An invitation to perform at Luxembourg’s premier new music festival rainy days gave us the possibility to put together a new group, adding Chris Cutler on drums and Børre Mølstad on toy tuba to our electronics.
We had played with Chris and Børre before in trios (documented here and here) but this quartet was a premiere. The giant stage of the Luxembourg Philharmonic grand auditorium also accommodated the audience which was seated on the racks usually occupied by large choirs. It made for a very special atmosphere. Lucky circumstances also allowed us to obtain a multitrack recording of the event, so we are thinking of turning it into a CD.
After the concert we invited the audience to celebrate the publication of Sarah’s book Radio Art Zone.
A second contribution to rainy days was a double installation that was displayed in the Philharmonie foyer. Sarah’s repurposed hair dryers had already been shown at SAVVY Contemporary during the documenta 14 radio project. Knut’s retelling of the early years of Resonance FM in central London via a single photo had been on display at Espace Multimédia Gantner in France. Here both of these installations came together for the first time.
Click to see the Mobile Radio installation excerpt.
Our third involvement in the festival was to be guest performers in Annea Lockwood’s composition Spirit Catchers which was performed as a quadrilingual version on this occasion.
October 11, 2023 by Mobile Radio | Comments Off on HAMBURG October 2023
We followed an invitation by the Verband für aktuelle Musik Hamburg to present Sarah’s book Radio Art Zone at the sound art venue Beek, where we were joined by RAZ artists Mariola Brillowska, Günter Reznicek and Felix Kubin.
VAMH member Heiner Metzger took our visit as a prompt make an extended radio feature about Mobile Radio and Tonic Train for FSK Hamburg.
June 8, 2022 by Mobile Radio | Comments Off on ESCH-SUR-ALZETTE June – September 2022
Mobile Radio are the artistic directors of Radio Art Zone, a joint project with Luxembourg’s independent broadcaster Radio ARA as part of the European Capital of Culture Esch2022.
For all information about Radio Art Zone please visit www.radioart.zone.
June 4, 2021 by Mobile Radio | Comments Off on LUXEMBOURG June 2021
Second live outing with the The RADIOM ))) RADIÔME radio art network in two days, this time at the Rotondes in Luxembourg City with a live braodcast on Radio ARA. On stage were:
Karim Aït-gacem, Knut Aufermann, Katharina Bihler, Élodie Brochier, Sam Erpelding, Sandra Laborier, François Martig, Martha Regueiro, Stefan Scheib, Claire Thill & Sarah Washington.
during soundcheckSome words for the (on air) audience after the performance
June 3, 2021 by Mobile Radio | Comments Off on SAARBRÜCKEN June 2021
The RADIOM ))) RADIÔME radio art network brings together artists from the Greater Region, a border-defying zone that encompasses Luxembourg and all its neighbour regions. Thanks to the initiative and tireless work of the Liquid Penguin Ensemble eleven artists produced and shared audio miniatures in a time of social distancing.
Once we were able to travel again all members of the network came together for a performace at KuBa in Saarbrücken which was broadcast live by public radio Saarländischer Rundfunk.
Sarah’s point of view from the main mixer.
All performers were distributed around the whole space while the audience listened on wireless headphones.
January 1, 2021 by Mobile Radio | Comments Off on ÜRZIG/PARIS January 2021
What better way to start a new year, however unpromising it might feel, than by bringing together good friends for an online live performance for Le Placard and ∏node. Enter The World Fuse (Felix, Xentos, Sarah & Knut):
For her contribution to the closing of the festival, Sarah invited a host of superlative radio collaborators to assist in the celebration of the end of radio as we know it, by taking part in a chaos ritual designed to banish all broadcasts which have ever taken place so far and thus make way for a new ear-a of radio to emerge.
