Jett Ilagan – industrees (live in the studio)
Tuesday, 15 September⋅5:00 – 5:30pm
At 5pm today we have Jett Ilagan, a Philippines and Taiwan based interdisciplinary artist, and cultural worker – live in the Radiophrenia studio. He will be here to present ‘industrees’ – a speculative music label in the form of a 30-minute live radio performance.
The broadcast features fictional sound artists and musicians whose practices revolve around field recordings, electronic music, and noise. Here, “selected works” are shaped by the ever-evolving conditions of rural and urban ecologies. Within this imagined radio narrative, the fabulated label becomes a platform to engage issues of body, atmosphere, and memory across shifting landscapes.
In this context, radio functions as a medium to pose situated relevant questions: How does sound circulate through environments marked by industrialization and extraction? What does it mean for a body to produce, transmit, and archive its own sonic labor? Who or what gets to be heard within rural and urban infrastructures? Through narration and live performance, the broadcast uses the immediacy of radio to stage these questions in real time, grounding speculation in audible, embodied acts of transmission.
Memory plays a crucial role in the context of migration as it provides continuity to the dislocations of individuals. Among the array of stimuli influencing the process of memory formation, sound emerges as an equally significant factor. Truax suggests that “sounds and their original context are stored in memory as patterns. Recalling the context may revive a memory of the sound, and the sound, if heard again, usually brings the entire context back to life”. Drawing from Henri Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis, the urban environment is understood as a temporal structure, a dynamic system of beats and flows, (such as transportation schedules, architectural repetition, or pedestrian rhythms,) that inform our internal states and sense of place. The city, therefore, becomes a “musical” space whose rhythms are both imposed and performed. Here, embodied listening acts as a psychogeographic tool, making tangible the affective and material consequences of urban design.
industrees operates as a speculative radio label that treats broadcasting as a site of embodied listening. By staging both fictional label and artists, the project examines how migration, displacement, and ecological change are inscribed in the body through sound art practices.