Radio, Art, Life: New Contexts by Helen Thorington

Helen Thorington contributes a feature article on the evolving context for sound and radio practice, exploring networked media, participatory platforms and the sonification of every-day objects. An introducing to a series of Radio Art including recent work by Christof Migone and Sarah Washington.

The Alchemists of Sound

2003 Documentary on the BBC Radiophonic Workshop

Audio Theater

What you will find here is a list of those producing this art form, Sources for finding tapes and cd's, Resources for those who want to try their hand at producing Audio Theater and reviews of current titles.

Review of Terry Allen's "Pedal Steal" And "Torso Hell"

Theater-For-The-Ear, And- The-Eye-Of-The-Imagination, or plain old-fashioned radio drama musical, is how to describe Allens next disc, Pedal Steal, commissioned as a soundtrack by the Margaret Jenkins Dance Co. of San Francisco. More than a hour and a half long, it premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's " Next Wave Festival" in October of 1985.

Joe Frank

Joe Frank is an American radio personality, known best for his engaging, often philosophical, monologues and radio dramas.

Joan Schuman

website for radio artist Joan Schuman

Henry Jacobs on NPR (2005)

Beginning in 1953, Jacobs hosted a music program for KPFA in Berkeley, Calif. The Folkways record label later released highlights from this show on an LP, Audio Collage, in 1955. His work represented a patchwork of skits, soundscapes and mock interviews.

Seven Radio Plays by Samuel Beckett (2006)

Site to download bit torrent of 2006 recordings of Beckett's 7 radio plays:
Embers
Words and Music
Rough For Radio 1
Rough For Radio 2
Cascando
The Old Tune
All That Fall

Bertolt Brecht "The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication" (1932)

As for the radio's object, I don't think it can consist simply in prettifying public life. Nor is radio in my view an adequate means of bringing back cosiness to the home and making family life bearable again.

Tetsuo Kogawa "Toward Polymorphous Radio"

From Radio Rethink

The term mini-FM was first used in a mass-circulation newspaper in 1982, when a very low-watt FM-station movement started.Mini-FM stations have very little power judged by any standard-usually less than a hundred milliwatts. Although such a weak signal may seem to be of no use for broadcasting, the purpose was not broadcasting but narrowcasting.

Tetsuo Kogawa "Deconstructing Broadcast"

53 minute video of lecture/ performance by Tetsuo Kogawa

Brandon LaBelle "Towards a Theory of Transmission"

19 minute video of a lecture by Brandon LaBelle

Antonin Artaud "To Have Done with the Judgement of God"

English Translation of Artaud's 1947 Radio Play

Gregory Whitehead "Out of the Dark: Notes on the Nobodies of Radio Art"

If the dreamland/ghostland is the natural habitat for the wireless imagination, then the material of radio art is not just sound. Radio happens in sound, but sound is not really what matters about radio.

Nicholas Zurbrugg "Sound art, radio art,and post-radio performance in Australia" (1989)

What is 'radio-art'? Defined most simply, radio art might be identified as that creativity predominantly dependent upon radio technology for its conception, for its realization, and for its distribution. In its most pure form, radio art might be thought of as exclusively radiophonic materials orchestrated and disseminated by radiophonic technology.

The Mercury Theatre on the Air

All of the surviving Mercury Theatre shows are available from this page in RealAudio format (some are also in MP3 format). There are several Campbell Playhouse episodes available here as well, in both RealAudio and MP3 formats; the rest are being added gradually.

Patrick Ready "THE STORY OF THE HP RADIO SHOW"

Legendary 70's Radio Art Program from Vancouver

Eric Leonardson "PAINTING WITH WAVES: An Interview with Sabine Breitsameter on Sound and Radio Art" (1995)

Sabine Breitsameter is a free-lance journalist, curator, and radio artist at Sender Freies Berlin (SFB), one of Germany's largest public radio stations. She produces a weekly radio program at SFB called Internationale Digitale Radiokunst, presenting radio documentaries, sound art and radio art.

Jesse Moss Shapins "Walter Ruttmann’s Weekend: Sound, Space and the Multiple Senses of an Urban Documentary Imagination"

On June 6th, 1930 a radically new form of radio was broadcast over the Berlin airwaves. An 11 minute, 20 second long collage of raw sounds greeted listeners accustomed to hearing news reports, occasional classical musical programs and, only very recently, literary works written specifically for radio performance, the nascent genre known as Hörspiel (”radio drama”).

Christof Migone "The Technology of Entrapment: Open Your Mouth and Let the Air Out" (1992)

For all of radio's broad and far reaching casts, the radio booth rather resembles an implosion. A foreboding cubicle at its point of production in antithesis to its expansive space of diffusion.