Avant Radio Festival

WAVE FARM and WFMU and ARTxFM are teaming up to bring you a weekend focused on the creative and experimental nature of radio. Early Bird Registration: $175 Early Bird Student Registration: $140 Early Bird Deadline: September 15 Regular Registration: $195 Avant Radio Fest Friday November 13 1-2 PM: Opening Reception: Registration, coffee and general hobnobbery and fistbumping with other radio heads. 2:00 PM Dorit Chrysler: Theremin Workshop with Dorit Chrysler limit 15 participants, extra cost for materials ($35) The Art of Playing the Theremin - Everything you ever wanted to know about the theremin! Dorit Chrysler will guide you through tips and tricks during this workshop. You will learn technical and practical aspects in how to approach this mysterious instrument. Theremins will be provided for each session. Sessions are limited to 15 players. Calibration, positioning, exercises, repertoire, woowoo - and no touching! 2:00 PM Paul Bame: Update on the FCC Translator Window and LPFM Allocations Paul Bame of Prometheus Radio offers the latest info on the FCC's latest translator window and LPFM allocations. 3:00 PM College Radio Meeting All attendees from college radio stations are invited to compare notes and discuss issues related to university broadcast operations. 5:00 PM Raw Power: Radio Remotes for the Masses In a new era of political repression and corporate consolidation where mainstream media becomes less reliable, Democracy will depend on communities building new methods of sharing and distributing information. In this workshop, the DJs of ART FM will lead participants through the steps of developing their own online signal, allowing them to broadcast their voices, ideas,and musical selections live and loud from wherever they may be in the world. Includes demonstrations from WXOX DJs in their various remote locations. 5:00 PM Radio as Collage: From Freeform Broadcasting to Spoken-Word Composition, 1990–Present Vicki Bennett, working as People Like Us, has been making radio since 1990, using broadcasting as a space for collage, sustained listening, experimentation, and unconventional forms of storytelling. Her practice has moved between DJing, live and improvised broadcasting, commissioned spoken-word works, and large-scale acts of radio curation. This presentation traces that history, including her long-running DO or DIY program, the 2016 WFMU residency Optimized!, and Radio Boredcast, the extraordinary 744-hour continuous online broadcast she curated for AV Festival in 2012. Vicki will also discuss her composed radio works for WDR and Deutschlandradio, including No One Is an Island, I Can Fly, and Changing Your Mind. Moving between found sound, music, speech, and archival material, these works approach radio as a durational and relational form. Do or DIY with People Like Us: Playlists and Archives 7:00 PM Tour of WFMU: Tour of WFMU's Magic Factory, including the massive record library and the black velvet gallery. 8:00 PM Performance/Demo: Demon Box Developed by Eternal Research, the Demon Box transforms the hidden electromagnetic world into sound, signal, light and data. It captures frequencies from everyday electronics like phones, drills, and TVs, then converts them into audio signal, MIDI data, and control voltage. 9:00 PM Performance: Radio Wonderland Joshua Fried, performing as Radio Wonderland, transforms live commercial radio into a funky electronic collage. His software creations include The Re-Shuffler, which deploys slices of radio across a rhythmic and melodic grid to create instant techno. The Re-Esser extracts the sibilance and plays those S, T, and K sounds like a drum machine, while Anything Kick morphs slowed-down radio into a bass drum to shake the dance floor. 9:30 PM Performance by Laenz: Laenz is a producer based in Brooklyn, NY, working within radiophonic textures and caliginous dance music. Saturday November 14 9:30AM Hearty White: Homemade Radio Theater with Hearty White Homemade Radio Theater or How to Make Bad TV on the Radio, with WFMU spiritual leader and master of voices, philosophy and foley, Hearty White 9:30 AM The Collaborative Ecology of Radio at Wave Farm In this presentation, Wave Farm Co-Directors Bianca Felix Biberaj and Meredith Kooi travel through a selection of projects presented by Wave Farm to explore how making radio can be a way of collaborating with nature and its fundamental forces including electromagnetism, time, and a place’s flora and fauna. 11:00 AM Full Group Session: Radio Is Not A Container with Anna Friz Radio art practitioners have long sought to transform radio from an apparatus of information diffusion to an apparatus of communication, and to expand beyond the logics of the programming grid and engage with the conditions and ecologies of wirelessness in new ways. This presentation offers a brief overview of radio art from the early radio experiments and emergent stations to contemporary international practices. Anna Friz is a radio, sound, and media artist and scholar, who began making radio on CiTR FM Vancouver, Canada in 1993, and since then has created radiophonic works for extensive international broadcast, installation, or performance, where radio is the source, subject, and medium of the work. Anna is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow, and won the Karl Sczuka Prize for Radio Art in 2024. Her radio artworks have been commissioned by national public radio in Canada, Australia, Austria, Finland, Germany, Denmark, and Spain, and heard on public and independent airwaves all over the world. Recent presentations include The Lab (San Francisco), The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History (USA), Sonandes Bienal Internacional de Arte Sonoro (La Paz, Bolivia), Tsonami Festival de Arte Sonoro (Valparaíso, Chile), Bienal Sur (Argentina), Heroines of Sound Festival (Berlin), Donaueschinger Musiktage 2024, and Radio Art Zone (Esch-Zur-Alzette, Luxembourg). Anna is currently Professor of Sound in the Film and Digital Media Department at University of California, Santa Cruz. 1:30 PM Ken + Andy 36 Years of Experimental Comedy: Co-hosts Andy Breckman and Ken Freedman discuss their long running comedy experiment, their greatest successes, and most hilarious failures. 1:30 PM 40 Watts From Nowhere (Documentary Film on Pirate Radio) Sue Carpenter built a 40-watt FM station in 1995 and ran it out of her apartment in Los Angeles, exploiting a ruling that allowed hundreds of low-power illegal radio operators to proliferate throughout the country, giving birth to the legal LPFM movement. This is Carpenter's documentary on KBLT, which took on a life of its own, drawing Mazzy Star to headline a benefit concert and the Red Hot Chili Peppers to play live in her living room. Presented as part of ARF’s radio art and media education program, followed by a moderated discussion. 3:00 PM Workshop: Inductive Listening with Zach Poff Limit 12 participants ($30) Zach Poff is a New York area media artist, educator, and maker-of-things. His artwork is rooted in open systems that eschew individual authorship in favor of collaborative or generative models. At ARF, Zach will facilitate a hands-on workshop titled "Inductive Listeners." We will build inductive coils to plug into sound recorders, then go on a walk around the neighborhood to listen to the radio emissions of the infrastructure.