Participants included:
Jasmina Al-Qaisi on wails
Tina Klatte on interviews
Ralf Wendt on concepts
Xentos Fray Bentos on fingers
Felix Kubin on electro-voice
Knut Aufermann on disruption
Sarah Washington on cut-ups
The live interviewees were:
Hardi Kurda, Lukas Holfeld, Marold Langer-Philippsen, Ernst Marcus Stein, Claire Serres, Julia Drouhin, and Gabi Schaffner
The show also featured a host of voices reanimated from the six weeks of festival broadcasts, with a little P-noodling thrown in for good measure
This Mobile Radio production gives thanks to all the contributors, D21 for the invitation and ∏-node for the streams… MERRY NEW RADIO!
July 16, 2020 by Mobile Radio | Comments Off on SAARBRÜCKEN July 2020
The last edition of the CWCH collective season took place in Saarbrücken at the Saarländisches Künstlerhaus. Fellow CWCHees Katharina Bihler and Stefan Scheib had suggested this as an option to share a physical space with each other, and with a small audience, after months of regular performances that happened exclusively online.
For a detailed description and a full archive of CWCH shows please visit the dedicated project page.
To make full use of the spaces of the Künstlerhaus our set-up mirrored those of the CWCH collective so far: Sarah created the mix from all contributors, Katharina and Stefan were in the adjacent hall but still bound to the seconds-long delay of web-streaming, and the roaming audience had to visit a third room to hear the final broadcast.
Photo journalist Kerstin Krämer offered us the two images you can see below and wrote a report for the Saarbrücker Zeitung, positing that Orson Welles would have loved the evening. New Music expert Hubert Steins was in attendance too and conducted interviews that would find their way into his excellent portrait of the CWCH collective for Deutschlandfunk Kultur.
First visual contact of the CWCH collective players after the performance: Frauke Berg, Dinah Bird, Anna Friz, Billy Roisz, dieb13, Rodrigo Ríos Zunino, Llody Dunn, Ralf Schreiber, Knut Aufermann, Katharina Bihler, Stefan Scheib, CWCH photographer Pierre Metzinger and Sarah Washington. Missing is Xentos Fray Bentos.
March 26, 2020 by Mobile Radio | Comments Off on ÜRZIG/TOKYO March 2020
De-Distancing with Tetsuo Kogawa
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.
November 9, 2019 by Mobile Radio | Comments Off on LEIPZIG November 2019
Still taken from a video by Samuli Salonen
The invitation to Leipzig’s Seanaps festival gave us the second opportunity in this year to play a trio with Chris Cutler. This encounter felt like we’d played as a group for decades, something that seemed to translate to the audience as well if the appreciation and after-show comments are anything to go by.
The festival made use of a great number of cultural spaces within the district of Plagwitz, one of which inhabited the studio of Sphere Radio, a nascent local radio collective that tried out its first steps during Seanaps with the help of a few seasoned practitioners and airtime from Radio Corax and Cashmere Radio.
Our contribution to the radio programme consisted of a handful of bespoke Johnny Head in Air mash-ups, a discussion on radio futures and a new radio experiment by Knut called The Compression Chamber.
This situation/installation/composition consisted of two microphones in the room which were patched through a chain of compressors so that any sound nearby would gain the same volume, no matter how quiet or loud. Visitors to The Compression Chamber were handed headphones that conveyed this unique form of listening and their behaviour changed immediately. For one hour the room turned into an alternate reality in which people crawled around the space and played with the minute sounds of floor boards, carpets, plastic wrapping, camera shutters, the door of a wood burner and anything else that could be found, underpinned by the chatter of guests in the adjacent room. A short excerpt can be found below, the full hour and many other Sphere Radio transmissions are accessible here.
Knut Aufermann, ‘The Compression Chamber’ radio experiment, photo credit: Leon Seidel
October 26, 2019 by Mobile Radio | Comments Off on DÜSSELDORF October 2019
This must have been one of the most unusual locations we have ever played a Tonic Train concert in: the Hallraum Worringer Platz in Düsseldorf. The venue is a small glasshouse that is situated on a heavily frequented traffic island close to the city’s main station. The setting was intimate, with the curious audience crouched around us listening intently. However, the guiding theme for the performance emanated from the outside, from the constant car traffic and the electromagnetic disturbances from the busy adjacent tram stop that Sarah could pick up with a scanner. And then there was a secondary audience, just outside of the glasshouse, that didn’t care but also didn’t mind us being there while they were drinking and injecting. It was a memorable event, the last warm evening of the year, and strangely life-affirming.
