Aether
Aether continues a field recording discipline that extends listening beyond the limits of human perception, revealing electromagnetic environments that exist alongside the audible world. Recorded in three remote locations - the Nevada Desert (2016), St Agnes in the Isles of Scilly (2021) and the Pyrenees (2023)—the works were created using a Stephen P. McGreevy VLF receiver. The environments were chosen for their lack of technological interference, where human-made electromagnetic activity recedes and the Earth’s own radio environment emerges.
Stephen Shiell is a London-based sound artist, improviser, composer and field recordist working across experimental music, radiophonic art and site-responsive practice. His recorded works, live performances, sound walks, and workshops explore listening, gathering and performing as social, ecological and political acts, engaging with sound as a means of understanding place and environment. Drawing on field recordings, found and self-built instruments, electromagnetic sound and live electronics, he creates immersive works spanning solo and collaborative performance, radio and participatory projects. He is a certified Deep Listening practitioner and one half of the duo Blanc Sceol. He works collaboratively through Surge Cooperative on listening-based projects along the Channelsea River in East London.
To communicate is a sci-specific performance, that starts with the installation of an antenna, designed by my father, Sante Gava, radio-amateur till the 70s, with the name IndiaZulu3Charli3IndiaXRay, at the performance site, alongisde with a radio.
“To Communicate” is a composition for radio transmissions, feedback and live electronics by Andrea Gava created in collaboration with Sante Gava.
“To Communicate” is a site-specific performance that begins with the installation of an antenna designed by my father Sante Gava, radio amateur ‘till the late 70s with the name India Zulu Three Charlie India Xray (IZ3CIX), at the performance site, alongside with a radio. The signals captured with it is then processed in real time and combined with live electronics.
My dad has been a radioamatuer since his twenties. He is still very passionate about it. He builds is own antennas and in the past he also used to make them for other people. Probably, in a subconsciuos way, my interest in sounds, noise, electronic instruments and diy comes from this activity as a radioamateur I was exposed to since birth. A few years ago in my musical research process with aleatoric sound sources, soundscapes and improvisation, I started thinking about radio signals and how to incorporate them in my music. I asked my dad if I could listen to some of his sessions. With my adult ears, the ones of a musician and composer with a passion for Pauline Oliveros, John Cage and Murray Schaffer, I discovered some amazing things simply listening to him surfing the radio waves.
There is such a vibrant soundscape hidden in that background noise and the wonder of the research and discovery for someone (or something) out there is so exciting and inspiring. The fact that noise is also a big part of this sonic landscape is pretty important for me: it is a perfect representation of the fact that noise is everywhere, it is the space where we move, the time that we live, it is a sea where we swim, a sound that contains all of the sounds and it is no single one of them.
“To Communicate” cannot exist without my dad. He is an essential part of this composition not only for the technical side of it but also in the final concerts as an active sound element.
I’ve never talked that much with my dad. He is quite descreet and silent about his inner world, his emotions. We haven’t had many conversations during our lifetime about our feelings. Nonetheless we really love and support each other in every situation, both good and bad. But this lack of communication has always bothered me, more and more during the last years. I know that I’m responsible for this too so I decided to make a change: now that we are becoming older I want to try to create a new bridge between us, a way to communicate.
Music and sound. A creative process that involves one of his passions, the radio, specifically conceived to supply this basic human need for connections and communication seemed the perfect way to do it. A way to make things together, to be creative, to talk and to listen, to connect deeply with each other. “To communicate” for me has a personal and emotional value beside its universal meaning.
Of course this is just a little step. It’s an attempt to communicate, in a rudimentary way maybe, and failure is part of the process too. Communication doesn’t work everytime. It is full of compromises, misunderstandings, conflicts, distance. But it is important to try. Again and again. In these dark and violent times where borders and wars are part of our everyday lives to communicate is more necessary than ever. We need to do it. I want to do it. And I will.
