Radius is an experimental radio broadcast platform established in 2010 in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Radius produces, exhibits, and distributes work by radio and transmission artists from around the world.

Radius features a new project monthly with statements by artists who use radio as a primary element in their work. Radius provides artists with live and experimental formats in radio programming. The goal is to support work that engages the tonal and public spaces of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Radius Episode 94: Untitled Radio (futile, fertile)
by Lia Kohl

The basis of Lia Kohl’s Untitled Radio (futile, fertile) is a series of improvisations with live radio static, created while in residence at ACRE in northwestern Wisconsin. ACRE is situated outside of Steuben, WI, an area rural enough that pockets of it get little to no radio signal. Instead, the FM signal offers a rich and varied palette of drones, percussive stutters and pops, prompting the ear to invent myriad sonic architecture: harmonies, melodies, landscapes. Kohl is drawn to the radio for its particularly physical expression of sound; these waves are all around us, all the time; broadcasting weather and emergencies and prayers and pop tunes, we only have to turn it on to hear them. These long recordings of static have a futile and fertile quality: full of possibility, transmitting nothing. Though these radio improvisations could stand on their own as musical objects, here they serve as scores or guides for further response. This work is a collection of four of these responses, utilising synthesizer, cello, voice, and processed field recordings. Kohl’s responses to these scores can vary dramatically in each realisation. Sometimes specific tonalities or clear melodic fragments emerge, other times she is more struck by noise, or focused on a close recreation of the static sound. She is careful not to impose preconceived restrictions on the process, offering herself the opportunity for present and attentive listening, honoring the fact that listening is a responsive act. There is no single sonic truth. The more often she explore this practice, the more it changes.

The Correct Time
von Jeff Kolar

Beginning on Thursday September 22, 2022 at 8:03 PM CST for the autumnal solar equinox, The Correct Time responds to the precise moment in time when the Sun crosses the Earth’s equator creating 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of darkness.

As we then begin descending into the darker months ahead, the piece serves as a reminder that time unites us all.

This work was originally commissioned in response to the exhibition “The Correct Time” at the Design Museum of Chicago.

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