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In Babel from Radio Corax
The intention for the next half an hour was to switch into the subject of CITY - refering to the small east German City Halle and the metropolis Chicago- we decided to choose Babylon as the tertium communis.
"In Babel" can also be used according to the Great Oxford - "babel" means a: a babel of voices, a noisy medley, mostly in today's lingua franca which is English, b: confusion, a scene of confusion, c: as "Tower of Babel" a gigantic project, and finally d: the biblical confusion of languages. Bernd Born is a composer and musician -living in Halle/S. and Wilhelm Bartsch is a writer- working and living in Halle.
Flame "Real Energy World / Niger Delta"
By Eva Ursprung for Klubradio/Herbstradio Berlin
Since the 1960s, oil extraction by international corporations has been destroying the environment and ecological balance in the Niger Delta, and thus, the basis of life of the local population. The composition works with the sounds of gas flares, as well as interviews with activists and theoreticians from the region, contributed by Sokari Ekine.
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The Radia Network emerged from a series of meetings, clandestine events, late night club discussions and a lot of email exchanges between cultural radio producers across Europe. The topics vary and the reasons for forming a network are many, but Radia has become a concrete manifestation of the desire to use radio as an art form. The approaches differ, as do the local contexts; from commissioned radio art works to struggles for frequencies to copyright concerns, all the radios share the goal of an audio space where something different can happen. That different is also a form in the making - radio sounds different in each city, on each frequency. Taking radio as an art form, claiming that space for creative production in the mediascape and cracking apart the notion of radio is what Radia does.
It is producing radio stuff that is hard to describe. Some of it can be labeled radio art, or experimental radio, or creative radio. Sometimes it talks, sometimes it doesn’t. It can be noisy, or a kind of soundscape, or a documentary, a document, a talk, a performance. Each and every week, one of the partners will provide the network program, commissioned and produced especially for this purpose : being broadcast by all the partners and made available online.