fugitive radio will broadcast Hum Klub today (10 June) from Pixelache Festival #BURN_____2021. We will join with humming artist-in-residence Eero Yli-Vakkuri! Come hum with us at 15.00 EEST. Join on Jam, a simple to use browser-based audio streaming platform. Click ‘join’ after the jump: https://jam.systems/humklub
Pixelache Helsinki Festival 2021 #Burn____, co-directed by artist-organiser Andrew Gryf Paterson and author Laura Gustafsson, takes place this year with limited access in selected spaces inside Oodi Central Library in Helsinki and outside the front canopy of Oodi, as well as online, from the 6th to the 13th of June 2021. The theme of the festival #Burn____, anticipated in late summer 2019, sets the context of the festival contributions, reflecting on mental health, social solidarity and struggle as well as on ecological crisis.
After a year of excessive screen-based meetings, the festival re-adopts one of the oldest media forms at physical distance from another – radio – seems to be the idea of making a festival event with local and international contributors in consideration of mobility and gathering restrictions. With the established experience of hybrid radio, Pixelache brings a localised listening mix of audio works from two open calls, a live radio stream of festival events especially made or adapted for radio, emerging sound artists, podcasts, and interviews with festival artists and contributors. During the festival, the public can interact with a local FM radio broadcasting around Oodi. Bring Your Own Radio (BYOR) to listen, and if you like a blanket or picnic!
fugitive radio is planning a series of live and collectively produced outside broadcasts for Pixelache #Burn. We will meet outside Oodi Central Library from 14.00 everyday of the festival. If you’re curious to make live experimental radio with us bring your smartphone and a pair of wired earbuds. These work as an antenna on your smartphone if it has an FM receiver (look for the app!) Also bring a bluetooth speaker if you have one. After a little warm up, we will begin streaming online between 15.00 and 16.00 each day, thanks to {openradio}. We will also be broadcasting to a limited range around Oodi on 91.4 FM. If you can’t make it to Oodi you could join us remotely — we’re working on a platform! Updates will be posted on fugitive-radio.net and our Telegram channel. Follow us on Insta: fugitive.radio.
fugitive schedule
Sun 06: Roaming Radiophonic Picnic — sites and sounds of the Oodi broadcast zone.
Mon 07: Poethical De-Scriptings
Tue 08: ‘Swings & Ropes’ with Irina Mutt
Wed 09: The Snow Globe Effect: post-vax mental health chit chat with Tania Nathan
Thu 10: Hum Klub
Fri 11: Karaoke
Sat 12: ‘Cacerolazo’ environmental percussion with Suva Das
Sun 13: ‘Democracy Day!’ What do you think?
To participate online please download SonoBus, a free and open source, multi-user audio streaming application. Check back here on Sunday 6 June for details about how to join our room.
A recording of the live broadcast of our radiophonic ‘closing ceremony’ for Suva’s exhibition, ‘Untitled’ at Myymälä2, Helsinki.
Participants gathered ‘Under a Fooled Moon’ in the gallery and on SonoBus, a multi-user audio streaming platform, for a live improv session that was streamed on openradio.in Using our voices, Suva guided us through a collective experiment in performing networked radio infrastructure as one would play a musical instrument.
The event was devised in collaboration with Sophea Lerner and Timo Tuhkanen.
With headphones in, I’m not surprised that I become more attuned to the audio environment and move according to what might sound interesting. I consider passerby according to how I think — or rather sense — they might contribute to the recording. At the same time, I try to hum absent-mindedly. I don’t want to think about what I am humming; when a motif from a song or a familiar musical phrase escapes from my vocal chords and I wonder a little about what it is or where it came from, but try not to dwell on it or consciously change.
