On Air - On Site : 48 Hours of Radio Art

Airing on May 24th 14:00 CEST
Royal Lady Sister
Genre: Radio Documentary
Duration: 60 min
In this interview, artist Desiree Mwalimu Banks discusses the vibrational disruptions to honeybee well-being posed by telecommunication technologies, the need to re-establish the regal and matriarchal role of bees in our world, and the importance of deep listening in drawing nearer to the more than human. The work she describes was developed with sound artist Grant Cutler during their Transmission Arts residency at Wave Farm in upstate NY. https://wavefarm.org/wf/calendar/jtxkpp

Mwalimu Banks is a Zambian-born, East-Coast raised, artist, writer, curator, educator, diviner, and mother, whose work explores somatic relationships between indigenous identity, water ecologies, apiary culture, and the ecstatic, within the framework of the sacred feminine and the African diaspora.

The sound-world created for this work is derived from 5 years of sonic materials from projects by John Roach that focus on the relationship between humans and pollinators. Some of these sounds include: 

- Honey burning on steel
- Bees and hives in Narrowsburg NY and Port Austin Michigan.
- Bee sounds re-recorded in a resonant abandoned radar station in Port Austin Michigan (thanks to Cindy Patrick at Port Austin AIR)
- Crystal Bowls, also in Port Austin (thanks to Beth Brilinski at Centered by Sound)
- Electrical lines in Chico California
- The sound of hot beeswax poured on speakers transmitting bee sounds
- Those same hot wax sounds radically and randomly jumping in time (bleeps, blips and bloops)
- Performance excerpts by the Foulbrood Orchestra at BioBAT Art Space in 2024. (Thessia Machado, Ranjit Bhatnagar, John Roach and Concetta Abbate)

Featuring:

John Roach

John Roach is an interdisciplinary artist with a particular interest in sound and multisensory experience and he builds environments that blur the line between what we see and what we hear. His sound compositions often focus on themes related to ecological systems, biodiversity and climate and exist in a space between electroacoustic music, documentary and experimental radio art. These pieces, shaped by a playful embrace with uncertainty, bring together his field recording practice, instrumental passages, and conversations with artists, scientists, writers, historians and others. He is currently working on an episodic experimental documentary about wind called When We Bow down Our Heads, which premiered in its earliest form during the 2025 On Air On Site festival and has since evolved into a release on Sirr-ecords in Portugal:

https://sirr-ecords.bandcamp.com/album/when-we-bow-down-our-heads

22-24 May 2026 - 48hours of Radio Art