Welcome to "The Radio Art Hour," a show where art is not just on the radio, but is the radio. "The Radio Art Hour" draws from the Wave Farm Broadcast Radio Art Archive, an online resource that aims to identify, coalesce, and celebrate historical and contemporary international radio artworks made by artists around the world, created specifically for terrestrial AM/FM broadcast, whether it be via commercial, public, community, or independent transmission. Come on a journey with us as radio artists explore broadcast radio space through poetic resuscitations and playful celebrations/subversions of the complex relationship between senders and receivers in this hour of radio about radio as an art form. "The Radio Art Hour" features introductions from Philip Grant and Tom Roe, and from Wave Farm Radio Art Fellows Karen Werner, Andy Stuhl, and Jess Speer. The Conet Project's recordings of numbers radio stations serve as interstitial sounds. Go to wavefarm.org for more information about "The Radio Art Hour" and Wave Farm's Radio Art Archive.
"Hieros Logos" by Manuel Rocha Iturbide (2010), introduced by Jos Alejandro Rivera, and Rachel Rosenthal's "Search for the New World Pataphysical Order"A Meditation in Time of War" are featured today. First, in 2010, Manuel Rocha Iturbide created "Hieros Logos," a radiophonic sound work originally commissioned by Radio Clsica of Spain in collaboration with the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofa. The piece was presented at the Alicante Music Festival in 2010 and was also broadcast on Kuntstradio in 2011.
At its core, the work sources the human voice as material for an abstract and imagined landscape, that begins with the sounds of a baby, an old man, and a woman. The piece then flows into field recordings and rhythmic bits, where isolated syllables contribute to what Rocha Iturbide calls, invented electroacoustic sound poetry.
"Hieros Logos" displays Rocha Iturbides masterful treatment of granular synthesis, where snippets of vocals pan seamlessly from left to right, swarming around the listener. Clouds of phonetic elements and beds of time-stretched drones emerge, all of which transform any meaning of language into its musical, emotive, and intuitive elements.
The arc of the piece moves from the individual voice to collective instances that include those of group prayer, labor songs, and poetry. Possible opportunities to decipher the content of these interactions are presented; however, any signification of meaning remains just out of reach. This is perhaps due to the large spaces that the voices were recorded in, the layering of multiple conversations, and the electronic processing with filters, delays, and reverbs. Alternatively, listeners are led down long corridors of melody and feeling, lined with shifting, sonic exchanges that fade delicately into a distant nothingness. In essence, Hieros Logos questions the sanctity of the word as the supreme container of knowledge, and instead, highlights the spiritual undertones of the voice that exist before the word is given meaning. - Introduced by Wave Farm Radio Art Fellow 2022, Jos Alejandro Rivera.
Also featured is Rachel Rosenthal's "Search for the New World Pataphysical Order"A Meditation in Time of War" from the New American Radio archive. What has happened to us? After the promise of 1990, we find ourselves catapulted back to the time when brute force solved all problems. 1991 is an historic blight. Rosenthal goes on a tour of her own mind in an attempt to discover the seeds of universal folly. The "New World Order" promises to fall in step with Pere Ubu, wading and waddling in his Pataphysics philosophy, shouting "merde!" at the scud fragments raining on the sands of Eden, as Mere Ubu knits little sweaters for crude coated cormorants. All voices and sounds by Rachel Rosenthal with sound design by Dain Olsen. Commissioned by New American Radio.
Wave Farm is a non-profit arts organization driven by experimentation with broadcast media and the airwaves. A pioneer of the Transmission Arts genre, Wave Farm programs provide access to transmission technologies and support artists and organizations that engage with media as an art form. Major activities include the Wave Farm Artist Residency Program; Transmission Art Archive; WGXC 90.7-FM: Radio for Open Ears, a creative community radio station based in New Yorks Upper Hudson Valley; a Fiscal Sponsorship program; and the Media Arts Assistance Fund in partnership with NYSCA Electronic Media/Film. EVERGREEN EPISODE 093.
Manuel Rocha Iturbide, Rachel Rosenthal
A show where art is not just on the radio, but is the radio.
00:59:12
1
Nov. 3, 2022
Produced for Wave Farm in the Hudson Valley in New York.
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