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Radio Gallery
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Abake, ‘Pre-recording of Radio Gallery’, 2006.
Episode one. l-r Maki Suzuki and Martin Cohen
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Abake, ‘Radio Gallery episode one’, 2006.
Performed as a pub quiz at The Bird Cage, London.
www.radiogallery.org
3 July – 18 September
Thomas Beecham once quipped that a new music commission receives two performances, the second being its echo. Beecham was part of this problem rather than part of its solution; he had doubtless identified a real and still present headache for commissioners. How does one guarantee a wider audience than merely those privileged souls fortunate enough to be present at the premiere? For the commissioners of radio art the transitory nature of the medium itself, where works are transmitted on a one-shot basis to an indeterminate number of isolated listeners, can seem an even more bitter pill to swallow.
Fortunately ‘Radio Gallery’, a series of twelve commissioned radio programmes broadcast on Resonance FM, tackles this problem through the incorporation of an online exhibition space as part of its strategy to reach unknowable and unidentifiable receivers beyond its immediate broadcast reach of the M25. In this project curated by Anna Colin, contributors treat the one-hour broadcast window as a temporal frame for artistic interventions. These audio artefacts reaffirm Resonance’s mission of presenting heartier fare than the record collector naval-gazing of easy street experimental music and sound art radio programming.
The curation reflects a true variety of approaches. These range from the abstract station hopping radiophony of Raimundas Malasauskas’s Radio Diner, Thibaut de Ruyter’s fascinating documentary outline of investigations into the occult chimera of Electronic Voice Phenomena and the live-to-air audience participation and technical ‘seat of the pants ride’ of Dirk Fleischmann’s The Stop Show. ‘Radio Gallery’ is a project that outlines the potential for artistic appropriation of the airwaves and the potential of the web to act as a conduit to both temporarily and geographically remote audiences.
Richard Whitelaw
Richard Whitelaw, Programme Director, Sonic Arts Network
First published: a-n Magazine October 2006
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