“To Communicate” has been performed twice: the first time in May 2025 during “Closer” (https://www.borgodicolleameno.it/portfolio/closer/), a contemporary art exhibition at Villa Davia, Borgo di Colle Ameno, Sasso Marconi, Italy, dedicated to the 150th birthday of Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of the radio, in the same places where he made his first experiments at the end of the nineteenth century. It was played on an acousmounium called Organo Motore, built by Nicola Facchini and Giuseppe de Benedittis (www.organomotore.com). For this performance, I connected via radio with Sante, who transmitted from his home hundreds of kilometers from the concert site.
The second performance took place in February 2026 during “Radia. Mini-festival di radioascolto” (https://radiafestival.com/), at the Memoriale Veneto della grande guerra, Villa Correr Pisani, Montebelluna, Italy. The festival is dedicated to collective radio listening practices: podcasts, contemporary music, sound poetry, listening parties. During this second concert, Sante joined me on stage and performed a radio amateur session. I collected his audio and manipulated it in real time with live electronics, no input mixers and feedback.
Andrea Gava (1990, Italy) is a musician, composer and sound designer.
His work focuses on electroacoustic music and improvisation techniques. He explores the topics of the unexpected, the musical value of broken instruments, of the relationship between man and machine, between presence and absence, of the soundscape as a real space and an imaginary one. His research in the field of electronic music has developed around no-input techniques and the use of audio feedback as the core of his aesthetics.
He plays concerts and records albums both on his own as Andreij Rublev and together with others.
He created soundtracks for theatre, short films, silent movies and contemporary dance performances. He collaborates with cultural institutions, galleries, schools and universities, associations and people from all over the world. He creates online informative content on contemporary music, connecting artists and audience through talks, listening sessions, radio broadcasts and much more.
Don Giovanni Metamorphosen Fragmente
Radio version of the audiovisual performance
Don Giovanni is one of the archetypes of our culture, one of its founding myths. And myth is not an inert fable but an active, creative force, it nourishes, in a surprisingly circular way, the very culture that gave it life.
Over the course of four centuries, Don Giovanni has taken on - or disguised himself in - countless and extraordinarily varied forms.
With this audiovisual project, we seek to explore the recurring and often mutable archetype concealed beneath Mozart’s masterpiece, creating a performance that draws on a contemporary aesthetic and language. Mozart’s music itself undergoes metamorphosis, electronic, sampled and manipulated, from old vinyl records to acoustic renditions, serving as the foundation for literary “evocations” of Don Giovanni, from Tirso de Molina to José Saramago, from Molière to Baudelaire, Hoffmann, Kierkegaard, Byron, and many others. And, of course, the operatic libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte.
The project includes readings, sung passages, and historical recordings of actors’ performances, a sound carousel that conjures the situations, characters, texts, and voices that have given life to the Don Giovanni myth across different historical periods, authors, and its continual metamorphoses. Whether invoking the unrepentant libertine or the punished sinner, the paradise of the senses, the complexity of human relationships, or the hell of damnation.
Paolo F. Bragaglia is an electronic composer born in an entirely analog world, who has stubbornly journeyed into our digital age. Ever fascinated by the metamorphosis of sound across genres, over the years he has expanded his interests toward the intersections between music and moving images, dance, architectural spaces, visual arts, spoken word, and theatre.
This has led to an intense career as a composer of film scores, soundtracks, and multimedia performances, alongside record production, sound art, and sound installations. He is the creator and artistic director of the electroacoustic music festival “Acusmatiq”, held for twenty years in Ancona at the Mole Vanvitelliana, and the founder and president of the Museo del Synth Marchigiano (Museum of the Marchigian Synth)
By Paolo F. Bragaglia
Damian Dombrowski, Chiara Pietroni: narrators
Ludovica Gasparri: soprano
A production of Mozartfest Würzburg
World premiere: June 21, 2019
Modular synthesizer is not merely an instrument but a platform.
The minimalist musical composition, built from a few elements that repeat in cyclical and random patterns, serves as a dreamlike accompaniment to the transformation of the city, narrated through field recordings. It is a sonic narrative of the transition from a contemporary urban landscape to a city of the future, where nature plays a central role in our lives.
Music and Field Recordings by Giacomo Vanelli.
