GX Jupitter-Larsen's
Noisy Radio Art:

My radio art is everything I normally do, filtered through radio waves. Just as my net.art is everything I normally do, filtered through the web.

I was just about to do my regular weekly show, when the transmitter broke down. It wasn't going to get fixed that night, but I stuck around any way. I recorded the static that was going over the airwaves during the period that my program would have otherwise been on the air. Next week I played these tapes on my show in their entirety; just in case any one had missed the week before. I got a few calls from listeners as usual. But this time they all had the same thing to tell me. That the static I recorded at the station was different from the static they had heard coming off their radios at home. So on the following week's program I had the station engineer come on and explain, in detail, how a thing like this happens.

I find there's an absurdity to rot and decay. And to communicate this I've taken a light-hearted, if not flippant, attitude towards everything I do. Entropy is the underlining theme for all of my constructs, be they on radio or not. Once in 1993, I used a giant ion-gun to charge an entire audience to 5000 volts. Audience members chased one another around the club giving each other shocks. In 1994 I blew up the side of a hill at Lost Skulls Mine in the Nevada desert. Since 2000, I've been building empty holes with very loud noise.


As a result of all this, I've developed something of a reputation for wrecking the venues I perform at. Never the less, since 1987 one radio station after another has had me come on to do a live on-air presentation. Most of these on-air performances have consisted of the station broadcasting the sounds of me trashing their studio. This live radio-art can last anywhere from five minutes to four hours; with time set aside for station ID. I've performed mostly on college and community stations like KPFA Berkeley, KZSC Santa Cruz, KFJC Los Altos Hills, and KXLU Los Angeles. Pirate stations in Europe such as Radio Alize and Aligre FM 93.1 in Paris, as well as 104.5 in Zurich have also had me do my radiophonic specialty for them. Noise collages made from recordings of such shows were featured in the Festival Internacional De Radio Art on the Radio Nacional De Espana in 1989, 1990 and 1991

Entropy was also the underlining theme for the radio plays I've done for the ORF program Kunstradio. With entropy the outcome is invariably some variation on the hole. My 1992 radio play Clici-Clic was composed solely of amplified hole-punching. A contact-mic was mounted on a hand-held hole-punch, and recorded one track at a time on a maximal amount of tracks.

Since 1995, most of my live radio art has been aired on such stations as KDVS Davis, KZSU Stanford, Sauvagine Bordeaux, Canal Sud Toulouse, Freies Sender Kombinat Hamburg, and Resonance FM London.

In 2005, a performance of mine, in which I dug a hole in the ground with live mics, was aired live on the German/Polish network Radio Copernicus.

In 2006, I allegorized the polywave by means of amplified erosion in a hour long episode of Kunstradio. The spinner spade never sounded better!

During the 1980's, whenever I wanted to create an all-night broadcast using only a single sound, I would take a long tape-loop and play it through multiple playback heads. This technique always provided a seamless sound sculpture. During April 2008, for Simulcast 1.0b (via free103point9) I did something different. Instead of using analog based repetition, I took a short recording of 40 seconds and digitally stretch it into a single ten and a half hour long wave form. The original recording was that of an auto accident, which is one of my favourite sounds. The resulting effect was very much like ceaseless grinding, which also happens to be a favourite of mine.

Some of my broadcasts have consisted of me slowly pushing live microphones into power grinders. Go ahead, laugh. You know you want to. The idea behind my broadcasts is to keep people guessing; to trick them into thinking. I've done game shows when there should have been news reports. I've done all-night sound sculptures that lasted 6 hours non-stop. Afterall, Kettleday greetings can happen any time of the year.

Since 1983, I have done over 3500 hours of live radio art on 31 different stations in 11 countries. No matter how short the distance, you can always divide it further in half. And that's the entropy of travel. No matter how far you've gone, you're only ever half way there. Call it the success of failure if you like; because sometimes close can be more than enough.

A Selected Jupitter-Larsen Radiography...