September 28, 2019 by Mobile Radio | Comments Off on DZIERZONIOW September 2019
The Młyn dzięków / Klangmühle / Sound Mill concert was the culmination of a two-year project called Ortsgespräche by the Goethe Institut in Warsaw for which Knut was the artistic director. Five German sound artists (including newly-naturalised Sarah) had been working throughout 2018 and 2019 in five medium sized Polish cities with Polish counterparts to produce workshops, events, concerts, talks and interventions in public space. These proceedings are documented and contextualised on a dedicated website and Facebook page.
For the final event of this project all the artists were brought together to inhabit a giant former industrial flour mill turned museum in the town of Dzierżoniów (where Sarah´s project in collaboration with Stowarzyszenie Edukacji Krytycznej had already taken place). The short video documentation above gives a glimpse of the varied mini-concerts which the audience encountered in various locations around the building. Due to the unusual cultural offer, brilliant organisation by the Goethe Institut team, and the previous project in the mill, a buzz developed around the event. We had to add a second run of the performance due to a stipulated maximum of 80 audience members per show, and both were sold out. Health and safety rules meant that everybody had to wear a hard hat, and the surprise final course of each show consisted of a buffet of sausages, pierogi, compote and beer. Needless to say everyone went home delighted, unfazed by the strange and at times hilarious music.
With the help of Udo Noll’s Radio Aporee the event was broadcast live on Resonance Extra in London, Soundart Radio in Dartington and WGXC in New York, reaching audiences around the globe. Below you can hear a recording of the first show in its entirety, and the edited individual performances from the second show.
Our contribution, besides being responsible for the overall dramaturgy of the whole show, was an atmospheric 10-minute live Hörspiel featuring childhood memories of Dzierżoniów resident – and leading light of the local pensioners club who had taken part in Sarah´s earlier project – Barbara Kuźmińska. This was profoundly moving for the audience as the stories ranged from listening in live with her father to Russian space mission communications on a domestic radio set, through to his role in aiding Jews fleeing the Nazis. She also read out parts of a poem sent to him in the 1920s, a precious document which she brought along.
August 9, 2019 by Mobile Radio | Comments Off on BERLIN August 2019
Midnight wine tasting
Frequencies & Fragrances was the theme of a night of broadcasting at Datscharadio, which took place in an allotment colony in the south east of Berlin (rather than at its regular venue of Gabi Schaffner’s own datscha). We brought along a present from the Mosel in the form of an on-air wine tasting featuring six of the most remarkable Rieslings we could get our hands on, plus recorded interviews focusing on the issue of smell with the respective winemakers. While the entire 2-hour midnight tasting is probably better left to the imagination, the unconventional interviews could be of wider interest as well as pricking up the ears of wine nerds. Half are in German, half in English, and they can be found here:
The night’s events were many and varied, with a whole host of acts approaching the topic of fragrance from various angles. Towards the early morning hours Sarah and Kate Donovan joined forces for an impromptu reading of a story by Gabi Schaffner.
Contemplating garlic
The photos for this post were taken from the Datscharadio website, which features a much more detailed report of the the proceedings.
June 29, 2019 by Mobile Radio | Comments Off on BERNKASTEL-KUES June 2019
The above work was our answer to a rare request to create sound pieces for a private birthday party that was taking place in the construction site of the Alte Weinbauschule in Bernkastel.
Sarah created the sound installation Birthday Bash. The sounds, recorded two days previously at the site, are of various building activities or were made by playing in the empty resonant spaces with found materials such as metal bars, bottles and sheets of polystyrene. Audio transformations were made to short excerpts of the recordings, which were then played randomly over two radio transmitters to 30 radios. As it was very noisy on site, the recreation you can hear above was made afterwards to give a clean sound.
