Harakka Radio: The Analogue, Tapes & Waves

Six listening stations were set up around the gallery Lennätin: Six radios adorned with feathers transmitted the studio situation to the visiting or passing guests (tourists, children’s classes, nature lovers, artists, birds, and insects).

Harakka Island Radio received personal support from the immensely helpful assistance of Rori Vallinharju, who took care of helping with the set-up of the station and providing everything needed during the first two radio days.

Our broadcasting range was small, due to the rocky geography of the island and the rather low elevation of the transmitter being fixed to the wall of the house. Gallery Lennätin is a small house with a gallery space, a kitchen, an anti-chamber, and a small wooden terrace on which we installed the radio station. Our frequency was 92 MHz.

Harakka Island Radio started with Peter Cusack’s recordings of magpies (Harakka means ‘Magpie’ in Finnish), that now interweaved with the constant screeches and warning hisses of the seagulls and barnacle geese that were nesting all over the island. And while I Am This Radio was playing, Kari Yli-Annala, the organizer of the event of the “Week of the Impossible” made himself comfortable at the microphone.

As the founder of the island’s Nomad Academy of Experimental Arts, into which this former telegraph building still stemming from the Russian occupation has been converted, Kari jokes that who else than artists would be able to put up with the hundreds of angry birds populating the island. Kari works in Helsinki as a filmmaker, media artist, and art teacher, yet, the “Day of the Impossible” – according to Sun Ra, the 22nd of May – forms a central theme for his activities assembling ‘impossible’ artists to join him on the island for art exhibitions, lectures, performances, and… this time, even radio.

The main building hosts more than 20 studios rented out to different artists; for the “Week’s” events, the artworks are installed at the separate Gallery Lennätin, with an ancient farmhouse building of the “Kasematte IV” serving as a performance and multi-media space.

With this year’s focus on ‘the analogue’ it was clear that pre-digital recordings would be a favourite sound resource for the radio. Tiger Stangl’s short Rewind was a good example to play… a soft, as windy as melodic tape hiss. We examined some of the tapes Kari had been given for this event and played an excerpt from Lukatoyboy’s last-minute collage for Harakka. Anna Friz’ piece Radiotelegraph featured a sending of a radiotelegraph in spoken Morse code from the Skaftfell Center for Visual Art in the small town of Seyðisfjörður on the east coast of Iceland where she had undertaken a two-month residency. In only just introducing these works the bandwidth of the radio art spectrum became evident. 

The Taiwanese media artist and musician Wan Quian Lin aka Winona had arrived together with Kari already around noon. Originally based in Berlin, she too had undertaken the ‘impossible’ journey to Harakka Island. Her work, “The Whisperings of Mushrooms”, would be staged the following day at the Kasematte IV building, in cooperation with the Finnish dancer Sara Kovamäki.

We listened to an excerpt of her music, and we spoke about her fascination with the mycelium underworld. In her performances, she uses piezo and contact microphones which are intricately connected to objects in the room and to each other, creating a self-responsive web of communications.

Musically, the program of Day 1 continued with more tapes (and rewinds)  by potentiometer conductor Maximillian Glass, who spun through the frequency worlds of medium wave radio (AM) and uninterrupted waves (CW).

With Rori, who is active as a socio-cultural activist and artist we talked about the theme of psychogeography: What is it that makes the aura of a place special, even maybe eerie or tense, or relaxed? While we chatted on, alarming lightnings crisscrossed the sky and thunder could be heard from afar. Then, quite suddenly,  a gust of rain flooded the radio table and we decided to call it a day. The last piece played that day was Magz Hall and Peter Coyte’s collaborative piece Outside –  an auditory work that maps and makes audible sea and air pollution. A piece too, that brought us back to our location on an island that, just a stone’s throw from the city, is all the more vulnerable to all man-made environmental threats.

Day 1 Radio Artists in loosely remembered order of appearance

• Peter Cusack: Berlin Magpies
• Gabi Schaffner: I Am This Radio
• Tiger Stangl: Rewind
• Lukatoyboy: Tape4Harakka
• Anna Friz: Radio Telegraph
• Maximillian Glass: The Conductor at the Potentiometer
• Magz Hall and Peter Coyte: Don’t Listen Up

This post is also available in: German