Tag Archives: acoustic ecology

News, Sound Art Radio

Soundworks on Radiophrenia: April 9 and 10

Ms Schaffner is chuffed to announce two of her works being broadcast at the international radio art festival Radiophrenia, starting on April 7, 2025.

BROADCASTS ACROSS GLASGOW ON 87.9FM

24 HOURS A DAY: 7th – 20th April, 2025

RADIOPHRENIA is a radio art collective, festival and art radio station broadcasting intermittently across Glasgow.  
The broadcast schedule for our 2025 edition includes a series of newly commissioned radio works, public Live-to-Air performances, live studio shows, long-form works, shorts and pre-recorded features. For this year’s selections we were assisted by guest curator Riah Naief of Listen Gallery. Through our public engagement programme we will be working with four different community groups to realise a new series of sound and radio works. As in previous years the majority of the programme will be made up from selections submitted to an international open call for sound art and radio works.

9 April 2025  10:00 pm – 10:30 pm
1) Kristina Loring – DNA ASMR (3:00)
2) Gabi Schaffner – Horom Radio (6:00)
3) andre birken – 31 monstrous demonstrations – GAUMENFREUDEN 8 (0:27)
4) Sylvain Souklaye – INVISIBLE BODY (RAW NOISE) (10:00)
5) Sarah LeMieux – A Phase Change (6:30)

The ancient city of Horom is set in the southwest of Gyumri in Armenia. The hills are strewn with the remnants of ruins… one might guess that this has been a fundament – or that the color of the grassland had changed with what resided underneath. The air was filled with the drones of jets circling a sky with some clouds. The wind chased wilted thistles across the expanse of the land. We walked among the stones and turned my small radio on.

10 April 2025  11:00 am – 11:30 am
The devastating earthquake on December 6, 1988, destroyed the greatest part of the city of Gyumri in Armenia. With the Mush II District, a whole new living quarter was stomped out of the ground. Sturdy tenement buildings, a school, three supermarkets, a park with a varied fountain, a football arena, playing grounds and small garden patches, either in the yards or bordering on the overgrown meadows.
When stopping by one of those gardens, I was spoken too and afterwards ‘kidnapped’ by two ladies (best friends and gardeners) and taken into the kitchen to drink coffee. English is overestimated as lingua franca once you travel east. I felt discombobulated and difficult. My translator-app worked for Russian only… which created much fun for Gina and Raja. I chose to submit this situation piece because its squeaky ambiguities are so well known to any field recording person/traveler. There is still much to learn.

Sound Art Radio

False Forks@Maerzmusik

Today and tomorrow: My commissioned piece “False Forks – Errant Waves in Arcadia” will be broadcast within the frame of Cashmere Radio’s collaboration with Maerzmusik festival Berlin 2022. There will be a listening session starting on Sunday, 10 pm, at Cashmere Radio.
For more info please look into https://cashmereradio.com/

False Forks (Errant waves in Arcadia)
32:35 min

Frequencies permeate our life world on all levels. They can be abstract, unfathomable, lurk at the threshold of our hearing, be extremely figurative or even plainly obtrusive. They can be soothing, piercing, alarming, beautiful, awe inspiring, familiar. Seldomly, they come along single, as one clear tone, more often they huddle in clusters or patterns. Frequencies sail like clouds along the horizons of our perception. They rain on us. And they sneak into the deepest layers of our brain, where they tickle memories or feelings or both.

For this piece, I was looking for frequencies offside the tech sphere (if such a thing is possible). There is, of course, the language of animals and the mumblings of human voices, the resounding of instruments, elemental drones, doorbells, sewing machines. I became especially interested in those clusters of wavelengths one finds grouped in little scenes of everyday life. While having fun with my work I kept thinking about ‘forking paths’ and forks and branches, about ‘taking a wrong turn’, and about mazes and ‘amazement’. It seems though, that frequencies are much too ephemeral to follow any track, be it right or wrong. Under their cloaks of math or (astro)physical formulas I imagine they foster secret urges to roll about in the mud and dirt, to permeate and mingle, to travel as sirens across the seas of the city, or to be breathed out of the pleats of an accordion.

As a series of life-world-frequency vignettes, “False Forks (Errant Waves in Arcardia)” assembles varied notions of mimicry, dirt, duration and osmosis.

Recordings and composition /Aufnahmen und Komposition
Gabi Schaffner 2022

Credits
Accordion/Akkordeon: Olsen auf Aldebaran, 2020
Musical Saw/SIngende Säge: Mimosa Pale, 2012/2020
Cat/Kater: Augustin, 2021
Drums: Toni Brokoli, Patrick Guderitz, 2020
String instrument/Saiteninstrument: Anonymous lady in Folk Music Shop, Taiwan 2019
Xylophone/ Xylophon: Stella Braun, 2011
Recording Husky dogs / Aufnahme von Huskys: Nathalie Grenzhaeuser, 2021