Fake Radiolab: "Studio NYC"

Описание: Audio 1: “Studio NYC,” first track from the upcoming album Fake Radiolab.

Media for Adam Mirza and Akiva Zamcheck, "Fake Radiolab: Audio and Ideology," Current Musicology 111 (Spring 2023)

Fake Radiolab is the name of an ongoing duo performance project in which we interrogate
mediated facts through explorations in the podcast media form. We adopt the mannerisms and mania of radiophonic personalities and a variety of media genres (e.g., podcasts, YouTube rants,ASMR sessions, self-help narrations, dream sequences, radio plays, nature documentaries) to playfully/seriously jar the clarity and authority imparted to content by contemporary audio production. Acting as (unreliable) hosts of a live podcast, we present a kind of musicalized speech performance that juxtaposes multiple modes of audio narration against live synths, processed violin, and sampled audio fragments. During live performance, the opening narration, which is pre-recorded, presents an acousmatic pun to the audience who sees us on stage in front of our microphones; our improvised performance inserts other manipulated material in counterpoint to the pre-recorded backing-track.

For this edition of Current Musicology, we present the opening track “StudioNYC” from our
upcoming album alongside documentation that contextualizes this piece within the ongoing
performance project. Fake Radiolab self-consciously addresses radiophonic matter as both
subject and form. The result is an unstable discourse in which power-symbols presented as
performative utterances are subsumed within an assault of genres. In particular, we use audio production to highlight and amplify the transformation of text into performance, and
performance into text, powerful manipulations which we see as ubiquitous and scarily efficient throughout contemporary media. Through all the surface misdirection, there remains a through-line to “StudioNYC” which offers an analysis of the history and presence of the radiophonic voice.