Son[i]a
English
The slovak musician, sound artist, and maker Jonáš Gruska is a proud amateur, honouring the French origin of the term (to love what you do). Curiosity and passion run through pretty much everything that Gruska engages in. In our conversation ranging from his site-specific sound installations to his hand-crafted microphones and audio tools, his recent interest in mycology, and his playful exploration of the electromagnetic spectrum, Jonáš used the word 'fascination' quite a lot. We talk to Jonáš about resonating spaces, resonating surfaces, tramways, self-taught electronic circuitry, field recordings, fermentation, mushrooms, and unusual microphones.
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.
English
Jennifer Walshe studied composition and often performs as a vocalist, but her practice and a whopping list of works over the past twenty years put her in a twilight zone where music, performance art, theatre and stage writing intersect and converge. Walshe’s approach to texts, scripts and musical scores is based on a recursive process, a kind of feedback loop which includes and acknowledges all sorts of information about the text itself – the context and paratext. In this podcast, we talk to Jennifer Walshe about writing, annotating, teaching, collecting, eavesdropping, performing, faking, and a touch of machine learning.
Specials
English
In 1953, after attending the first Swedish Radio and Fylkingen Society electronic music concert with Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer, Swedish artist Öyvind Fahlström wrote a manifesto for concrete poetry. More than a decade later, the Swedish Radio broadcasted his pioneer radio piece “Fåglar I Sverige (Birds in Sweden)”. In the decades that followed, the complexity and broad spectrum of productions coming out of the Elektronmusikstudion (EMS), founded by Karl Birger in 1964, made it a hub for artists. But while the text-sound scene was in and out of the Sound Workshop, Knut Wiggen, the first director of the EMS, channelled his energy into the futuristic dream of creating a world-class computer music studio for experts and scholars.
From the vault
Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí
"I have talked about the racism of feminism, and at the time that seem radical, not because it was radical in the United States, because it was what African American women had said about feminism, that white feminism was imposing its own experience and was pretending there was no race at all. But apparently that critique was OK for African Americans to make in the US. What was radical and shocking was that an African woman, oppressed, weak, whatever... charity case, was accusing white American women of being racists! How dare you? I was shocked by the reaction."
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.
Explore by…
anti-racismClimate changeAIDS crisisradical pedagogyradiocinema in the white cubewritingsamplingsound + technologyartist booksarchitecturesexual dissidencefemale producersAnna FrizMonica NarulaWomen’s Audio ArchiveMargaret Leng TanJudy DunawayIsaac JulienOur 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 political geographer and sound artist Anja Kanngieser that we were unable to include the first time around.