October. The beacon signals the descent of the sun into the northern night. Voice, electronics, and radio signals, all recorded and mixed at Hóll, Seyðisfjörður.

http://theradius.us/episode44

Episode 44: Anna Friz

Alyssa Moxley
Infinity = Zero
31:16

In Jorge Luis Borges’ story “The Library of Babel,” the world is made up of an infinite network of hexagonal libraries containing all possible iterations of books with 410 pages and 22 characters. Books can resemble each other in all but one letter. Some volumes can be read in multiple languages with entirely different interpretations. Others have meaning only coincidentally. The librarians who inhabit this world are overwhelmed with information, most of which is nonsense. In a search for deliberate meaning, many wander through the libraries in a quest for the Crimson Hexagon, a library containing books of small format, illustrated, magical, and containing revelatory insight.

For Infinite = Zero, Alyssa Moxley produces the conditions for radio listeners to sculpt senseless cacophonies into form through their movement as they walk the halls and navigate obscure corners of the stairwells of 37 South Wabash, Chicago. In a participative choreography beginning at The Joan Flasch Artist Book Collection in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, listeners will take the path of those who search for the archival material of insight and meaning within books, people, objects, and architecture. Fractured and collaged narratives create ambiguous worlds where the fictional world of hexagonal libraries interacts with the environment of the Sharp building’s hallways and archival collections.

http://theradius.us/episode45

Episode 45: Alyssa Moxley

D. Burke Mahoney
Fading Signals (Dead Air)
13:13

Fading Signals (Dead Air) is the culmination of Mahoney’s scanning and recording airwaves, searching for elusive radio signals that had supposedly been rendered obsolete by digital transmissions. Late one night, while scanning, Mahoney made a single 13 minute recording using a 1956 National NC-88 shortwave receiver. This recording became the landscape out of which Fading Signals (Dead Air) evolves. Intuitively adding elements to enhance the original recording, Mahoney draws the listener into this sonic environment. His addition of subtle tones and melodies encourages the listener to create his or her own narrative to a story which, quite literally, appeared out of thin air.

http://theradius.us/episode47

Episode 47: D. Burke Mahoney

Radio Aktiv
Sonic Deep Map
01:30:20

Sonic Deep Map consists of various recorded materials gathered at the Case Pyhäjoki camp for artists, theorists, scholars, cultural producers, and activists that responded to the threat of nuclear power in Pyhäjoki, Finland. Case Pyhäjoki, organized by Mari Keski-Korsu, Hai Art, and the Finnish Bio Art Society among others, took place during August 2013 for two weeks. During Case Pyhäjoki, Radio Aktiv learned about the small town in Finland that is facing possible construction of a nuclear power plant. One of the ways Radio Aktiv decided to process this experience and communicate it to others is through sound and broadcasts.

To produce the audio content for Sonic Deep Map, Radio Aktiv conducted interviews with local activists of the organization Pro Hanhikivi, which is led by two mothers — local community members Hanna Halmeenpää and Helena Maijala — who fight every day to stop the proposed power plant; made field recordings in the stunning seaside landscape of the Hanhikivi Cape; did group vocalization exercises — humming and screaming to conjure the rage and sadness that the threat of the power plant proffers; traveled by boat; and documented the sounds made in a Geiger counter building workshop led by Erich Berger and Martin Howes. Gathering all these sonic elements, sound artist, poemproducer, and electronic musician, Antye Greie-Ripatti, edited them into multiple broadcast-ready programs to be sent out into the world.

http://theradius.us/episode48

Radius Episode 48 is the first episode of GRIDS. GRIDS is a four-part series of radio broadcasts at four electrical production or distribution centers in Chicago that examines energy propagation and distribution.

