Re-imagining expanded listening, in 5 podcasts 1/ AM Kanngieser: <https://rwm.macba.cat/en/sonia/sonia-314-anja-kanngieser>*‘All of the things you can hear in a particular space are unique to that space and at the same time completely ubiquitous. There’s nothing special about footsteps or the wind. That’s the best way to think about the relationship between geography and sound.’*
— Political geographer and sound artist AM Kanngieser works in the coordinates between space and sound. This merging of disciplines—which seems completely normal to AM—tends to be more perplexing to the compartmentalised world of science and academia than to the undisciplined field of artistic practice. In this podcast AM Kanngieser reflects on expanded listening, on the inaudible, and on our anthropocentrism. We become the listeners as they talk about their long-standing interest in sound governance and describe the build-up of tensions in the project ‘Climates of Listening’, which was originally meant to amplify campaigns for self-determination and self-representation in the Pacific. *PODCAST >* <https://rwm.macba.cat/en/sonia/sonia-314-anja-kanngieser> 2/ Jennifer Walshe: <https://rwm.macba.cat/en/sonia/sonia-316-jennifer-walshe>*‘I am a terrible divil, as we would say in Ireland, for writing down overheard conversations. I love being in really obnoxious hipster cafés, ‘cause people talk very loudly and the conversations are hilarious and you write it all down. (...) But it’s fascinating to me, ‘cause this is how real people speak!.’* — Irish maverick Jennifer Walshe studied composition and often performs as a vocalist, but her practice and a whopping list of works over the past twenty years put her in a twilight zone where music, performance art, theatre, and stage writing intersect and converge. Walshe’s approach to texts, scripts, and musical scores is based on a recursive process, a kind of feedback loop which includes and acknowledges all sorts of information about the text itself. In this podcast, we talk to Jennifer Walshe about writing, annotating, teaching, collecting, eavesdropping, performing, faking, and a touch of machine learning. *PODCAST >* <https://rwm.macba.cat/en/sonia/sonia-316-jennifer-walshe> 3/ Ji Youn Kang: <https://rwm.macba.cat/en/sonia/sonia-320-ji-youn-kang>*‘While Western music sees a perfect 5th combination as a perfect harmony, in Korean music the opposite is true. You need to have some kind of broken part, so that it is natural.’* — Ji Youn Kang’s abstract compositions are infused with her personal blend of Western experimental sound and Korean ritual music. This hybrid background also seeps into her live performances, where she explores the primitive and empowering rhythmic structures of Korean shamanism—often building up from slow to fast—and noisy sound through an amalgam of handmade analogue devices, acoustic instruments, and digital signal processing techniques. In this podcast, Ji talks about Korean ritual music, resonating objects, noise, self-built instruments, uncertainty and tension, and strategies to engage online audiences in meaningful communication. *PODCAST >* <https://rwm.macba.cat/en/sonia/sonia-320-ji-youn-kang> 4/ Dirty Electronics: <https://rwm.macba.cat/en/sonia/sonia-319-john-richardsdirty-electronics>*‘Virtuosity is in the listening, or in the methodology in some way, not in the skills of controlling the devices.’* — Under the moniker of Dirty Electronics, British musician and maker John Richards explores the crossroads between electronic circuit design and live performance, picking up the baton of David Tudor’s tradition of ‘composing inside electronics’. With emphasis on collaborative making and a holistic approach to performance, Dirty Electronics’ speculative circuits are documents of a larger collective experience: expanded and quite unconventional workshops / installations unfurling as 21st-century happenings within communities of practice with a strong DIT (do it together) ethos, where the usual divisions between designer, maker, composer and performer become blurred. *PODCAST >* <https://rwm.macba.cat/en/sonia/sonia-319-john-richardsdirty-electronics> 5/ Jonáš Gruska: <https://rwm.macba.cat/en/sonia/sonia-318-jonas-gruska>*‘Sometimes I just record a sound because it’s a beautiful thing I need to capture, and there is no further plan, except that I might listen to it again in the future. Maybe it will find its place in my work, but a lot of sounds don’t – they just exist on their own in the database, and that’s completely fine.’* — Slovak musician, sound artist, and maker Jonáš Gruska is a proud amateur, honouring the French origin of the term (to *love* what you do). Curiosity and passion run through pretty much everything he engages in. In our conversation, which ranged from his site-specific sound installations to his hand-crafted microphones and audio tools, his recent interest in mycology, and his playful exploration of the electromagnetic spectrum, Jonáš used the word ‘fascination’ quite a lot. We talk to Jonáš about resonating spaces, resonating surfaces, tramways, self-taught electronic circuitry, field recordings, fermentation, mushrooms, and unusual microphones. *PODCAST >* <https://rwm.macba.cat/en/sonia/sonia-318-jonas-gruska> Re-Imagine Europe <https://re-imagine-europe.eu/> is a 4-year collaboration of 10 cultural organizations from across Europe, addressing the social and political challenges we face today. Co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union, Re-Imagine Europe is initiated by Sonic Acts (NL) <https://sonicacts.com/portal> and coordinated by Paradiso (NL) <https://www.paradiso.nl/en/?gclid=Cj0KCQiA1pyCBhCtARIsAHaY_5dreB_xcX3tfa6uHNsVwyFHcqNvgOEmSWaoHQHzrXmBbPmjSLIHxKEaApYBEALw_wcB> in collaboration with Elevate Festival (AT) <https://elevate.at/en/>, Lighthouse (UK) <https://www.lighthouse.org.uk/>, Ina GRM (FR) <https://inagrm.com/fr> , Kontejner (HR) <https://www.kontejner.org/en/>, Landmark / Bergen Kunsthall (NO) <https://www.kunsthall.no/>, A4 (SK) <https://nextfestival.sk/2020/>, Disruption Network Lab (DE) <https://www.disruptionlab.org/> and Ràdio Web MACBA (ES) <https://rwm.macba.cat/en>. Under this umbrella and in constant dialogue with the RIE ensemble programming, Ràdio Web MACBA has produced more than 20 podcasts. Here we feature five expansive, in-depth long listens.
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