RADIO WONDERLAND

Presented at A New HOPE (2022), July 23, 2022, 11:40 p.m. (60 minutes)

RADIO WONDERLAND pulverizes mass media into little bits that dance. RADIO WONDERLAND pulverizes mass media into little bits that dance. Live commercial radio becomes recombinant funk, controlled by old shoes I hit with sticks (I'm a drummer) and a steering wheel (I'm a, er, wheel player). All the sounds originate from an old boombox, playing radio LIVE. Nothing is pre-recorded. All the processing is live, though my custom MaxMSP code. But I hardly touch the laptop. My controllers really are an old Buick vintage steering wheel, four shoes on stands, and some gizmos. You'll hear me build grooves, step by step, out of recognizable radio, and even un-wind my grooves back to the original radio source. I walk on with a boom box, tuned to FM. I plug it into my system and start slicing. I arrange those slices both rhythmically, and, by simple transposition, melodically too. I call this process the RE-SHUFFLER. Another algorithm, my RE-ESSER, isolates sibilance, so I can compose on the spot with those S, T, K, Sh, etc. sounds, like programming a drum machine. The ANYTHING-KICK uses FFT-based convolution to morph a bit of radio in the direction of a kick drum. The sum is live dance music made performative by shoes, wheel--and myself. So what's it all about? Code can subvert commercial media and interrogate the never-ending flow. So my transformations, taken individually, must be clear and simple--mostly framing, repeating and changing pitch--although when everything is put together the whole is indeed complex. My controllers are simple too: the wheel merely a knob to take things up and down (frequency, tempo) or play radio loops like a turntable, the shoes just pads I hit softer or louder. The surreal quality of using such ordinary objects underscores the absurd disconnect usually found between digital controller and sound, as well as the congenial nature of the aural transformations themselves. So, too, my riffs must be vernacular and not elite. (We need the funk.)

Presenters:

  • jo s h u a
    Many know composer-performer Joshua Fried for RADIO WONDERLAND's steering wheel and shoes, others know him for putting headphones on some of Downtown NYC's most mercurial stars of the 1990s and 2000s, and still others for his collaborations with pop stars They Might Be Giants. In the 80s he signed to Atlantic Records as a dance music artist. In the 90s he became the youngest composer discussed in Schirmer Books' American Music in the 20th Century. Fried's production credits include Chaka Khan, Ofra Haza, and avant drone-master David First. His recordings have been released by free103point9, Trace Label, clang, Tellus and Atlantic Records.

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