Knut placed field recordings of fermenting wine barrels at the bottom of the building’s staircase, referencing the former use of the premise as a school for apprentice wine makers.
May 11, 2019 by Mobile Radio | Comments Off on LONDON May 2019
Sarah travelled to London to join the other members of Unhappy Fly for a gig at Mau Mau Bar in Portabello Road. The following morning they set up for a live session on Resonance FM’s Hello Goodbye show, which was captured on video.
The self-titled LP Unhappy Fly including a rare see-through lathe cut seven inch single can be bought from Rough Trade, and a growing list of songs can be streamed through Spotify. Other tracks can be found on Youtube and Soundcloud.
May 8, 2019 by Mobile Radio | Comments Off on LJUBLJANA May 2019
Radia representatives from Radio Orange, Radio Helsinki, Resonance FM, Soundart Radio and Radio Študent
An invitation to join in with the celebrations of 50 years of Radio Študent in Ljubljana brought some of the Radia network members to the Slovenian capital. We could only glimpse a part of the amazing programme that honoured five decades of self-determined broadcasting. Much appreciated was the detailed tour of the station and the experimental music festival that ran at the Cirkulacija2 venue, which also hosted a discussion round on Radia.
Lucinda Guy from Soundart Radio explains their way of making radio at Cirkulacija2
The music library of Radio Študent
Radio Študent alumni meet up before the big anniversary concert
March 23, 2019 by Mobile Radio | Comments Off on BERLIN March 2019
Unhappy Fly onstage at Bar Bobu
In the long run-up to the release of their first album Unhappy Fly had their first live gigs in Berlin with a two-day residency at Bar Bobu. The line-up consisted of Xentos Fray Bentos (vocals, guitar, entertainment), Richard Dudanski (drums, percussion), Sarah Washington (vocals, harmonies, circuits), John Glyn (saxophones), Christian Schmidt (bass) and Owen Ross (electric guitar). It was a blast! Due to a yes-smoking policy all tunes had to be transposed down five semitones for the second night.
March 14, 2019 by Mobile Radio | Comments Off on HALLE (SAALE) March 2019
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
February 16, 2019 by Mobile Radio | Comments Off on TRIER February 2019
Our first public concert as a trio with Chris Cutler happened as part of the Opening 19 festival in Trier and we enjoyed it so much that we decided to publish the entire set on Soundcloud (see above, including the option for a high res 24bit 96kHz audio download, file size 1.5GB). Before the gig we were interviewed for Luxembourg’s national public radio where we had to pretend that the concert had already happened due to the later broadcast date. You can listen to the subsequent podcast of this radio show here. Our photographer friend Susanne Schug took very nice images of the concert and the festival, some of which you can see below.
January 19, 2019 by Mobile Radio | Comments Off on DUDELANGE January 2019
In conjunction with Luxembourg’s community station Radio Ara we ran a Radio Art workshop at the Centre National de l’Audiovisuel in Dudelange. During two day-long sessions the twelve participants recorded and constructed the first contribution of Radio Ara to the Radia network:
December 3, 2018 by Mobile Radio | Comments Off on LONDON December 2018
Cue cards for the London Improvisers Orchestra
We were invited to the 20th anniversary of the London Improvisers Orchestra which consisted of workshops, rehearsals and concerts at Cafe Oto. It was a great joy to return to the group after a long gap, contributing our electronic sounds from the back row of 30+ fantastic musicians, set inbetween Orphy Robinson and Louis Moholo Moholo, what more can you ask for?
