Radio As Art

Acoustic signals, voice, sound, articulation, music and spatial networking are dispositifs of radiophonic transmission which have brought forth a great number of artistic practices. Up to and into the digital present radio has been and is employed and explored as an apparatus-based structure as well as an expanded model for performance and perception. This volume investigates a broad range of aesthetic experiments with the broadcasting technology of radio, and the use of radio as a means of disseminating artistic concepts. With exemplary case studies, its contributions link conceptual, recipient-response-related, and sociocultural issues to matters of relevance to radio art's mediation.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 126) and index.

Listen Up is the first publication to consider American radio art as a distinct sound art practice. Analytical essays by leading media historians and practitioners discuss how the field took shape in the context of changing broadcast environments, while manifestos and other documents provide glimpses into the concerns of artists.

This book explores the cultural, aesthetic, and political relevance of music in radio art from its beginnings to present day. Contributors include musicologists, literary studies, and cultural studies scholars and cover radio plays, radio shows, and other programs in North American, English, Spanish, Greek, Italian, and German radio.

Beyond his work as a musician, Jon Langford has attracted attention as a visual artist in recent years. Nashville Radio is the first collection of his art. It reproduces 215 paintings, as well as song lyrics and autobiographical writings. The book includes a CD of Langford performing 18 of the printed songs. Langford's "song-paintings" fuse portraiture with imagery derived from folk art, Dutch still life, classic Western wear, and the cold, cold war--all instilled with his trademark sardonic wit. He applies this distinctive style to the depiction of American musical icons like Bob Wills, Hank Williams, and Johnny Cash, but also to more ghostly, marginal figures--blindfolded cowboys, astronauts, and dancers--who are jerked around by success and exploitation, fame and neglect. Underlying his work is a deep love of musical lore, twinned with fierce opposition to the death-dealing tendencies in the culture of his adopted homeland, from the killing off of authentic popular music by mass-marketed drivel to the embrace of capital punishment as a response to social ills. Langford's work offers an alternative perspective, recalling "a time when great visionaries and pioneers thrived at the heart of the mainstream--and the lid wasn't on so tight."

This book documents Radio Revolten, the international radio-art festival in Halle, Germany, which took place in October 2016 and featured an independent station, installations, live performances, conferences, workshops and public interventions.

This book examines the impact of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation/Société Radio Canada (CBC/SRC) on the development of art music in Canada during the broadcaster’s first fifty years (1936-1986). In so doing, it investigates the achievement of one man: John Peter Lee Roberts. Born in Australia, he arrived in Canada in 1955, and, over the next thirty years, he worked tirelessly as a producer, administrator and adviser at the state broadcaster to bring the music of Canada to the world and the world of music to Canadians. Roberts also played a crucially important role in commissioning, disseminating and promoting new music by Canadian composers.