http://theradius.us/grids

Episode 48: Radio Aktiv

Lia Kohl
Untitled Radio (futile, fertile) 
23:14

The basis of Lia Kohl’s Untitled Radio (futile, fertile) is a series of improvisations with live radio static, created while in residence at ACRE in northwestern Wisconsin. ACRE is situated outside of Steuben, WI, an area rural enough that pockets of it get little to no radio signal. Instead, the FM signal offers a rich and varied palette of drones, percussive stutters and pops, prompting the ear to invent myriad sonic architecture: harmonies, melodies, landscapes. Kohl is drawn to the radio for its particularly physical expression of sound; these waves are all around us, all the time; broadcasting weather and emergencies and prayers and pop tunes, we only have to turn it on to hear them. These long recordings of static have a futile and fertile quality: full of possibility, transmitting nothing. Though these radio improvisations could stand on their own as musical objects, here they serve as scores or guides for further response. This work is a collection of four of these responses, utilising synthesiser, cello, voice, and processed field recordings. Kohl’s responses to these scores can vary dramatically in each realisation. Sometimes specific tonalities or clear melodic fragments emerge, other times she is more struck by noise, or focused on a close recreation of the static sound. She is careful not to impose preconceived restrictions on the process, offering herself the opportunity for present and attentive listening, honoring the fact that listening is a responsive act. There is no single sonic truth. The more often she explore this practice, the more it changes.

http://theradius.us/episode94

Radius

Untitled Radio (futile, fertile)

Episode 94: Lia Kohl

Brandon Bauer
Transmission: Hectic Mix
14:48

The sound collage Transmission: Hectic Mix was originally created in 1999 and conceived for a pirate radio broadcast on the eve of the year 2000. The work is a collage of radio broadcasts, analog media and film samples, static, and noise textures that reflects the apocalyptic discourse surrounding the turn of the millennium while offering voices of hope and resistance.

http://theradius.us/episode69

Episode 69: Brandon Bauer

Paul Kayhart
Night
19:11

Paul Kayhart’s Night was completed at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA) in 2013. The broad intent of the work is to evoke a psychological sense of nighttime. With threads running through the piece that are mystifying, forlorn, frightening, or intriguing, the soundscape aims to conjure a sense of interrupted dreams, nightmares, and the rush of thoughts and worries that often accompany a sleepless night.

The making of this piece was influenced by the occurrence of a derecho (a straight-line storm with hurricane force winds and accompanying tornados) that passed through the American South that July and arrived without warning at VCCA during an artists’ gathering in the studio complex on the third night of Kayhart’s stay at the residency. The sounds of intense wind, flying branches, and trees falling were remarkable, and suddenly VCCA was without power. The temperatures were in the high 90s to low 100s, so the lack of fans and air conditioning became burdensome. The outage was widespread, and it was 10 days before power was restored at the location. Kayhart worked on the piece for the remainder of his stay, recording and editing everything on portable equipment. He and his fellow residents scouted the nearby towns during daylight hours in the hopes of finding public buildings that still had power or had power restored so that they could charge their batteries. The power was still out when he departed on the train for home.

http://theradius.us/episode71

Episode 71: Paul Kayhart

Lindsey french
non attachment to the ground
01:11:07

Think of a plant. Is it a tree? Or is it a houseplant?

The ground is the basis of the terrestrial environment, where the normative plant is rooted. Without the ground there would be no sky, or without the sky we would know no ground. The ground is our grounds of habitation and habit. We habitually water our houseplants. Plants turn the air into ground. Plants disappear into the background. Plants are the background, but they transmit promiscuous signals and receive them, too. When the glaciers melted they deposited seeds.

The midwest is a flattened ground, a hosting substrate of swampy soil, a flatness between the coasts. Chicago sits atop this plane, a plain that was the bottom of the ancient glacial Lake Chicago. Imagine tall trees in a swamp. Chicago’s early skyscrapers floated on clay, the floors now tilting, artifacts of settling into the uneven and shifting layers of muddy glacial deposit. Midway through the century an attachment to the bedrock anchored new buildings taller and upright, this attachment affording their heroic reach upward. The tallest building in Chicago is tallest at its antenna.

An epiphyte is a type of plant that has no attachment to the ground. Growing on trees or other raised surfaces, the relationship is neither symbiotic nor parasitic. The roots of an epiphyte seek darkness, extending downward along the surfaces of its grounded hosts toward the shade of the forest floor. Epiphytes are over-represented in the houseplant world, as they can withstand the darker interiors of buildings. The houseplants in Chicago recede into the interiors of buildings attached to the bedrock beneath the city’s flat glacial lake or floating precariously on slabs of swampy clay.

