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READER: IONOS

25.–27.07.2025

Erik Chancy

Maia Urstad: IONOS – Music in the Ether (2025)
Radiophonic concert installation for two performers and an amateur radio operator

World Premiere

Sofia Jernberg (Voice)
Ane Marthe Sørlien Holen (Percussion)
Erik Chancy (Radio amateur)

Carsten Seiffarth (Curator)
Valentin Lux (Sound Engineering)
Markus Steffens (Coordination)


Sound Installation (Designhaus)
29.07.–02.08. daily 15:00–19:00

From July 29, Maia Urstad’s IONOS can be visited as a sound installation from with free admission and without prior registration.

Maia Urstad: Sketch "IONOS – Music from the Ether", Designhaus Darmstadt 2025
Maia Urstad

IONOS – MUSIC FOR THE ETHER

The artist Maia Urstad, who lives in Bergen, Norway, works at the interface of sound and visual art. Technological progress and communication technologies are omnipresent themes in her projects. The radio is often the central acoustic, visual, and conceptual element and a simultaneous metaphor for the transience of current technologies. Urstad’s radiophonic concert installation IONOS at Designhaus Darmstadt explores the fascinating world of amateur shortwave radio and features two musicians and amateur radio operators from Darmstadt and Norway.

Worldwide, communities of enthusiasts for this over 100-year-old, analog low-fi technology still exist. DXing (DX: distance) attempts to receive or communicate with distant radio stations. Short waves are sent into the sky and reflected by the ionosphere, allowing the radio signals to travel great distances. Amateur radio also plays a communicative role in the event of a catastrophe.

IONOS is based on a concert piece of the same name that premiered at the Norwegian festival Borealis in 2023. In the newly composed hybrid of concert and sound installation for the Designhaus, Maia Urstad combines sounds from the ether with the sound activities of an amateur radio operator doing live radio transmission and reception, as well as with the sounds of a vocal artist and a percussionist, which are created in a joint process on site. A short-wave antenna is installed in the garden, via which the amateur radio operator constantly receives and sends out sounds to and from the ether at his local radio station in the house, which are integrated live into the installation.

IONOS creates a global radiophonic listening situation – for Urstad a kind of “ether song”, a mix of signals and noise determined by atmospheric conditions. This ether song is projected into various rooms of the building via a loudspeaker system installed throughout the space, in which visitors can position themselves for different listening perspectives.

I think the radio, especially amateur radio, deals a lot with the idea of expanding, and I don‘t mean accelerating the economy, but expanding our minds. Even if you don’t ­understand physically how radio works it‘s so incredible to think of, on a universal scale. A radio signal or my voice going out there, beyond the atmosphere and bouncing back because of ionospheric electron ­density. And this signal then bounces back down ­somewhere else where somebody’s almost reeling it in like a fisherman with a fishing rod. This way of making contact is everyday life, this has been going on for a hundred ­years. It‘s a human need, and I think it’s ­ super important.

Maia Urstad in conversation with Peter Meanwell
© ️Thor Brødreskift
© ️Maia Urstad
© ️Eva Matsigkou
© ️Maia Urstad