Chaque mercredi *Duuu diffuse une émission inédite réalisée par l’une des radios du réseau Radia, groupe international informel de radios libres. Radia se veut un espace de réflexion sur la radio et la création radiophonique d’aujourd’hui.

Cette semaine *Duuu diffuse Variations on a Topography de Lia Kohl pour Wave Farm.

Variations on a Topography is constructed in stratified layers, each containing a recording of a full scan of the AM/FM spectrum from bottom to top and back down again. Tuning through the spectrum in the same place every time, Kohl charts a map of her specific signal, showcasing the geographic specificity of radio and drawing out its topography with additional musical sounds. Cello and synthesizer highlight moments of clarity and static, creating a counterpoint ruled by the dichotomy between them. These “signal sweeps” also offer a sedimentary view of time, capturing multiple 28 minute sections of what would otherwise be completely ephemeral sounds. The recordings, taken over the span of a few months, speak in various ways to the passage of time – the weather gets colder, traffic patterns shift, wars break out. The signal, like a ghostly mountain range, hovers around us.

Lia Kohl is Wave Farm’s fall 2023 Radio Art Fellow. She is a composer, cellist, and sound artist based in Chicago. Her wide-ranging practice includes solo composition and performance, installation, improvisation, and collaboration. Kohl tours nationally and internationally, working in theater, jazz, rock, and experimental contexts. Her work centers curiosity and patience, an exploration of the mundane and profound possibilities of sound.

Chaque mercredi *Duuu diffuse une émission inédite réalisée par l’une des radios du réseau Radia, groupe international informel de radios libres. Radia se veut un espace de réflexion sur la radio et la création radiophonique d’aujourd’hui.
Cette semaine *Duuu diffuse Comfort Noise by Iru Ekpunobi for Wave Farm.

“I have made a mark, and I do not know whether I am drawing or writing. I am thinking about marks and how they collect on a surface. I have accumulated marks, and I believe that this accumulation is at once a drawing, a text, and an archive.”. –Steffani Jemison

Writes Ekpunobi, “Comfort noise, or comfort tone, is synthetic background noise used in radio and wireless communications to fill the artificial silence in a transmission in which low volume levels are ignored by the transmitting device. In a system that disregards sound under a designated threshold, the absence of that sound must be reintroduced to ‘comfort’ the listening ear.

Drawing on Saidiya Hartman’s process of critical fabulation, comfort noise reintroduces speakers and practitioners of love, freedom, and memory in conversation with one another. In this sonic third space, audio samples originating from 1976 to 2023 not only coexist, but collaborate. ”

playlist:
Free, Deniece Williams (1976)
Relation, Anaïs Maviel (2018)
Speaking Freely, bell hooks (2002)
welcome, i are u (2023)
Iru’s Introduction, Bongo Herman (2022)
I Love Myself When I’m Laughing…And Then Again When I’m Looking Mean and Impressive (Zora Neale Hurston Tribute), Imani Uzuri (2016)
DNA Activation, Witch Prophet (2022)
Neptune Frost Q&A: Techno-Spiritual Overtones, Neema Githere + Saul Williams (2022)
Creative Matriarchy, Shantrelle P. Lewis (2022)
Slow tv, Thomas Hellum [Invisibilia Podcast, Season 7 Episode 5] (2021)
Hvnli, KeiyaA (2020)
Theater of the Black Church, Serpentwithfeet [reinventing gospel with complex visions of gay black love] (2018)
Neptune Frost Q&A: Encryption, Saul Williams + Anisia Uzeyman (2022)
How do you preserve freedom?, Anisia Uzeyman (2022)
blessings mantra, iru ekpunobi (2023)
Happy Birthday EmmaB, KillMovesNate (2016)
Othership 23, KMNate + MC Maggley + Aleon + Angel (2023)
Grandma E’s Wishes, Esther Igboko (2019)
Can I Hold The Mic (interlude) + Stay Flo, Solange (2019)
The Phone is a Confessional, Miss Cleo (2022)
Are We African Gods or African American Gods?, Jordan Gallimore + Kristin Dodson [Flatbush Misdemeanors, Season 2 Episode 4] (2022)
Gladys is With Me Right Now, Shantrelle P. Lewis [In Our Mother’s Gardens] (2021)
Grandma E’s Wishes: Remixed, Esther Igboko (2019)
We Wear The Mask / That Survival Apparatus, Maya Angelou (1988)
HAHA, Charlotte Adigéry + Bolis Pupul (2022)

Iru Ekpunobi is Wave Farm’s spring 2023 Radio Art Fellow, a deep listener, DJ, and audiofuturist. A recent graduate of New York University, Ekpunobi began their journey in FM radio as an DJ and show host at WNYU 89.1-FM, where they synthesized Black musicology, revolutionary history, and futurist transmission on a weekly, 90-minute broadcast. Culminating in their undergraduate thesis, Ekpunobi launched Third Space Radio, a digital media project and community radio station exploring sonic transmission as a ‘third place’ where community, education, and love can persist.

