Avant Radio Festival

Name: Avant Radio Festival
Start: 2026-11-13T14:00:00-05:00
End: 2026-11-15T17:00:00-05:00
Location: Monty Hall

Schedule

Fri, 13 Nov, 2026 at 02:00 pm to Sun, 15 Nov, 2026 at 05:00 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

Monty Hall | Jersey City, NJ

WAVE FARM and WFMU and ARTxFM are teaming up to bring you a weekend focused on the creative and experimental nature of radio.
About this Event

Early Bird Registration: $175
Early Bird Student Registration: $140
Early Bird Deadline: September 15
Regular Registration: $195

Friday November 13
1-2 PM: Opening Reception: Registration, coffee and general hobnobbery and fistbumping with other radio heads.

2:00 PM
Dorit Chrysler: Theremin Workshop with Dorit Chrysler
limit 15 participants, extra cost for materials ($35)
The Art of Playing the Theremin - Everything you ever wanted to know about the theremin! Dorit Chrysler will guide you through tips and tricks during this workshop. You will learn technical and practical aspects in how to approach this mysterious instrument. Theremins will be provided for each session. Sessions are limited to 15 players. Calibration, positioning, exercises, repertoire, woowoo - and no touching!
2:00 PM
Paul Bame: Update on the FCC Translator Window and LPFM Allocations
Paul Bame of Prometheus Radio offers the latest info on the FCC's latest translator window
and LPFM allocations.
3:00 PM
College Radio Meeting
All attendees from college radio stations are invited to compare notes and discuss issues related to university broadcast operations.
5:00 PM
Raw Power: Radio Remotes for the Masses
In a new era of political repression and corporate consolidation where mainstream media becomes less reliable, Democracy will depend on communities building new methods of sharing and distributing information. In this workshop, the DJs of ART FM will lead participants through the steps of developing their own online signal, allowing them to broadcast their voices, ideas,and musical selections live and loud from wherever they may be in the world. Includes demonstrations from WXOX DJs in their various remote locations.

5:00 PM
Radio as Collage: From Freeform Broadcasting to Spoken-Word
Composition, 1990–Present
Vicki Bennett, working as People Like Us, has been making radio since
1990, using broadcasting as a space for collage, sustained listening,
experimentation, and unconventional forms of storytelling. Her
practice has moved between DJing, live and improvised broadcasting,
commissioned spoken-word works, and large-scale acts of radio
curation. This presentation traces that history, including her
long-running DO or DIY program, the 2016 WFMU residency Optimized!,
and Radio Boredcast, the extraordinary 744-hour continuous online
broadcast she curated for AV Festival in 2012. Vicki will also discuss
her composed radio works for WDR and Deutschlandradio, including No
One Is an Island, I Can Fly, and Changing Your Mind. Moving between
found sound, music, speech, and archival material, these works
approach radio as a durational and relational form.
Do or DIY with People Like Us: Playlists and Archives

7:00 PM: Tour of WFMU: Tour of WFMU's Magic Factory, including the massive record library and the black velvet gallery.

8:00 PM
Performance/Demo: Demon Box
Developed by Eternal Research, the Demon Box transforms the hidden electromagnetic world into sound, signal, light and data. It captures frequencies from everyday electronics like phones, drills, and TVs, then converts them into audio signal, MIDI data, and control voltage.
9:00 PM
Performance: Radio Wonderland
Joshua Fried, performing as Radio Wonderland, transforms live
commercial radio into a funky electronic collage. His software
creations include The Re-Shuffler, which deploys slices of radio
across a rhythmic and melodic grid to create instant techno. The
Re-Esser extracts the sibilance and plays those S, T, and K sounds
like a drum machine, while Anything Kick morphs slowed-down radio into
a bass drum to shake the dance floor.
9:30 PM
Performance by Laenz: Laenz is a producer based in Brooklyn, NY, working within radiophonic textures and caliginous dance music.

