Welcome to Radio Insomnia.

Despite the sound of marching boots increasingly resonating around us, Radio Insomnia is in Paris for a stopover to present a short radio night with artists, writers and musicians, including some voices that are already familiar to our sleepless nights. We'll gather around discussions and sound performances to combine our nocturnal and political anxieties. More than ever, awake and use radio to build nocturnal communities!

We will spend this first part of the evening around open discussions, readings, and broadcasts that explore the night as a protagonist in our lives, in feminine insomniac literature, and art criticism, with Léa Cassagnau and Samuel Belfond, as well as the artists performing during the night.

Léa Cassagnau is an author and researcher currently preparing a thesis in comparative literature on insomnia, from a gendered perspective, focusing on Marie Darrieussecq and Louise Bourgeois among others. She also produces radio shows for Radio Campus Paris.

Samuel Belfond is an independent writer and art critic who works mainly in collaboration. He experiments with the possibilities of situated, experimental and collective criticism, within Jeunes Critiques d'Art and the Podcast Verni(e)s. He is also developing a practice in performance, programming and sound creation. We'll be talking about La nuit n'en finit plus, a collective, nocturnal, sound-based writing experiment devised by Jeunes Critiques d'Art.

Only performed in the dark, Talking Knots is a choral piece performed by a group of participants with a sculptural score created on a cord with successive knots, which measures 116 meters. The cord is a sound notation encoded with the knot’s position and thread type. The knot positions correspond to the timing of each note, and the thread types each connote a specific hiss/click sound. In the piece, circle of readers generates the sonification of the knots, resulting in a swarm of tiny repetitive sound patterns, combined to build a 30-minute chilled soundscape that recalls a surreal marshland. Talking Knots is inspired by the Quipu of Inca and allowed people to read only using fingers in the dark.

Lin Chi-Wei, based in Paris - and you may know him as Eric - is a Taiwanese sound art legend whose practice incorporates folk culture, noise, ritual and audience participation.He is a founding member of Zero and Sound Liberation Organization, pioneering groups for experimental music in Taiwan, and in 2012 published Beyond Sound Art: The Avant Garde, Sound Machine and the Modernity of Hearing, which analyses the aesthetic condition of sound art in a post-colonial East Asian context.

Gaël Segalen is a sound artist, electroacoustic composer and performer who describes her practice as a translation, metamorphosing noises (between naivety and sophistication), intuitively creating connections from life to the studio, through the activation of objects, machines and mobile recording. In sound art, she calls her project IhearU - I hear you, I understand you - because it emphasises the direct relationship with others and the world through sound. It's a question of sensuality.

Her music, which she describes as multi-listening, has also been described as "DFR" (Danceable Field Recording). She also works with radio and film, and is co-founder of Polyphones and the electronic Open Women Orchestra. She has released on the Erratum Musical, Frm-at, Firecracker Recordings, Coherent States, Les Ateliers Claus, Mirae Arts and Tanzprocesz labels.

A timeless figure of the Parisian experimental art scene, Sig Valax is a sound artist, composer, and shaman. Fascinated by the fragile moments of listening, she seeks to distill a poetic, techno-archaic, and improvised energy through impromptu encounters between sound materials, voices, and audiences.

In her compositions, she brings together analogue and modular synthesizers to express variations in the grain of sound. She produces sound pieces for radio and live performance, and explores experimental improvised music with Vierge Noire, Elek Ember, Seuil Optique, Mesce Basse, Ensemble Electron and Lucus Furrina.

Oto Ninski is an experimental sound artist and musician. Plural and raw in her practice, her surreal explorations of contrasts and the spaces they reveal transcend genres and take many forms.

Using a range of sound sculpting techniques, from field recording to harsh noise walls, her work seeks out vibratory extremes to create an abstract, sensory narrative.

No3sis creates electronic music and is a tireless organiser of experimental, artistic, and radio projects – in particular using artificial intelligence algorithms. One example is Danse Noétique, an extension of his musical project, which consists of creating a hybrid live performance with interactive scenography, produced in collaboration with Alexandra Radulescu, Thomas Ballèvre and Nikita Goile.

He is co-founder of Label Syrinx Music, an invitation to explore divergent musical aesthetics and open the door to hybrid artistic projects. We particularly like Hypnagogia, released on Quanta Records.