Joshua Fried: Radio Wonderland - Sunday

Joshua Fried

(New York, NY)
presented by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum

Experience live music as never seen (or heard) before: “Radio Wonderland” is Joshua Fried’s surprising and enlightening audio set, where the artist sources only a boom box, a steering wheel, a couple of gizmos and a pair of old shoes, in an entertaining transformation of conventional radio into unconventional-yet-danceable remix grooves!

About Radio Wonderland

No two performances are ever the same, as “Radio Wonderland” turns live commercial FM radio on its head with an enlightening, on the spot remix into recombinant funk.  Joshua Fried simply walks on stage with a boom box, plugs it into his system, and in front of everyone’s eyes (and ears), he slices and dices conventional radio into an unconventional-yet-danceable rhythmic re-creation!  

With nothing pre-recorded, Fried’s entire set is an on-the-fly, anything-goes performance full of fair-game source material culled from the Cleveland airwaves.  Audiences are left stunned and delighted by the experience, as typical computer remix applications play second fiddle to his novelty gizmos, including a vintage Buick steering wheel and a couple of beat up old shoes!  With the surreal touch of these ordinary objects, Fried underscores the absurd disconnect between digital controller (always polishing things up) and raw, authentic sound.  Charged with a taste for surprise, immediacy, and Fried’s keen sense of humor, “Radio Wonderland” is a lively, head-scratching, foot-tapping freewheeling performance piece that draws its own party atmosphere and leaves audiences begging for more.
 

About Joshua Fried

Joshua Fried emerged from New York’s downtown experimental music and East Village performance art scenes of the 1980s.  Fried is known for turning technology on its head and challenging its assumptions, while using machines to accentuate the raw human qualities of live events that are unique to the moment.  His work partakes equally of minimalism, the rhythmic experimentation of Nancarrow and his followers, sound collage techniques, performance art and popular dance rhythm.  Fried is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Composer’s Fellowship, New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships in Emergent Forms, and artist residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, Djerassi, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center.  His other works include “Headfone Follies,” with its multiple cast of headphone-driven performers, dubbed “a mind-blowing, Hitchcockian theater piece” by the Village Voice and “a tour de force” by The New York Times, and “Welcome to the Ice-box,” with 25 loudspeakers permanently installed in Copenhagen’s main town square.  Fried’s recording “Jimmy Because,” with guest guitarist Fred Frith, was released by Atlantic Records.  He is credited as re-mix producer on dance recordings by Ofra Haza, They Might Be Giants, and Chaka Khan.

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