Saturday November 14
9:30AM
Hearty White: Homemade Radio Theater with Hearty White
Homemade Radio Theater or How to Make Bad TV on the Radio, with WFMU spiritual leader and master of voices, philosophy and foley, Hearty White
9:30 AM
Beyond the Time Slot and the Human: The Collaborative Ecology of Radio
In this presentation, Wave Farm Co-Directors Bianca Felix Biberaj and
Meredith Kooi discuss radio beyond the traditional time slot and the
human radio producer. Traveling through a selection of projects
presented by Wave Farm, this talk explores how making radio can be a
way of collaborating with nature and its fundamental forces, including
electromagnetism, time, and a place’s flora and fauna.
11:00 AM
Full Group Session: What is Radio Art / Transmission Art with Anna Friz
Anna Friz is a sound and radio artist and media studies scholar. Since
1998, she has created and presented new audio art and radiophonic
works internationally, in which radio is often the source, subject,
and medium of the work.
1:30 PM
Ken + Andy
36 Years of Experimental Comedy: Co-hosts Andy Breckman and Ken
Freedman discuss their long running comedy experiment, their greatest
successes, and most hilarious failures.
1:30 PM
40 Watts From Nowhere (Documentary Film on Pirate Radio)
Sue Carpenter built a 40-watt FM station in 1995 and ran it out of her
apartment in Los Angeles, exploiting a ruling that allowed hundreds of
low-power illegal radio operators to proliferate throughout the
country, giving birth to the legal LPFM movement. This is Carpenter's
documentary on KBLT, which took on a life of its own, drawing Mazzy
Star to headline a benefit concert and the Red Hot Chili Peppers to
play live in her living room. Presented as part of ARF’s radio art and
media education program, followed by a moderated discussion.
3:00 PM
Workshop: Inductive Listening with Zach Poff
Limit 12 participants ($30)
Zach Poff is a New York area media artist, educator, and
maker-of-things. His artwork is rooted in open systems that eschew
individual authorship in favor of collaborative or generative models.
At ARF, Zach will facilitate a hands-on workshop titled "Inductive
Listeners." We will build inductive coils to plug into sound
recorders, then go on a walk around the neighborhood to listen to the
radio emissions of the infrastructure. Participants should bring a
laptop, wired headphones, and, if possible, a sound recorder that is
not a phone.
3:00 PM
Neon Icon: Syndicating Experimental Programming
Groundbreaking and spellbinding, you have created an exceptional piece
of experimental audio, and this workshop will help get it out there!
Looking to platforms such as Pacifica Audioport and Public Radio
Exchange, the DJs of WXOX will help you format, distribute, and
publicize your program for airplay on noncommercial stations
nationwide!
4:00 PM
Babette Thomas
Babette Thomas is a radio producer, media artist, and PhD candidate in
the departments of Black Studies and American Studies at Yale
University. They are also the co-host of the award-winning podcast,
Gender Spiral. Babette's current research focuses on community radio.
5:00 PM Audience Building
WFMU Station Manager, Ken Freedman, discusses the tools and strategies
that have expanded WFMU's audience and have allowed the station's
revenue to grow from $50k to $3m per year. Ken will also update the
Audience Engine project and describe station opportunities for using
the tool.
8:00 PM Negativland + SUE-C
Significantly Less Deceptive
Extra $5 for workshop registrants
Negativland + SUE-C present Significantly Less Deceptive: Legendary
sound collage group Negativland and live cinema visual artist SUE-C
collaborate to bring you their latest audio-visual performance about
our minds, our current realities, and the evolving forms of media and
technology that orchestrate our perceptions.
9:30 PM Negativland + SUE-C Q&A
Negativland's Mark Hosler, Jon "Wobbly" Leidecker, and SUE-C take your
questions on their incredible legacy of media jamming and sampledelic
art.
Sunday November 15
10:00 AM
All Together Now: Activating the EAS
Hurricanes, earthquakes, and nuclear war—thanks to the Emergency Alert
System, radio broadcasters have a fast and efficient system for
dealing with natural emergencies. Developing a similar rapid-response
network for political and societal emergencies is the goal of this
closing-day workshop. Riding the heels of impromptu radio nationwide
broadcasts following the invasion of Ukraine and the M**der of Breonna
Taylor, this session will focus on building a network of stations and
audio practitioners who can quickly and creatively respond to global
events through coordinated action.
10:00 AM
Supplemental Media
Tik Tok, Twitch, Print, etc.
12:00 PM
Full Group Session: Looking to the Future
Where do we go from here?
What are the possibilities?
What is this for?

ARF Accommodations

The Avant Radio Festival takes place at WFMU’s Monty Hall, and Art House Productions, both located in downtown Jersey City, near the Paulus Hook neighborhood:

Monty Hall is located at 43 Montgomery Street in Jersey City, NJ

Art House Productions is located at 345 Marin Boulevard in Jersey City, NJ

The two venues are a five minute walk from one another.