In April 2025, Giacomo Vanelli took part in the fourth edition of Radio Residenze, the series of artistic residencies dedicated to experimental radio and its connections with the performing arts. Hosted at Giardini Pensili in Rimini and organized by Usmaradio – Research Centre for Radiophonic Studies of University of San Marino, Vanelli developed a new work exploring the possibilities of modular synthesis and chance-driven composition. His residency culminated in a live performance broadcast on usmaradio.org, presented as part of the Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day on April 24.
More information about the Radio Residenze project is available at usmaradio.org/radio-residenze
Giacomo Vanelli is a musician known for his deep commitment to ambient and experimental electronic music. Vanelli is distinguished by his innovative approach to composition, where the modular synthesizer is not merely an instrument but a platform for exploring chance and self-imposed limitations. This method allows him to create complex and nuanced soundscapes that reflect a highly personal and introspective creative process.
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Nostalgia for the Androgynous unfolds an ethereal-telluric space for voices and concrete sound, generative drones creating arcane sounds, lo-fi recordings, lyrical witchcraft, high-hovering voices, dazed and processed in glossolalic harmonies progressively embodied in organic and mineral scenarios. Occult soundscapes melt alternative listening paths in a cathartic collision, haunting and refreshing at a time, an atmosphere of ascent and intimacy, ambiguous, nostalgic, and visceral. Serena Dibiase is an experimental vocalist, sound artist, performer, poet. She identifies her artistic and sound productions with the androgynous name Kratu. She carries out her artistic investigation starting from intense physical/respiratory practices and through analogue and not-analogue devices, to listen to radical phonic geographies, choral happenings, interventions on biophonies and geophonies extracted from explorations in abandoned, wild, industrial spaces, in a horizontal treatment of the sources. She collaborates as a sound dramaturg and performer with independent theatre companies, and also working for Biennale Teatro ’22-’23 and disseminating her research in Italian and international festivals. She collaborates as artistic consultant in contexts of social hardship (jale, community outreach centre for addicts), considering these incursions into her broader spectrum of anthro-poetic research. He has been leading Mouth of the landscape, a transversal vocal training and listening workshop. Her EP Nostalgia for the Androgynous released by Oceani Label.
Usmaradio – Centro di Ricerca Interdipartimentale per la Radiofonia (CRIR) / Interdepartmental Research Centre for Radio Studies, is a workplace of The School of Radio to develop an innovative radio pedagogy. Workshops, work sessions, meetings, presentations of live performance as sections of the project. Produced by UNIRSM | Università degli Studi della Repubblica di San Marino. usmaradio.org / theschoolofradio.org / unirsm.sm
Sasayaki o kiitekudasai
Vittoria Assembri is an experimental sound artist and independent researcher in sonic arts and public architecture. Her sound research is about field recording, sound objects, experimental music that reflect on the theme of marginal and liminal territory, in close relationship with urban plans and its crossing (human and non-human).
Her practice develops from site-specific deep listening, focusing on urban dynamics, sociocultural processes and public sphere, with which to rewrite an affective and political landscape of resistance.
Vittoria is currently in Japan since the beginning of May, where she is doing a live performance tour and working on a few artistic residencies’ projects (Kyoto Kinugasa Art Residence for Community in Kyoto, Aomori Contemporary Art Center, Lake Haruna Artist Residence).
This track is a cut-up of her analog and digital recordings around Japan: Haruna and Fuji-san volcanoes, Kinugasa district in Kyoto, tatami’s and bonsai’s artisans in Okayama, izakayas in Shinjuku-Tokyo, Taka-san cellist, nightingale flooring of the Ryōn-ji Temple, shishi odoshi, radio fm-am interferences, jingles and alerts from megaphone loudspeaker, Aomori forest’s fauna, memorial songs from inhabitants and fishermen of the Haruna cadera, etc.
Radia Show 977 : CONTINUUM / Usmaradio
CONTINUUM has been a collaborative radio performance conceived by Roberto Paci Dalò for TACTUS Radio Festival.
The challenge was to work on radical improvisation without any conduction and prior rules giving a maximum of freedom to the participants. Most of the artists, performing from different locations, didn’t know each other and actually never talked to each other before the performance. Obviously the key of the project was an extreme attention during the performance from any single artist: “the art of listening” with 18 people performing together on-site in the Republic of San Marino and remotely from the USA, Germany, and Austria.