Lindsey french’s non attachment to the ground reaches down in non-attachment to the ground, a promiscuous transmission in an extended moment of transition and cautious optimism to the bedrock beneath Chicago.

http://theradius.us/episode73

Radius Episode 73 is the first episode of GROUND. GROUND is a three-part, site-specific commissioned radio series that focuses on radio’s direct physical connection to the Earth.

http://theradius.us/ground

Episode 73: Lindsey french

Anthony Janas
Water Has Nothing To Say And Neither Do I
46:28

Water Has Nothing To Say And Neither Do I is a site-specific sound piece for treated boat and radio. Taking inspiration from treated piano techniques developed by John Cage, Anthony Janas treated a 25 foot sailboat with hydrophones and contact mics and processes them through a modular synthesizer. During the course of the vessel’s journey from the Adler Planetarium to the 31st Street Beach, the water, waves, and wind perform the piece with Janas acting as the conductor on the ship. A radio broadcast antenna placed on the vessel transmits the performance to the audience on shore. Audience members, provided with handheld radios, are encouraged to walk up and down the shore to observe the boat from afar and listen to the interactions of their environment with the composition produced on the vessel.

http://theradius.us/episode74

Radius Episode 74 is the first episode of GROUND. GROUND is a three-part, site-specific commissioned radio series that focuses on radio’s direct physical connection to the Earth.

theradius.us/ground

Episode 74: Anthony Janas

Darsha Hewitt
Regarding Obsolescence: Reference clips from restoration of a very old drum machine
17:10

In 2015 Darsha Hewitt restored a Wurlitzer Sideman 5000. The Sideman was invented in 1959, and is often referred to as the world’s oldest commercially available drum machine. It is very big and old, it has moving parts and some very old vacuum tube technology. Hewitt spent the better part of a year tracing her way through old schematics, extracting busted capacitors and patching into it dusty circuitry with an oscilloscope. But mostly, she spent a lot of time somewhere between being perplexed, enchanted and overwhelmed by how this machine worked and in turn, how she would explain it in an accessible manner for a series of experimental educational videos for the internet. At every stage of this project, the Sideman generated sounds - sometimes they where the ‘right’ sounds that were danceable, sometimes they were merely mechanical sounds, and sometimes the machine churned out unexpected sounds that only happened once or twice during the process of getting it up and running. Making recordings was an important way of documenting the process and helped her recall how the machine sounded throughout the different steps of the restoration. The episodes presented are samples of some of the reference clip Hewitt made for herself and act as a window into some of the sounds that the machine made through this process.

http://theradius.us/episode76

Episode 76: Darsha Hewitt

Will Krauland
Location
12:45

During my residence in Chicago, I lived across the street from the Chicago Fire Department for two years. I still remember the first time the sirens pierced my windows, redirecting my attention away from the computer screen and toward my neighbors. As time progressed, the sirens began to drone out of my domestic experience. I began to fill my living space with objects that absorbed both the sound and my attention. We were, then, simultaneously present in the same space, but not aware of each other. Two years later, the last thing I removed from that apartment was an old sofa. My friends were going to meet me and take it to their new apartment, which was located down the street from where I was moving. As I waited for them to arrive, a siren once again abruptly entered my attention and slowly faded into the distance, and I reached back into the memory of that first day.

Location concurrently explores the relationships between a sound and its environment, and a sound and the objects located within an environment. Utilizing pink noise as a medium, Location seeks to blur the lines between specific transmitted sounds, coincidental existing sounds, and objects present in a listening environment. This work will be broadcasted twice. The first broadcast of Location will be transmitted forthright, but the later broadcast of the work will be transmitted in reverse—simulating a departure and return. This gesture is thus intended to send the listener off and then welcome them upon their return, creating a loop. Though the sounds transmitted do not change, except for their direction, the things around it do, over time.

http://theradius.us/episode77

Episode 77: Will Krauland

Billy Roisz
BLUE/RED
17:20

BLUE/RED refers to the phenomenon of chromostereopsis, a visual illusion where the impression of depth is conveyed in two-dimensional color images, usually red-blue or red-green.