My sounding is not ‘echo location’ (at least not in any conventional sense), nevertheless I am humming as way of perceiving the environment. I hum at a volume that I think only I can hear it. Indeed, and especially with earbuds in, humming feels like a sound that is only inside my head. It’s much more intimate than, say, whistling. As well has drawing my attention to my sonic surroundings, humming also makes me aware of a certain pressure in my chest and nose and mouth. It’s a muffled expression —like a muted trumpet — rather than an expressive open mouthed articulation and I wonder why I never noticed this before.
Around the 11 minute mark I try to hum with the sound coming from a GeldAutomat which, now that I think about it, seems to be installed quite randomly along an otherwise residential street. I did attempt to harmonise with the sounds expressed from the vents of the machine, that upon close listening seems more granular than regular — ie more like static noise than a drone.
Drifting, I try not to notice where I am going. I try not to make conscious decisions about where I am in relation to where I began and let the audio experience by my guide, although other factors are at play. It is a warm day in early Spring and I favour the sunshine. I come to a street that I recognise as the address of a wholesale ‘oriental’ grocer that a friend had sent me to more than a year ago. I’m surprised to come upon it, but what strikes me more is the acoustic resonance of the laneway. At around 21 minutes in the recording, I pause in silence to appreciate a patch of sunlight between concrete structures that shape this light industrial zone and listen to the bass pumping out of a nearby parked car. I am surprised when the music is drowned out by an encroaching truck, pulling into a nearby parking bay. The sweeping ‘woof’ of the truck engine is physically palpable and I cannot distinguish the sound from the hot air which seems to engulf the truck like a cloud. The screeching highs of hydraulic truck brakes accentuate the effect as a full spectrum audio-body experience. It’s remarkable.
Hum Klub is concerned with humming as a preverbal musical form of communication and as the background noise of urban life.
Humming can be approached as a low barrier-to-entry mode of (collective) music-making. It can be (non)-performed absent-mindedly, while doing other things, or as a focused resonant practice — think of the yogic ‘Om’.
Hum Klub also has an interest in humming as the background noise to urban life; the hum of motors, refrigerators, electricity hubs, and other sounds that we are mostly inattentive to, that we have learned to filter out. We might ask how does a hum differ from a buzz?
Hum Klub seeks to explore what happens when we bring these and other notions of humming together. We could make a humming dérive or drift through an urban centre. What kind of psychogeographies might we uncover? It’s not hard to imagine how humming could serve as a means of communication, marking one’s movement within proximity to others. So might humming be a navigation tool, as a means of echolocation? What happens when the humming stops? Does background noise take over or are we left with the ringing in our ears? Where might we find ourselves when humming guides our negotiations of urban space?
Hum KClub will also convene online on ‘jamming’ platforms, such as Jam, Jamulus and SonoBus, to explore low level forms of connectivity. During this time of pandemic, what is it to be in the presence of others without a specific purpose or focus; while doing others things? How might we be together differently, digitally?
What is the history of humming? When did people first hum? One proposal is that humming and other kinds of preverbal vocalisations are vestigial forms of communication inherited from our pre-human ancestors. What might be the evolutionary reason for its persistence? Simply put: why hum? There is some discussion about the role of biosonics in wellbeing and healing, so might humming relieve anxiety? Could humming enhance the regeneration of cells and soft tissue?
Hum Klub takes its cues from the poet and author Christina Hume who founded ‘Center for the Hum’. In an email interview published on Poetry Foundation (2014) she writes:
In the wake of visual aggression, metamorphosis is biological, and so must be recuperation. Our focus on the body routes us through tactile, kinesthetic, and proprioceptive senses. At the Center, we send high frequency vibrations—in the form of a hum too high to hear—to pressurize the tissues of civilian wounds, but the vibrations, more crucially, locate the wound’s own voice in a kind of echolocation. This echo-pulse lets us take back a sonic subjectivity, an identity informed from surround sound instead of frontal optics.
An excerpt from Hume’s recent book Saturation Project (2021) that concerns ‘hum’ can be found at Full Stop.
