photo: Luzie Illgner
Two celebrations coincided at the cafe of Halle’s opera house: the long awaited book “Radio Revolten: 30 Days of Radio Art” had arrived from the printers just in in time for its launch, and in addition the artist André Damião from São Paulo was starting his radio art residency with Radio Corax.
Seeing as this event marked the very end of the Revolten project which we had been totally wrapped up in for the past five years, for our performative broadcast we decided that we would tidy up live on stage in a symbolic attempt to put our house back in order. The elements included Knut cleaning the cafe floor with an amplified mop, live streams (displayed on computer screen) of DinahBird washing dirty dishes in Paris and Anna Friz sorting through old boxes in Vancouver, and recordings of other cleaning-up processes which were all mixed together by Sarah for the audience.
The evening event included a performance by the above mentioned André Damião as well as a tightly choreographed radio play by Ralf Wendt and Tina Klatte, with remote live-streamed performances from Steve Bates, Marold Langer-Philippsen, Sally Ann McIntyre, Sol Rezza and Claire Serres.
The images below were taken by Radio Revolten photographer Marcus-Andreas Mohr, visit the link for more photos from the event.
Sarah and the remote viewing of a Parisian kitchen sink
Mop with wireless mic
Radio Revolten was the largest festival dedicated to radio art worldwide. As artistic director and co-curators we were involved in all stages and aspects of the festival and temporarily relocated to Halle to help with the organisation.
The scope of the month-long festival included daily performances, more than a dozen installations, two exhibitions, a 24/7 radio station, a conference and several international meetings and much more by nearly a hundred artists from around the world. In April 2018 a documentation in book form will be published by Spector Books. The festival’s website now acts as an archive of the proceedings and contains specific audio-visual archive pages for our own activities as part of the programme. Click here to view this for Sarah or Knut.
Below are audio excerpts of Knut’s silence detection radio installation “Changing of the Guard” and Sarah’s three frequency broadcast “In the Air We Share”.
As guest curator and contributor to the Addicted2Random festival of Radio Corax, Knut assembled an international group to produce Imaginary Radio Band No. 1 for the opening of the proceedings at the Händelhaus. The musicians performing live on stage were:
Andre Damião (BR), computer, voice
Børre Mølstad (NO), tuba, voice
Xentos ‘Fray’ Bentos (UK), guitar, voice
Knut Aufermann (DE), electronics, voice
Sarah Washington (UK), electronics, voice
With additional voices by Helen Hahmann and Ralf Wendt
The idea was to produce an acoustic journey through an uncharted band on the radio dial, jumping from station to station. We were lucky enough to work with the museum custodian Christiane Barth, who allowed us to perform on the organ built by Johann Gottlieb Mauer in 1770. The recorded version below is a special reworking of the live recordings for the Radia network by Xentos.
Photos: Marcus Andreas Mohr
Other events of this wildly diverse and beautiful festival included a duo of Tetsuo Kogawa (on AM transmitters via live-stream from Tokyo) and Knut, a rare DJ set by the elusive Johnny Head-in-Air and the introduction of two people who should have already met decades ago…
We decide to spend two weeks at the RadioRevolten festival hosted by Radio Corax, where we were invited to do a live radio show. The festival spans one month, including a conference, installations, lots of live events and some fantastic radio projects. We stayed with some wonderful local students – Manu, Ellie and Adi
The Ligna project Radiotelephonie involved simultaneous broadcasts in Halle marketplace in the old town and Halle Neustadt, allowing the citizens of each to communicate their lives and passions to the other using mobile phones, portable speaker systems and radio transmitters
We wanted to try an experiment which is not always technically achievable, but with the help of the engineer Daniel, we were able to play with both the Radio Corax transmitter and the one installed as a special festival frequency. We each fed back one transmitter altering the signal with effects, and sometimes made a double feedback loop between the two transmitters. The audience listened on two radios. It worked well, even though we could not hear what each other was doing until we got the recordings afterwards
Our fellow Radia collaborator Jörg Köppl presented the results of his radio miniatures workshop, and gave a stunning concert of his own quarter tone guitar music. We also played as Tonic Train in this live-to-air concert at the Ärztehaus, a former surgery in Halle
Radio Erevan! Our favourite project was run by Marold Langer-Philippsen, who did a marathon broadcasting stint three times daily, running deep into the small hours. His shows were a magical intervention in the public life of Halle, sitting as he was in a builder’s van in the centre of the marketplace. He warmly invited guests with vodka and cakes and casual passers-by found themselves included in the action whenever Marold tired of unravelling his intoxicating tales into the microphone. Surreal strains of Armenian folk music could often be heard wafting around the van at night, and the local taxi drivers added their own colour to the scene…..