BLUE/RED consists of two sections: BLUE and RED. Each part is a one-take recording in my studio on a hot sunny afternoon in July 2017. It was a lazy afternoon, so my self-imposed rule was to use only one instrument (plus extensions like effect pedals) for one set.

For the BLUE recording I played my electric-bass guitar—petting and hitting it with a necklace and a screw driver, and feeding the signal through a distortion and a freezer pedal. I really like the physical interaction between the body, the instrument, and the moment, and when this viscerality and tactility is transferred into sound.

For the recording of RED my only instrument was my Roland sampler—stuffed with excerpts of live recordings of various projects I am involved with—some of my solo shows, performances with The Elks (a quartet with Marta Zapparoli, Liz Allbee, and Kai Fagaschinski), a duo with Peter Rehberg, and one with drummer ddkern. I played these samples and fed them back into the machine, added effects, played it back, fed it back again. The sonic-feedback cloud grew and grew, until it unloaded itself as sonic rain and electric storms, then it grew some more. 

BLUE/RED was recorded, mixed, and mastered at Sperrmuecc Studios on July 22, 2017. It was a sunny afternoon, 30° C.

Thanks to Dieter Kovacic for recording equipment and mastering.

Notes:

Radius Episode 80: Billy Roisz was guest curated by Elisabeth Zimmerman. Elisabeth Zimmermann is a cultural manager living in Vienna, Austria. She studied at the International Centre for Culture and Management (ICCM) in Salzburg and has been involved in organizing, coordinating, and curating radio art projects, symposia, CDs, publications, and international telematic art projects. She has held various presentations and lectures on radio-art projects at national and international festivals. Since 1998, she has been the producer of the weekly radio-art program Kunstradio – Radiokunst on the cultural channel of ORF (Austrian National radio). In 1999, she founded Werks—an arts association dedicated to the realization of artistic projects in telecommunications media. She is the vice-chair of the EBU’s EURORADIO Ars Acustica group.

http://theradius.us/episode80

BLUE/RED

Episode 80: Billy Roisz

Anna Friz
Echophone
13:58

I am here. If you can hear this, this message is for you.

Two women rent a room in the Pabst Grand Circle Hotel in New York City in late 1947. Their belongings seem to be comprised entirely of a large number of aluminum postal boxes of the sort used to mail laundry; three bellhops are needed to transport it all up to their room. The women stay for one week, pay in advance, and are not seen during their stay. Over several nights the neighboring rooms complain of strange hums and sounds heard through the walls, disturbing their sleep. Three hotel guests complain of the sudden onset of severe migraine headaches, and request a doctor. The dumbwaiter in the hotel breaks down and is stuck between two floors.

After one week, the hotel staff find the room unlocked and empty. The women are gone, as are their boxes, and the maids discover wires and electronic components on the table and the floor of the room. The dumbwaiter is never repaired.

Four of the aluminum boxes re-appear at MAD this year. Careful inspection reveals that they are radiophonic, each transmitting a single signal to either AM or FM bands. Perhaps they were sent out as probes, recording what they encounter, and then transmitting their findings. The probes have returned as beacons, measuring distance and indicating time passed or times parallel. Four presents from the past.

Responding to the idea that radio measures and allows for relationships over distance and time, Echophone is a radio based installation that reveals itself to visitors as they explore the Museum of Arts and Design, searching for and tuning into transmissions from beacons which are placed throughout its interior. Radios and headphones can be checked out from the admissions desk to experience this piece. Each individual beacon can only be heard in close proximity to its physical location, and are tuned variably to 107.9FM, 1600AM, or 1620AM.

http://theradius.us/episode81

Radius Episode 81 is the first episode of BEACON. BEACON invites commissioned artists to investigate the idea of radio as a signal from afar. Radius BEACON is featured in the exhibition "Sonic Arcade: Shaping Space with Sound" at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City from September 14, 2017 - February 25, 2018.

http://theradius.us/beacon

Episode 81: Anna Friz (Wireless Forces)

Sadie Woods
It Was a Rebellion
01:03:16

Sadie Woods' "It Was a Rebellion" is a site-specific radio broadcast for the fiftieth anniversary of the Chicago “riots” following Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination in April of 1968.

