Creative Tech Week 2017

Ed Bear performs Scrying, the premiere of a new 64 voice composition realized on the radioOrgan, a hand-crafted modular FM transmission system built from obsolete electronics.

Marginally legal as a “part 15” test device, the radioOrgan is 64 individual low power radio stations which can work in tandem to desperately fight for the attention of single radio receivers, completely occupy radio bands [e.g. 88 – 108 Mhz], and create non-compliant transmissions unavailable using commercial hardware. As the radioOrgan is 100% recycled, this work teases historic durational music compositions with the almost transhuman material half-life of disposable electronics and a few nice, old boomboxes.

Telescoping backwards as well as forwards in time, Scrying draws polyrhythmic and polyphonic structures from the I Ching’s hexagrams (base 64) and Babylonian sexigesimal (base 60) numeral system as a simulation of geomantic, magical, and technoromantic behaviors and belief systems, playing with the magic of radio. The most rigorous exercise of the radioOrgan’s unique FM transmission mixing and spatialization system to date, this performance is at once an experimental lecture and demonstration, a ritual of endurance, and a dramatically lit chamber work.