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RE:VIVE rewires Rewire with Antenes

For the third year in a row, Sound & Vision’s RE:VIVE initiative and Rewire will collaborate on a world premiere that brings together radio and telegraphy heritage as never heard before. RE:VIVE has invited Antenes (Lori Napoleon) to expand her unique modular rig of rewired communication switchboards by adding a telegraph key. Using her visionary engineering skills, Antenes has conceived a way for words and thoughts to be manually transmitted into her sets opening up new worlds of compositional methodologies.

For the third year in a row, Sound & Vision’s RE:VIVE initiative and Rewire will collaborate on a world premiere that brings together radio and telegraphy heritage as never heard before. RE:VIVE has invited Antenes (Lori Napoleon) to expand her unique modular rig of rewired communication switchboards by adding a telegraph key. Using her visionary engineering skills, Antenes has conceived a way for words and thoughts to be manually transmitted into her sets opening up new worlds of compositional methodologies.

Photo: Nationaal Archief

Antenes will present the world premiere of Telegraph Music, a unique live performance that explores the intertwined histories of electronic music and telecommunications. The performance elevates a one-of-a-kind re-purposed switchboard modular setup by introducing a modified telegraph key system. Situated on the receiving end of transmissions, Antenes will transform the beeping echoes of the past into a newly realized piece challenging the audience to decipher the obfuscated messages and revel in their musical potential.

Photo by Seze Devres

The inspiration for this year’s collaboration was born out of RE:VIVE’s Sample the City Workshop, where the initiative invited young producers to come rework archival field recordings and films of The Hague from our collection. Each producer received the The Hague Sample Pack and hidden within, among typical urban environmental sounds were sounds from the old Netherlands Postal Museum (PTT Museum). These sounds of whirring, clanking, beeping and churning telex writers, telegraphs, post sorters, morse code and printers inspired the idea for Antenes’ Telegraph Music. RE:VIVE was inspired by the musicality in these sounds and also the long and rich Dutch heritage of broadcast, communication and radio. The performance will be an homage to this heritage, transforming it for young audiences and allow them to engage with Dutch broadcast and telecom heritage.

Interested in attending? Rewire is April 6-8 in The Hague and you can find the whole program here.