Radio Amateur Ensemble. Open Studio & Recording Session.
Open Studio Radio Amateur Ensemble
with Anton Kats, Patrick Marschke, Noah Ophoven-Baldwin, and Cole Pulice
Radio Amateur Ensemble explores Minneapolis’s ham radio enthusiast community, taking the sonic, social and technological aspects of ham radio communication as scores and notations for improvisation and the sharing of new sound compositions. It will take the form of collaborative events, radio interventions, sonic installations, set design, open studios, and musical performances. Considering listening as a generative act, Radio Amateur Ensemble transforms the Goethe Pop Up space in Minneapolis’s skyways into a walkable score and a sound system. The ensemble, developed in collaboration with local musicians, invites the wider audience to take part in the ongoing dialogue exploring radio as a tool manifesting new social constellations, networks and organisms.
Kats’s project is developed in respect to Bertolt Brecht’s critique of radio as an instrument that standardizes individuals into passive listeners. Translating research findings sonically and rhythmically during the duration of the project, the compositions developed by the Radio Amateur Ensemble are performed and recorded during several public events at the Goethe Pop Up Minneapolis and released on a limited edition 7-inch vinyl.
Related Project
Anton KatsAnton Kats
Anton Kats is an artist and musician born in Kherson, South-Ukraine into the family of a WWII wireless radio operators. Kats‘s practice derives from informal everyday relationships within the vibrant neighborhood of his hometown and is complemented through necessity and pragmatics of self-legalization in Europe via entering formal institutions of education. His work with sound and radio often unfolds in public space in form of collaborative interventions, sonic sculptures, musical compositions, and public programs. Kats explores radio as a question of agency and intentionality through the concepts of the radio narrowcast and concrete listening.
Kats’s radio narrowcasts and listening spaces were developed and presented at Studio 174 in Kingston, Jamaica; in Serpentine Galleries, Tate Britain and Tate Modern in London UK; during documenta14 in Kassel; as a contribution to the 10th Berlin Biennale of Contemporary Art; and at the Radiophonic Space: Walk in Archive at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt among others.
Kats has been awarded a practice-based doctorate degree from Goldsmiths University of London. His works have been exhibited and performed in venues including the Serpentine Galleries, Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Victoria and Albert Museum, the Showroom Gallery, and at the documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel.