With diffusion fm’ Hethre Contant & Jon Panther, writer Tom Melick and Radio Insomnia’ Anabelle Lacroix & Nicolas Montgermont.

Wakefulness as Resistance explores actions such as night protest, and soft activism in wakefulness, in awakening against chrono-normativity, against the silence of normalcy and in reconfiguring capitalist rhythms. Insomnia is political because it cannot let things rest. This broadcast of Radio Insomnia is part of ((( Amplify: Story, Resistance, Radio ))) exhibition/takeover held at Sydney’s Tin Sheds Gallery.

During this hour, we will feature Frances Barrett’s recent piece Cry (2023), an interplay of calling out in the dark to no ear, as well as new sound decompositions by Debris Facility, that will reappear like bites at different times across the night.

In Alarms for wide ears, carillon and bells that are a collective marker of time in civic space and for military use, also signal time as a biopolitical power behind productivity, and cultural production. In tribute to Charlemagne Palestine's Music for big ears, these sounds invite us to think further about today’s state of alarm.

Diffusion fm is the collaborative radiophonic project by scholar and artist Hethre Contant, and sound artist/performer Jon Panther (AKA Audiotopsy).

With current focus on vocal performance and large scale immersive sound installation, Frances Barrett process foregrounds listening, collaborative methods of making, and embodied forms. Barrett is an artist currently living in Narrm Melbourne.Cry is sung by Joanna Fabro and mixed by Felix Abrahams.

The queer body corporate Debris Facility is artistic/corporate entity whose activities often parody and parasite processes of neoliberal identity construction and industrial commodification.

Tom Melick is a writer, editor, and publisher in Eora Sydney who has written A Little History of Fatigue (out on Rosa Press). With Simryn Gill, he runs Stolon Press, a publisher of books and other printed and photocopied matter.

When night falls in Brooklyn, pirate broadcasters take over the airwaves by the dozens. Frequencies with music, voices, and religions from various cultures resonate, blend into the landscape to the extent of adopting its dominant radiophonic codes.

David Goren takes us on a journey through the history of these wild broadcasts in this neighborhood, providing an overview of what can be heard there today, with many excerpts available on his platform: pirateradiomap.com

David Goren has created programming for the BBC, Studio 360, NPR's Lost and Found Sound series, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Afropop and On the Media as well as audio-based installations for Proteus Gowanus, the Ethnographic Terminalia Collective and Radio Cona and many others. A Brooklyn based writer, post production mixer and field recordist for over 30 years, David has recorded everyone from the Dalai Lama to the Dancing Chicken of Chinatown. He is also one half of the shortwave radio jam band, The Propagations with Ned Sublette.

A new sound piece crafted by musician Robert Curgenven with “a sense of movement, an edge bordering on an urban insomnia, with the window open to the elements… undertones and seasonal inflections.”

The composition combines new material with some of his releases from Record Fields.

Robert Curgenven is a composer, performer and sound artist working with field recording, pipe organ, custom-made vinyl, turntables among other techniques. His works often challenge the flow of time and our perspective of space in which the body and mind resonate. Curgenven is attentive to the porous relationisp between sound, our body and its environment, both natural and architectural.

This conversation explores radio waves' sovereignty, lineages of piracy, the night as an echo-chamber of extinction and silence, with radio entities both human and non-human. We discuss borderless radio art practices, including Earth-Moon-Earth transmission, mini fm broadcasting in remote locations as well as various kinds of spooky spectral sounds through the work of radio cegeste, Sisters Akousmatica, Tom Roe and others. The conversation includes the sounds of Border Radio and an excerpt of The New Zealand Storm Petrel.

With Anabelle Lacroix, Hether Contant and Sally Ann McIntyre in Eora/Sydney, and Sisters Akousmatica and Tom Roe at Wave Farm in Acra, NY.

Anabelle Lacroix is a curator interested in the overlapping field of performance, sound, speech and publishing. She focuses on the politics and poetics of night-time as one half of Radio Insomnia (with Nicolas Montgermont), and as part of her practice-based PhD at the University of New South Wales.

Hethre Contant is an artist, radio scholar, and one half of Diffusion fm with sound artist/performer Jon Panther). Content explores structural coupling amongst human and more-than-human beings from the past and present, using an array of technologies and procedural techniques to produce online, installation-based, and live works.

Sally Ann McIntyre is a radio/transmission artist, poet/writer, researcher and the operator of the site-specific transmission art project station radio cegeste 104.5. Her recent solo work delves into the materiality of recorded silence, the history of birdsong transcription, and the hauntology of extinction as a trace within sound archives.

Lutruwita/Tasmania based radio queens Sisters Akousmatica (Phillipa Stafford and Julia Drouhin) explore the radical possibilities of transmission with expanded radio projects that are most often public, social, and collaborative. They create curatorial, artistic and written projects which are concerned with collective radio practices and auditory-spatial exploration to support socio-cultural and gender minorities in the field of sound arts.

Wave Farm’s Artistic Director, Tom Roe is a sound transmission artist who performs with transmitters and receivers using multiple bands (FM, CB, walkie-talkie), as well as prepared CDs, vinyl records, and electronics. One of the original founders of free103point9, which is now Wave Farm, Roe is also an avid radio educator, writer and critic.

Inspired by stories of whales in the Derwent River once keeping local residents awake at night, this live-performance, sound and transmission artwork, is a journey across humans and the marine environment exploring relationships between whales and other marine species. Using FM radio, theremin and live vocal performance, Nocturne unfolds as a series of sonic ‘migrations’ across several datasets and sites. The work invites listeners into a dreamlike soundscape that blends bioacoustic data from the Australian Antarctic Division’s Southern Ocean voyages, technological and environmental sound and recorded interviews of residents. Moving beyond human-centred listening spaces this work re-imagines the local marine environment as both a regenerative and haunted space and a significant site for interspecies communications.

Nocturne: Sonic Migrations was performed on the nipaluna/Hobart waterfront, lutruwita/Tasmania, on February 18, 2022 as part of Constance ARI’s program curated by Eliza Burke. It was also transmitted during the full moon in the deep sea of the Pacific Ocean for Radio Amnion’s 19th transmission on December 8th 2022.

Matt Warren is a lutruwita/Tasmanian electronic media artist, musician, curator and writer, working with sound, video and creating immersive electronic installations. With an interest in psychedelia, digital abstraction and hauntology, Warren develops works that are centered on memory, transcendence, liminal space and the suspension of disbelief.

Sally Ann McIntyre is a radio/transmission artist, poet/writer, researcher and the operator of the site-specific transmission art project station radio cegeste 104.5. She is formally interested in the liminality of radiophonic space, and how the fragility of small-radius transmission can work to reveal inaudible aspects of sites as well as uncodified noise within the spectrum. Her recent solo work delves into the materiality of recorded silence, the history of birdsong transcription, and the hauntology of extinction as a trace within sound archives.

Danielle Kirby is a musician, and scholar exploring atypical metaphysics and aesthetics. Using site-responsive improvisation and experimental post-classical composition Kirby creates compositions, recordings and performances.

With particular interests in new materialism, bio-arts and spectrality Eliza Burke undertakes hybrid and collaborative curatorial projects across the arts and sciences.

What are the benefits of synchronising and de-synchronising?

Anabelle Lacroix interviews philosopher Will Johncock to discuss his book Naturally Late: Synchronisation in Socially Contructed Times (2019).

Will Johncock is an academic, publisher, translator and podcaster who writes on areas of philosophy, social theory, and sociology. Will works within a philosophical tradition that interrogates distinctions of presence from absence. One such study concerns how an individual’s thoughts, actions, and attributes, are products of what is not the individual.

Live from Paris with three soundworks: Insomniac massage, Small talk with machines and Undergound equipment designed to be listened during the deep night...

Æther Varia is the industrial music moniker of Nicolas Montgermont, a sound and radio artist who explores the physicality of waves in its different forms. For more than 15 years, he has been designing artistic devices that explore the poetic essence of waves: resonance in a volume, vibration of materials, richness of invisible radio landscapes, musicality of interferences, antenna sculpture, listening and broadcasting territory... and he is currently developing a work on the relationship between radio-art and politics.

A talk about antennas by celebrated insomniac Tetsuo Kogawa, and his augmented selves.

After studying philosophy in Japan, artist Tetsuo Kogawa spent many years in New York City where he taught in several universities. Kogawa introduced free radio movement to Japan, and is widely known for his blend of criticism, performance and activism. He has written over 30 books and numerous articles on radio art, media culture, film, city and urban space, and micro politics. He has shown his artistic and useful workshops to build Mini-FM and microradio transmitters in many cities over the world. Recently he has combined the experimental and pirate aesthetics of the Mini-FM and microradio technology with internet streaming media.

The night-time of collective political organising as an horizon of possibility for resistance and consciousness-raising comes with its pendant: the night as a privileged time for striking the enemy whilst asleep. We cannot fully comprehend what night-time holds in times of war, but only point to the central, and continuous role of radio in creating connection, communication, and action across borders.

The Global Riot Golem was a performance by ∏Node and several guests (Radio Tsonami, Wave Farm, Felix Blume, Fiona lee, …) where the radio medium and Internet infrastructure are used as instruments: Multiple sound streams feed into each other forming a collective signal, a chain reaction of connection delays, data alterations, feedback loops and signal transformations. Little by little, the feed becomes alive and starts to have a life of it's own.

For the special occasion of Tsonami festival 2020 a golem was created using sounds of social and political struggles from South America, North America, Asia, Middle East and Europe, with an interpenetration of our local movements, demonstrations, and confrontations with State repression. Global Riot Golem shares a global multilingual soundtrack for struggle, a sonic contagion that will spread across radio waves, infiltrate the cables that connect us and seep through the membranes of your speakers…

∏-node is an artist collective working on the hybriditization of FM radio and digital processes. ∏node seeks to explore the many dimensions of radio – its physicality (ether, radio waves and the electromagnetic spectrum), its spatiality (bandwidth, frequencies), its infrastructure (network of radio receivers/emitters), its methods of production and editorial content management (programming boards/teams, recording studios), its methods of metadata reception (RDS/SDR), its history (free radio and pirate radio movements), and its legislation. Most importantly, ∏node also wants to examine the future role and potential of radio in a time when everything is going digital.

Gaza Nights is an incredible sound document. In 2014, during the assault of Tsahal in the Gaza band, a gazan is broadcasting live to let the world know of what is happening. This is a 15 minutes unedited recording of this raw broadcast, made by KRN. A sonic reminder that the political situation in Palestine is longstanding.

. Night of November 15th to 16th, Eora/Sydney (UTC+11)
. Midnight to 6 a.m.
. Open to the public
. Frontyard : 228 Ilawarra Rd, Marrickville NSW 2204

Contact:

A special broadcast for ((( Amplify: Story, Resistance, Radio ))) exhibition/takeover held at Tin Sheds Gallery until Nov 18th 2023. Full program here.

Radio Relays:
. Π-node : 14h-20h / mer 15 nov / Mulhouse-Paris / FR
. diffusion fm : 00h-06h / thu 16 nov / Eora-Sydney / AU
. Audio Foundation : 02h-08h / thu 16 nov / Tāmaki Makaurau-Auckland / NZ

Radio Insomnia is an invitation to listen with insomnia, rather than against it, for productivity. Drawing on radio as a medium with its qualities for fostering social relations, and night-time as an intimate space for listening, we aim at developing radiophonic devices for night communities.

Radio Insomnia is interested in the political and poetic forces of waking at night, whether by constraint or by choice. Our starting point is that in the extractivist model of our late capitalist society, sleep is depoliticised: unproblematized as a resource for productivity, which is part of a very normative and synchronized schedule driven by labour and moral values.

Whereas periods of wakefulness at night, were not always considered to be an illness and deficiency. Listening and other activities in the middle of the night were practised as part of day-to-day life prior to the industrial revolution. with two periods of sleep, with a first and second sleep, punctuated by wake. Across cultures, night-time is also a time for orality, for talking and listening. Commonly understood as an alarm bell, insomnia is a signal that something is wrong. With Radio Insomnia this is the signal that we want to follow and also broadcast.

Contact:

With Radio Insomnia, we ask -- What is the potential of listening at night when wakefulness is embraced rather than endured? In other words, what does it mean to listen “with” insomnia, rather than against it, for productivity?

Radio Insomnia unfolds through live broadcasts, sound installations, and the creation of social spaces and. Night-time broadcasts are shaped by roundtable discussions, performances, artist commissions, and listening sessions, or include a live transmission from the public space.

Created by and for sleepless bodies, Radio Insomnia was born of the collaboration between curator Anabelle Lacroix and artist Nicolas Montgermont.

This project is supported by the University of New South Wales, MITACS, and the Consulate General of France in Montréal as part of the research project The Sociability of Sleep by McGill University and the Université de Montréal.

. Graphic design by Aline Schneider, based on Avara font by Raphael Bastide
. Radio Infrastructure by ∏node
. Website by Nicolas Montgermont