Is There Really a Place on Radio for Experimentation?

To 4 players from different places. One hour.

(This piece was written for an online live broadcast prepared for the Tsonami Music Festival in Chile. "Musically homeless" is a saying somewhere that the Swiss artists Peter Fischli & David Weiss said. In this composition, I also drew on their favorite game rules.)

Prepare some local food and snacks;
Each person prepares a piece of local music;
("Place" can be your hometown or any place where you have lived for a period of time.)
Eat and drink naturally, observe and talk about the food;
Each time, one person gives an instruction to another person. The other person completes the instruction and gives an instruction to any next person, and so on.

instruction:

(Can be communicated with cards or gestures.)

1. Stop all movements and sounds.
2. Stand up, walk around the room, and play music on your phone.
3. Repeat your current actions and sounds.
4. Use translation software to translate the name of a food into English and play it.
5. Speak in one or two dialects or foreign languages.
6. Follow me and do the same thing.

Yan Jun

Yan Jun lives and works in Beijing, China. He is a poet and musician who works with field recordings, the body, electronic noise, and conceptual ideas. Among other events, he has participated in the Gwangju Biennale (2018), Documenta (2017), and the Shanghai Biennale (2014). In 2016, he was an artist-in-residence at DAAD in Berlin.

His recent main activities include what he calls "non-music," the band Fen (with Otomo Yoshihide, Ryu Hankil, and Yuen Chee Wai), and The Living Room Tour—a project performed in multiple locations, including Montreal, Canada, in 2016, where six performances were curated by Eric Mattson. He is also one of the minds behind the Chinese music label Subjam.

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Radio, as a heterogeneous mix of technological progress and aestheticised desire, goes far beyond being merely a medium of communication. This series of podcasts aims to highlight this fact, offering a selection within the wide variety of topics currently being explored, most notably the confluences and limits and the possibilities of dissemination and the presence of silenced histories.

Depending on the chosen historical and theoretical paradigm, multiple and even contradictory histories of radiophony can be constructed. Therefore, research starts from a general corpus of concepts which explore, along with a fascination with the medium, a utopian and unconventional treatment: the "Radio-Eye" and the Radio-Pravda manifesto of Dziga Vertov; the public interaction and communication of Bertolt Brecht; William Burroughs' cut-ups and communicative disruption; Velimir Khlebnikov's "The Radio of the Future"; and the concept "Radio Mind" by psychologist Upton Sinclair. As media theorist Allen S. Weiss states: “Radio is not a singular entity but rather a multitude of radios” and "radiophonia is a heterogeneous field encompassing diverse apparatus, practices, forms, and utopias”.

Opposite the canonisation of the field and radiophonic methods, there are people and collectives that opt to keep margins fluid and encourage participation, reflection and interaction through experimental approaches and applications. To invent and reinvent radio is to approach radiophonic space as a creative space. Thus, the series seeks to establish an open and fragmented dialogue with media artists, creators and thinkers on the relationship between radio, society, technology and experimentation through singular and idiosyncratic radio pieces.