The celebration was perfectly organised by Caroline Kraabel. Knut additionally offered a workshop on the freedom and limits of improvising with electronics one afternoon and during the first concert evening also conducted a new piece called Initialisation which was based around cue cards of the 26 letters of the alphabet. This is the score:
1. Think of a loved one you would like to dedicate your playing to.
2. Make a mental note of the initials of his/her name. If he/she has middle name(s) consider them too.
3. Play only when one of these initials is shown. More than one letter might be shown at a time.
Knut conducting the LIO, photo credit: Fabio Lugaro
November 2, 2018 by Mobile Radio | Comments Off on BERLIN November 2018
FMeral was the title of Sarah’s improvised broadcast performance which she gave at the Radiophonic Spaces exhibition opening programme in the Haus der Kulturen der Welt.
The remit was to work with the radio art pieces that were included in the exhibition, but by way of contradiction these were restricted for use by copyright issues. Sarah opted to use her own collection of alternative material from artist friends represented in the exhibition, and with a multitude of overlapping tracks created a playful surround mix through a versatile sound system that consisted of three small FM transmitters and a host of transistor radios strewn across the HKW’s foyer.
This set-up proved that the quality of analogue FM transmission with all its imperfections, combined with carefully placed synchronised playback devices (aka radios) spaced throughout the performance area, works perfectly to envelop an audience with sound that offers the intimacy of home listening even in large and acoustically challenging spaces. In this case there was the additional sensation of spatialisation due to variable routing of the source sounds between the three transmitters, allowing tracks to jump around the audience from one bank of radios to another.
Unfortunately the recording of this event was stolen during a subsequent train journey, so this special performance will indeed remain ephemeral. We can however share our radio works that were exhibited in Radiophonic Spaces:
August 18, 2018 by Mobile Radio | Comments Off on SOKOLOWSKO August 2018
During our residency with Agosto Foundation in Prague the chance came up to take a field trip to the already legendary Sanatorium Dźwięku festival in Sokołowsko in Poland and play a concert as part of it. Eight of us decided to go and experience the very special atmosphere of this rural happening which is documented in a report on the Agosto website.
For our Tonic Train concert we teamed up with Lloyd Dunn and his field recordings as well as a homemade optical synthesizer to play in a trio for the first time. We enjoyed it very much.
Before the concert. Photo: Miloš Vojtěchovský
Knut, Lloyd and Sarah fully concentrated during the concert. Photo: Miloš Vojtěchovský
Relaxed after the concert. Photo: Ken Ganfiled
Instrument table, including Lloyd’s optical synth discs. Photo: Ken Ganfiled
July 26, 2018 by Mobile Radio | Comments Off on PARDUBICE July 2018
An invitation to Pardubice during our residency in Prague resulted in a trip to this lovely city on the river Elbe with its booming cutural scene including a giant automatic mill which will soon be converted into a museum complex. We played a Tonic Train concert at the City Gallery augmented by a video installation that was responsive to our sounds by Michal Kindernay who also took the photo below.
July 22, 2018 by Mobile Radio | Comments Off on KEMPFENHAUSEN July 2018
We played a Tonic Train concert at the Echolot festival for new music at the picturesque Schloss Kempfenhausen on lake Starnberg south of Munich. The invitation came from the festival director and old friend Gunter Pretzel whose clever ploy to programme us after vocalist Golnar Shahyar lead to an improvised trio performance with her at the end of the evening, which evoked imagery of the palace ghost joining in.
July 18, 2018 by Mobile Radio | Comments Off on PRAGUE July 2018
A Tonic Train concert for the opening of an exhibition by Julien Maire and Robert Vlasák at GAMU gallery was the first public appearance during our summer residency with the Agosto Foundation. Further concerts during trips to Pardubice and Sokolowkso followed.
The main cimmitment during the two-month residency was Sarah’s Collective Dreaming project which warrants its own, still developing page on our website here.
June 21, 2018 by Mobile Radio | Comments Off on WEIMAR June 2018
For the summer semester Knut taught a project module called Radia & Slow Radio – developing and producing experimental radio at the Bauhaus-University in Weimar. Master and Bachelor students who had chosen this class at the chair of Experimental Radio were treated to six all-day seminars, an excursion to sights in Halberstadt and Halle and an after-school pirate radio themed cinema club. The project finished with two radio productions that were broadcast around the world. First was a Radia show called Strata that was constructed from frequency dependent audio layers which the students worked on without knowing each others ideas, but nevertheless came out perfectly fine (“how could this possibly work out like this?” one incredulous student asked).