“A riot is the language of the unheard.” - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr

From the days of the Civil Rights Era to Ferguson to Baltimore to downtown Chicago in wake of Laquan McDonald, the public expression of Black rage that escalates into physical confrontation or property damage is often framed as mindless barbarism by authority and mainstream media with the word “riot.” In this sonic exploration, DJ and sound artist Sadie Woods recooperates and challenges our notion of the riot and reframes it as legitimate, even loving, insurgency or rebellion. This performance commemorates Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination, but also his sanitized legacy, redeeming the radical impulses and invasions in the public space that are fundamentally expressions for hope and change. Mixing music from the Civil Rights Era, news reports, speeches, ephemera, and symbolic sounds, Woods takes us on a journey that reverberate with echoes of the unheard.

http://theradius.us/episode84

Episode 84: Sadie Woods

Eric Miller & Patrick Quinn
Limen
37:31

"Limen" explores the dimensions of liminality, or a passing through the threshold between distinct phases, afforded through the use of electromagnets. Binary signals are used to rapidly pulse the magnets on and off, resulting in an analog field. The presentation of various materials to this field produces a wide range of sonic output. Proximity to steel instruments yields acoustic excitation; proximity to dynamic microphones and radios yields audible interference patterns. Throughout Limen, a pre-composed sequence of pulses were presented through magnets, creating a dynamic, yet pre-determined electromagnetic field. Miller & Quinn were free to interact with this field in an improvisatory manner, adjusting parameters of input sources and modifying their proximity to the electromagnets. Several recordings of improvised sessions were then woven together, with the resulting piece existing in the liminal spaces between digital/analog synthesis, improvisation/composition, and real-time/offline production.

http://theradius.us/episode86

Episode 86: Eric Miller & Patrick Quinn

Steve Bates
Black Seas (Radius)
01:15:15

Black Seas is an ongoing body of work under the influence of historical and contemporary experiences of auditory hallucination. After scouring texts from modernist feminist writing to horror and weird literature, cognitive science studies, oral histories, 18th century psychic journals, colonial postcards and “post”-colonial critique, film and music influenced, or traumatized, by hallucination, sound and communications studies, religious tracts, philosophical threads, Situationist diatribes, studies on the psychology of solitary confinement, stories of lost and dying explorers, numerous sound, installation, video and transmission works have emerged.

In the month of March, 2018, Bates was working in Krems an-der-Donau, Austria preparing for a Black Seas Ensemble performance at the Minoriten Church. Over five evenings Bates also did a daily radio broadcast from his studio. Black Seas (Radius) is a reworking of the material broadcast over these sessions and includes feedback, wind noise from a fan, piano resonance, radio static, and production recordings from the church.

http://theradius.us/episode87

Episode 87: Steve Bates

Monte Burrows
Skua
20:19

Monte Burrows’s album Skua consists of two tracks: Winter Winds and False Beach. The album is produced using live recordings of AM radio transmissions manipulated in real time, recorded directly to cassette.

http://theradius.us/episode88

Skua

Episode 88: Monte Burrows

Nicolas Montgermont
Long Waves Scan
26:06

Before the invention of radio and electromagnetic wave theory, Thomas Watson spent time at night listening to the sounds “produced by the telephone” when no one was connected. Later we would learn that electricity travels through the air and that these sounds are natural radio waves heard through long power lines that act as an antenna.

Long Waves Scan is a practice of listening to radio signals blindly. Nicolas Montgermont performed Long Waves Scan live using only a radio set as the sound source. The frequencies that passed through the site were scanned to identify interesting sounds, and then used with a set of effects to modified their timbre and temporal structure. Over time, the frequencies gradually transform into music using only a radio set as a synthesizer.

