Son[i]a
English
Hugo Esquinca’s work is a multi-layered crust, intentionally obfuscated through excess, deliberately hard to peel. Scraping off layers of obfuscation in this dense network of transductive interactions gets you nowhere, cause those layers are precisely what Hugo uses in order to expose you (and himself) to a sort of sensory overload. We discuss with Hugo how growing up in the hyperchaos of Mexico City relates to his fascination with speed, overabundance and syncretism.
English
Ji Youn Kang’s abstract compositions are infused with her personal blend of Western experimental sound and Korean ritual music. This hybrid background also seeps into her live performances, where she explores the primitive and empowering rhythmic structures of Korean shamanism –often building up from slow to fast– and noisy sound through an amalgam of handmade analogue devices, acoustic instruments, and digital signal processing techniques. In this podcast, Ji talks about Korean ritual music, perfect 5ths and nature, resonating objects, noise, self-built instruments, uncertainty and tension, Wave Field Synthesis, and strategies to engage online audiences in meaningful communication.
English
In the 1990s, twenty minutes was all it took for local authorities in the Austrian city of Graz to detect and neutralise any illegal radio transmitter. Back then, Reni Hofmüller was part of a group of activists who took over the airwaves with pirate broadcasts every Sunday from the mountains surrounding the city. After short 18-minute sessions, the Radio Dauerwelle team would pack up its equipment and clear out, moments before the authorities arrived. In this podcast, Hofmüller shares her early commitment with radio, as well as her obsession with dismantling the invisible in order to understand and question it. A trip through time that takes us from the 1980s to the present, through her personal involvement in feminist discussions from the perspective of new media. Our conversation is riddled with references to her commitment to open source, to doing things together, to the uninhibited mixing of disciplines, and to her passion for the electromagnetic sphere and bicycles.
Specials
English
Things that are more than things: frozen embodiments of social relations, petrifications of desires and energies, replicas disguised as everyday objects. Images, microwave, post-its, money, inhalers, cheese. We speak with Hito Steyerl, Helen Hester and Roula Partheniou of these and other ideas. Because things are never quite the way they seem.
In FONS ÀUDIO #47, Andrea Fraser comments the work 'Little Frank and His Carp', in the MACBA Collection, which registerd her performance in the atrium of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in 2001. Recorded by five hidden cameras, 'Little Frank and His Carp' follows the artist’s movements from different angles and shows the changes in attitude and emotion generated by the male voice of the audio guide.
From the vault
Rasha Salti
'Reaganism and Thatcherism were not born in 1989. They were born in 1973, a very interesting date for the Arab World. That was the date of the October War and the Oil Boycott, which changed the relationship of the World with the Arabs.'
Rasha Salti is an independent curator and writer who is based in Beirut and works between New York, Paris and Toronto. In this podcast, Rasha Salti favours new narratives about the former East and West through her postcolonial analysis. She also talks about the methodology of unearthing images that she uses in her research, and about some of its repercussions.
Research
English
in PROBES #28 Chris Cutler follows the incorporation into new works of saws, sandpaper and power tools, artisans and knitting machines – and goes on to investigate the repurposing of radios and gramophones as musical resources.
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anti-racismClimate changeAIDS crisisradical pedagogyradiocinema in the white cubewritingsamplingsound + technologyartist booksarchitecturesexual dissidencefemale producersAnna FrizLyra PramukWomen’s Audio ArchiveSilvia FedericiJudy DunawayIsaac JulienLizzie BordenLuke FowlerTerre ThaemlitzReni HofmüllerJoana MollOur most listened podcasts everQuaderns d'àudio
English
An introduction to the work and methodology of Japanese artist Yasunao Tone. The essay is based upon several conversations with the artist and some of his collaborators.
Extra
English
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with the British sound artist and maker John Richards/Dirty Electronics that we were unable to include the first time around.
English
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with the slovak sound artist Jonáš Gruska that we were unable to include the first time around.