The second show was a six-hour-long live broadcast based around the idea of slow radio, with all students supplying live feeds of mundane activities throughout the shortest night of the year (see photos below). After the broadcast, which went out on Radio Lotte (Weimar), Radio Orange (Vienna), Soundart Radio (Dartington), Radio Corax (Halle/Saale) and Resonance Extra (London & Brighton), the result was deemed suitable to receive the cut-up treatment by Dieb13’s Schnitzel software and reemerged under the name Cold Cuts as a second emmission for the Radia network.
All in all a great experience to see a diverse mix of talented young media artists pull together as a group to produce two memorable radio events, and along the way hopefully picking up a few insights from the Mobile Radio toolkit.
Late night cake making live on air (photo: Anton Worch)
old school reverb chamber (photo: Johann Mittmann)
pushing a radio cart to the industrial outskirts of town (photo: Konrad Behr)
early morning poetry memorisation (photo: Konrad Behr)
June 12, 2018 by Mobile Radio | Comments Off on WEIMAR June 2018
Poster by Jan Glöckner
The chair for Experimental Radio at the Bauhaus-University in Weimar invited us to present some of our artistic work for their public lecture series called Radiogespräche. We chose the form of telling tales whilst playing audio and video from three of our most ambitious projects so far:
– Clingradio, our weekly 6-hour-show on Resonance FM in London (2002-2003)
– Mobile Radio BSP, nearly 100 days of radio art at the 30th Biennial of São Paulo (2012)
– Dubbelradio, a 24-hour radio art festival made for two FM frequencies in Stockholm (2013)
November 17, 2017 by Mobile Radio | Comments Off on WARSAW November 2017
A talk by Knut about radio art for the Goethe-Institut in Warsaw, as part of their Auf Sendung! series. This would turn out to be one of the crystallisation points for the international sound and radio art project Ortsgespräche.
October 15, 2017 by Mobile Radio | Comments Off on SYDLING ST NICHOLAS October 2017
Participants of the Social Dreaming Climate Change
Sixteen artists, activists, scientists and researchers from the Climate Psychology Alliance were brought together by Cape Farewell to be led in a research method called the Social Dreaming Matrix. After contemplating powerful climate-based artworks they undertook a shared exploration of dreams, aiming to illuminate the cultural unconscious of climate change.
One Thought Fills Immensity is the resulting audio work by Sarah and exposes some of the resulting subliminal themes relevant to us in the era of climate change. It was a joint commission by Cape Farewell and Kunstradio, produced for broadcast on ORF Kunstradio and the Radia network, transmitted on 30 radio stations around the world.
Eight different versions of the work were produced for specific radio stations, each featuring a remix of one section (and reordering of the segments) in a sequence of broadcasts across the world – until the final version where the gradual remix is finally complete (and the segments revert back to the original order).
September 15, 2017 by Mobile Radio | Comments Off on KASSEL September 2017
A last minute visit to Kassel’s documenta 14 exhibtion was coupled with a performance at Anton Kats’ Narrowcast House, using its small scale transmitter and selection of radio receivers as a sound system:
September 10, 2017 by Mobile Radio | Comments Off on DARTINGTON September 2017
Sarah’s visit to Soundart Radio ended in a live broadcast that included local recordings of bats, slowed down pop music and a beginners’ lesson of how to play the ukulele with Lucinda Guy.
September 2, 2017 by Mobile Radio | Comments Off on OBERBILLIG September 2017
Lucky Punch was a transnational strolling concert where the audience walked from event to event which were located in Wasserbillig and Oberbillig, including the border-crossing ferry across the river Mosel that runs between Germany and Luxembourg. Knut’s duo with pianist and accordionist Theo van der Poel took place on the German side in the private gallery Contemperaneum.
