We first combined our sonic palettes with fellow radio art practitioner Tetsuo Kogawa in 2005. Since then we have joined forces on a dozen occasions, often by combining sounds streamed in from our respective homes on different continents. This translocal practice comes to the fore now in times of Corona virus isolation. Responding to a call from Paris based experimental radio network π-node Tetsuo, Sarah and Knut collapsed time and space between the metropolis of Tokyo and the village of Ürzig for the listeners of a flock of radio stations including π-node (Paris, Mulhouse), Resonance Extra (Brighton, Bristol, Cambridge, London, Norwich), Soundart Radio (Totnes) and WGXC (New York’s Upper Hudson Valley) who made available the archive recording below.
The Canadian artist Robert Adrian passed away on 7th September 2015, aged 80. ORF Kunstradio, with which he had a long lasting and influential relationship, organised a memorial broadcast with many prerecorded and live contributions by friends and colleagues of Robert Adrian under the auspices of alien.productions. We provided a live stream that could be used as a back-drop for other artists’ contributions.
Mobile Radio teamed up with Xentos ‘Fray’ Bentos for an improvised radio play broadcast from a white bench high up in our local red slate vineyard, the Ürziger Würzgarten. Being off-grid meant that everything was battery operated and wireless, using the 3G network to beam our stream to our host radio station: Soundart Radio in Totnes, UK. The performance itself was old-school, everything had to be done live in front of a single stereo microphone. Foley instruments included various types of slate, plastic bottles, sticks, circuit bent instruments, iPhone sample app, crows, military aircraft, thumb piano, fm tx and rx feedback, percussion instruments, live air band radio, paper etc.
setting up at the white bench (photo by Xentos)
in performance high above the river Mosel...
...following an unknown script... (photo by Xentos)
Fellow radio artist Marold Langer-Philippsen invited Roberto Paci Dalò in Rimini and us in Ürzig to provide live input via webstream to his performance “jamming radio” at the EBU Ars Acustica meeting in Geneva. Our audio streams were source material for his mix that was taking cues from 100 years of radio history. It took some time to get it all working technically so we were happy to be offered another chance a few days later to collaborate using the same setup for Marold’s show Hörmaschine on Berlin’s Reboot FM.
On the invitation of Yoshitaka Mouri Knut gave a short lecture via Skype and streamed a live radio feedback performance to the Media Ecology of Radio symposium hosted at YCAM, Japan.
RadiaLx: Pancake Live Transmission
Every two years Rádio Zero in Lisbon hold the radio art festival RadiaLx. Knut loves to make pancakes, so along with Ricardo Reis we decided to cook them simultaneously in Lisbon and Ürzig for a live festival ‘duocast’. For this stereo broadcast, one location could be heard on the left channel and the other on the right
Pancake Live Transmission set-up in Ürzig
Pancake Live Transmission set-up in Lisbon, using binaural headphone microphones
Pancake chat with our guest in Ürzig, Susanne Schug. In both locations we were blessed with an array of home-made preserves
We joined up again with Tetsuo Kogawa over the internet to give a radio circuit-bending seminar for his students. We wanted to make a closer connection with them by sharing some wine from the vineyard behind our house, but it could not be easily sourced in Tokyo. Instead we shared mandarin oranges, and introduced the Japanese to the concept of advent calendars – to much interest as ours had marzipan chocolate inside it. Where did it come from, who put it in the calendar? Tetsuo wanted to know
We did a wine tasting simultaneously in Germany, France. From Ürzig we tasted and chatted about wine and cheese with Dinah Bird and Jean-Phillipe Renoult in Paris, while we waited for the Lisbon crew who couldn’t reach the festival in time. The recording was broadcast at the Future Places Festival in Porto
