A new monthly program is brought to us by Meredith Kooi and Jeff Kolar from Radius

The first broadcasts are scheduled for Wednesday 29. April
at 02:00-03:00, 08:00-09:00 and 16:00-17:00BerlinTime, World time.

The words further below, written by Jeff, explain what Radius is all about.

With the recent Drone conference in mind, I listened to the first episode called ‘failure.’ At some point during the drone talks it was said that a someone in a far away country activated his cell phone. For my inner eye I saw a couple of black cars on a sand road amidst a deserted dry landscape. I watched them from a hill that was littered with bigger and smaller rocks. The man got out, put the phone to his ear and the next moment the cars were hit by a bomb.

His phone had betrayed him.

Now back to Radius. The sounds you hear are all from within the computer and the network it is connected to, the same network the cellphone was connected to.

The sounds have a mystical but also a romantic feel about it. The composers enter an unknown territory, like the great explorers did in the 19th century. In this case the explorer reduces himself to the size of an electron.

The compositions are fascinating, emanate a calm that doesn’t exist in our visible world. Another image from my inner eye sees thousands and thousands of computers connect and send out these sounds to the stratosphere. And it’s only there where the big orchestral sounds can be heard.

Word to Jeff

“Radius presents PATCH, an ongoing series of curated playlists originally produced for the Free Music Archive, an interactive library of high-quality, legal audio downloads directed by WFMU.

PATCH 01: Failure

Art of Failure– 8 silences

“8 Silences”, part of Art of Failure’s Laps Series, offers a sensible representation of the Internet by broadcasting audio streams that travel and reverberate through the web. In the style of encephalography, this empirical sound process gives substance to an unstable and intangible digital space.

Initially silent, the streams progressively incorporate an infinity of transformations or “errors” that modify the sound as it circulates the network. These alterations are comparable to a form of erosion caused by the network space – they are a key to allow different mental representations of this digital topography. Presented as a live performance, 8 Silences is a sound immersion in the heart of data flows.

Gregory Chatonsky – My Hard Drive Is Experiencing Some Strange Noises

Gregory Chatonsky’s “My Hard Drive Is Experiencing Some Strange Noises” is the sound of a defective hard drive disk picked up by a contact microphone. The acoustic wave is instantly processed by software that repeats and amplifies the sounds creating a resounding echo.

Imaginary Forces – CT Room

Imaginary Forces’ “CT Room” is a collage of field recordings taken from various online video chat rooms and instant messenger services. In many of the recordings, the subjects that chose to type responses instead of speak, were unaware that they had left their computer microphones on.

In some of these cases, the computer was left on even after the person had stopped chatting. Hart was able to record the sounds of these seemingly empty spaces and the personal conversations that would take place outside the designated chat space.

PATCH is a series of curated playlists selected from the Radius episode archive. Each playlist is organised around a specific topic or theme that engages the tonal and public spaces of the electromagnetic spectrum. PATCH serves as a platform to illuminate the questions, concerns, and complexities of and within radio-based art practices.”

For broadcast hours please check our schedule.