June 14, 2017 by Mobile Radio | Comments Off on BERLIN/KASSEL June – July 2017
Design: Laurenz Brunner
For the documenta 14 radio programme Every Time A Ear di Soun, from 17th June – 8th July 2017, Mobile Radio produced 41 shows and two installations at SAVVY gallery in Berlin. The shows were broadcast on FM 103.0 MHz in Berlin, FM 90.4 MHz in Kassel and online, as well as intermittedly via short wave on 15560 kHz. Our daily radio productions consisted of two parts: a prerecorded morning show (Radiaphiles), and a live afternoon show (Render: live).
In Radiaphiles, Mobile Radio offer an overview of independent and not-for-profit community, ‘free’, campus, and pirate stations who provide a wealth of material and perspectives outside of the mainstream media orthodoxy. This series constitutes a major retrospective of the work of the radio art network Radia, whose collective mission is to make radio that transcends the borders and boundaries of land and language. Mobile Radio visit each station in turn to discern their motives and inspirations, and explore the work of one of their associated artists. Produced with support from Goethe Institut. Click on ‘Up Next’ in player to access all episodes.
In Render: live, a treasure trove of personal archives were opened for artistic exploration. Every day Mobile Radio delved deep into a collection of artefacts and memories and rendered them into radiophonic form: cassettes, minidiscs, vinyl, tape and conceptual works smothered in the hiss of time. Special guest appearances rendered these guidelines obsolete and opened the door to other forms of live radio shenanigans.
Some of the live events were also captured on video:
We also exhibited two installations at the gallery:
April 28, 2017 by Mobile Radio | Comments Off on LONDON April 2017
Resonance FM’s 15th Birthday Party offered the opportunity to try out a new performance in which Knut sits still on stage with hearing aids in his closed hands, feeding back at frequencies determined by the cavity size of the hands. The evening with a Resonance typical wide range of performances also featured The Honey Hahs, Tom Paley (RIP), Adesh Sundaresen, Locus, Errollyn Wallen and a host of poets.
March 16, 2017 by Mobile Radio | Comments Off on WITTLICH March 2017
Music therapist Theo van der Poel invited us to his hospital in Wittlich where he has been running a series of monthly free concerts for patients and visitors for the last ten years. Together with him on piano and accordion we evoked playing Bach on the motorway and included questions of the German immigration test.
February 1, 2017 by Mobile Radio | Comments Off on BRUSSELS February 2017
Sarah was invited to give a seminar on radio at the école de recherche graphique (erg) for their seminar atelier called ‘after empire‘. Under the title ‘Double Hertz Radio’ she brought two FM transmitters with her and led a one day workshop that started with the question ‘What is radio?’ and ended with a series of hilarious performances by the students within the erg building which utilised the two low power radio transmitters and a dozen portable receivers.
The art school has a tradition of working with the medium of radio. This was represented in several other radio related workshops and the set-up of a temporary student station called Radio Ergote that collaborated with Radio Panik in Brussels to access FM airtime.
November 4, 2016 by Mobile Radio | Comments Off on BERLIN November 2016
Around the same time of the international radio art festival Radio Revolten in Halle, Berlin’s premier experimental music venue Ausland ran a short series called ‘Bending the Waves‘ that addressed the issue of radio as instrument. We performed as Tonic Train and chatted live on air to Sissi FM in what must be the most idiosyncratic radio studio in Berlin, located up a vertical ladder above the main entrance.
October 30, 2016 by Mobile Radio | Comments Off on HALLE (SAALE) October 2016
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”.
The remit was to work with the radio art pieces that were included in the exhibition, but by way of contradiction these were restricted for use by copyright issues. Sarah opted to use her own collection of alternative material from artist friends represented in the exhibition, and with a multitude of overlapping tracks created a playful surround mix through a versatile sound system that consisted of three small FM transmitters and a host of transistor radios strewn across the HKW’s foyer. 