https://theradius.us/episode89

Long Waves Scan

Episode 89: Nicolas Montgermont

Maria Gaspar
FEEDBACK
10:28

FEEDBACK, by Maria Gaspar, is originally released as a vinyl record housed within an artist book of the same name. FEEDBACK is an audio-visual publication that serves as a living archive of Gaspar’s work over the past seven years around issues of mass incarceration inside and surrounding Cook County Jail. The experimental sound works on the record were developed through a series of workshops led by Gaspar inside Cook County Jail with a group of incarcerated men, collectively called the Radioactive Ensemble for her project and site intervention: Radioactive: Stories from Beyond the Wall. The record is comprised of two works, Side A and Side B, and is an exploration of down-time that glimpses the fusion of boredom with the necessity of expression. The two sound works echo each other, and include outtakes, performances, and experiments recorded by the Radioactive Ensemble inside Cook County Jail, a space of limbo and the in-between.

https://theradius.us/episode90

FEEDBACK

Episode 90: Maria Gaspar (FEEDBACK Side A)

FEEDBACK (Side B)

Episode 90: Maria Gaspar (FEEDBACK Side B)

Hali Palombo
GRAND DETOUR
32:06

GRAND DETOUR is a slow-scan television broadcast and soundscape. Named after an unincorporated census-designated place in Illinois, GRAND DETOUR depicts 32 desolate Midwestern scenes. Empty malls, weathered parking structures, shuttered toll booths and other cast-offs are revealed line-by-line via slow scan television, an increasingly obsolete method of image transmission via radio signal. The SSTV frequencies weave in and out of field recordings taken at the corresponding locations broadcasted, resulting in unnerving, hollow soundscapes punctuated by jarring bursts of data. Slow-scan television is a method of radio communication slowly growing obsolete - a suitable medium by which to portray the Midwestern decay in GRAND DETOUR.

http://theradius.us/episode91

Radius Episode 91 is the first episode of DECADE. Radius DECADE series invites commissioned artists to examine slowness, calling attention to radio’s relationship to time. 

http://theradius.us/decade

GRAND DETOUR

Episode 91: Hali Palombo

DinahBird & Jean-Philippe Renoult
The Gold Line
17:27

In 2016 DinahBird & Jean-Philippe Renoult began Antenna Gods, a composite art project on the use of radio waves by high frequency traders. In June 2018 they undertook a journey between the New York stock exchange, now a data centre in Mahwah, New Jersey, and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in Aurora, West Chicago. The time it takes for data to be transmitted from one centre to the other via a network of microwave repeaters is 4.01 milliseconds, faster than the blink of an eye. These microwave repeaters are placed on towers that follow a geodesic path between the two exchanges. The actual route of the towers takes you over the Allegheny mountains of rural Pennsylvania and past many an Amish homestead, through the flat plains of Ohio, and in front of the immaculately mowed lawns and the blue ‘Make America great again’ flags of Indiana. Some of the towers are a requisition from the AT&T long lines network and can be found at the end of long dusty roads where the presence of new comers is instantly noticed. Some are new and specially commissioned for the purpose. They are unremarkable, just another shape in amongst the spikey cell phone antennas that litter the interstate. DinahBird & Jean-Philippe Renoult’s ‘slow’ high frequency round-trip along what Chicago traders nick-name the Gold Line, took twenty-four days. Along the way we documented these outposts and their surroundings using image and sound. They learned about the past and present uses of these transmission towers that are both a material memorial to radio history, and a physical reminder of passing time.

http://theradius.us/episode92

Radius Episode 91 is the first episode of DECADE. Radius DECADE series invites commissioned artists to examine slowness, calling attention to radio’s relationship to time.

http://theradius.us/decade

The Gold Line

Episode 92: DinahBird & Jean-Philippe Renoult

Cecilia Tyrrell
Signal
07:27

Blurring the boundaries between land and sea, Signal creates a seascape in constant flux with its identity, ever changing, always in motion.  Sonic topography inspired and partly arranged from recordings made at a sound mirror on the South East coast of England (UK). The mirror itself stands dormant as it waits, facing out away from land. Sound markers and siren warnings, still it listens, quietly detecting.

https://theradius.us/episode93

Episode 93: Cecilia Tyrrell

Radius is an experimental radio broadcast platform established in 2010 in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Radius produces, exhibits, and distributes work by radio and transmission artists from around the world.

Radius features a new project monthly with statements by artists who use radio as a primary element in their work. Radius provides artists with live and experimental formats in radio programming. The goal is to support work that engages the tonal and public spaces of the electromagnetic spectrum.

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