What came out was a surprise. A subtle texture of sounds with an amazing quantity of moments of silence despite the massive use of live electronics. The performance somehow proved that the planned lack of conduction can be balanced by the level of attention and involvement from the performers. It was a mesmerizing immersion in an acoustical world where electronics graciously merged with acoustical instruments and voices. A nocturnal winterreise across galaxies.
CONTINUUM intended to develop the praxis of the “telematic performance” which grew up drastically from the beginning of the 90s of the last century. Especially around activators such as the programme ORF Kunstradio in Austria, the Ars Electronica Festival and L’Arte dell’Ascolto radio festival, seminal projects such as Cheap Radio, Horizontal Radio, Rivers&Bridges, Realtime, designed an innovative use of telecommunication technologies witnessing the arrival of the Internet in conjunction with the broadcasting and telephone networks. The artist Robert Adrian was one of the major inspirations for many artists in the field.
Idea: Roberto Paci Dalò
Station manager and general coordination: Alessandro Renzi
Mixing board: Lorenzo Ricci
Post-production and mastering: Alessandro Renzi
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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 Dialogue par The Cave, une émission d’Usmaradio.
A reflection on the community approach of music research, waiving together different methodologies in the making of sound, from improvisation to structured compositions, passing through live set and A\V performance and any kind of other related attitudes.
Radio and technology have always been related each others, as long as the broad of a growing non-real and immaterial space as this media represents its arial forms.
Physical, social, human, collaborative - left free in the sonic flux’s ether, layered of real time samplings, transformations, overdubbing and stratifications.
‘Dialogue’ meant through a vast array of non-similar sound’s applications reaching and sharing a network, a platform for conceiving and creating a peaceful listening zone, dreams and oscillations.
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Jacopo Buda: no-input mixer, trumpet, organ, radio, live electronics; Demetrio Cecchitelli: found sounds, acoustic guitar, radio, live electronics;
And a special intervention by Simone Doria. –
Thanks to Usmaradio for the invitation. –
THE CAVE is an artistic project active in the field of electronic and electroacoustic research music since 2021 and based in Rimini, Italy. The journey started during the pandemic time in which various artists pieces coming from the Italian underground scene, have been streaming live on Usmaradio, the events media partner which also collects them in its archive. Then, it comes through different venues across almost 30 performances in less than two years offering different layers of listening experience to the audience.
Si raggiunge un certo sistema dove l’aria diventa benzina.
IOLANDA MI NANT DE NÒMINI
(audio documentary, 31 minutes, written and directed by STUDIOLANDA, co-produced by Radio Papesse)
SYNOPSIS
Orlanda Sassu, a Sardinian poet and ecologist (1924-2015), carried on a lifelong practice of audio recording to archive the memory of her country and language that she feared to lose. Her voice transcends time barriers and accompanies us to the pivotal places of her existence: the river, the village, the sea, the hut she built around a centuries-old juniper tree on the sand dunes at Pistis, together with her companion Efisio, himself a poet.
Iolanda, thus known to the community, has entrusted the magnetic tapes she used to record on, with the power to make her travel through time, to the future, coming down to us as a living, present voice.
BIOGRAPHY
Multidisciplinary duo STUDIOLANDA is based in Sardinia: Giorgia Cadeddu and Vittoria Soddu focus their projects on re-use practices with a specific interest in audiovisual, graphic and textual archives.Coming from design and the visual arts, Giorgia and Vittoria bring different technical skills into play: they imagine narrative forms that exceed the rigidity of recognisable categories, combining apparently distant practices of drawing, translation, self-construction and listening.
BROADCAST/FESTIVALS
After the premiere held at Lucia Festival in December 2021, Iolanda mi nant de nòmini was broadcasted on Rai Radio 3 within the programme Zazà - meridione, cultura società in April 2022. It was selected to be included in the International Feature Conference held at BBC Wales in May 2022, at Prix Europa in the documentary competition and at Phonurgia Nova for the section “Archives de la parole”.
Une émission proposée par STUDIOLANDA et Usmaradio, co-produite par Radio Papesse, pour le réseau Radia.fm.