· I have undone the sob of the lost echoes…
I have the deep infinite playing in my hands

Become the caress. I don’t want you to limit
your eyes in my body. My road is space.
To travel me is to flee from all paths…
I am the dancing imbalance of the stars.

excerpts from a Julia de Burgos poem entitled, Mi senda es el espacio / My Road is Space

Writes Rivera,“Co-regulating the spectrum: Meanwhile, the wave is a radiophonic river of shifting reflections across neurodivergence and consciousness studies, radio and radar via the electromagnetic spectrum, language and communication, ufology and ET lore, and diasporic musings regarding the political and cultural history of Puerto Rico. Through a dense assemblage of sound design and field recordings, and cut-up bilingual samples from poetry, personal reflections, interviews and archival documentaries, the electromagnetic landscape becomes an imagined extrasensorial, polymorphic, carrier of consciousness; a pulsating presence that is inhabited, and that inhabits, in a myriad of Other ways.

What do you mean when you say “spectrum”? What of “being on another wave-length,” or “the same frequency”? Like tuning a radio, bats from a cave, or flying saucers from the deep waters beneath the island, possible meanings emerge via aqueous transmissions and various slippages of language and meaning. Moving between English and Spanish, the piece utilizes common tropes such as contacts with extra-terrestrials, and autistics and other neurodivergent minorities as aliens with the felt experience of being an other and being othered. At the same time, the piece references a 1901 US Supreme Court ruling (Downes vs. Bidwell) that, in response to categorizing shipments for tax purposes, determined that Puerto Rico and the “new” island territories like Guam and the Virgin Islands were “inhabited by alien races” and “foreign, in a domestic sense.”

In addition, the work is equally inspired by the radical Neuroqueer Theory of Dr. Nick Walker (she/her), an autistic trans scholar and writer, the diasporic longings of Puerto Rican poet, Julia De Burgos, Ida M. Kanneberg’s book, UFOs and the Psychic Factor, and the science fiction of Octavia Butler.

What does is it mean to experience communication differences, sensory sensitivities, or other ways of being? How might these communication differences serve as opportunities to experience time and space differently and/or connect in other ways? How can a bodymind listen to, regulate, and communicate with itself, others, and the environment? Do bodyminds receive and transmit signals to and from beyond the local, and like radio and radar, can the diasporic experience be related?

At times, the listener’s attention is signaled outwardly towards the stars through ominous drones and radio feedback. Simultaneously, a notion of embodiment and grounding is alluded to with the samples of yoga nidra and tai chi explanations, and sounds of shelling habichuelas (Puerto Rican beans) recently grown in Vermont. Woven throughout the piece are field recordings captured while camping across the island in the July of 2022. Serving as textural markers and place-holders of memory, the recordings feature bomba performances, conversations, city ambience during an apagón (black out), and street protests, as well as various environments such as farms, forests, beaches, and caves.

Though a spectrum is defined as “a condition that is not limited to a specific set of values but can vary, without gaps, across a continuum,” the piece ultimately lies in the curious space between the gaps of the spectrum; among the edits, along the time shifts and losses, and across the possible waves and feeling frequencies of meaning and energy.”

Une émission proposée par Wave Farm pour le réseau Radia.fm.

Special thanks to: Wave Farm (Galen Joseph-Hunter and Tom Roe), Gregory Whitehead, Anna Friz, Joan Schuman, Neil Verma; Dr. Mel Houser, Sierra Miller, and the Neurodivergent Community of All Brains Belong VT; Vermont Art Council; and PR, the land and its people across the island and diaspora.

José Alejandro Rivera is a 2022 Wave Farm Radio Art Fellow. Rivera (he/they) is a Puerto Rican, Ohio-born artist, composer, designer, and researcher currently based in SW Vermont. Their layered, place-based practice is informed by a background in music, architecture, and tending land. Working through sound and space to draw on critical cartography, technological ubiquity, systems, and flows of temporalities, José creates evocative, experimental soundworks, geo-notational maps, sound design for podcasts and the moving image, and multichannel, audiovisual installations and performances.