When I finished my piece, I sent it to the dubbing engineers that were collecting all the individual pieces and then joining them together to create a single composition. My piece was set after a peer composition that was based on The Myth of Sisyphus, from Albert Camus. I was very glad of this because that essay was one of my biggest inspirations when researching my concept. That piece contain recording of rocks rolling down, representing the rock that Sisyphus has to push up hill. My piece harshly interrupts the ending of the Sisyphus piece with a very loud News anchor sound effect, breaking through and giving my piece power and focus, such as a breaking news report would do.

Before sending my last draft, Ed Baxter a producer of Resonance FM, gave me a little bit of feedback of my composition. He thought my piece could be perceived as a bit insensitive for radio. I didn’t totally agree with his observation because I did the composition insensitive on purpose, with the outcome of creating an accurate representation of modern news. Even though that, I did water down a bit my composition by lowering the volume of the news in their worst part to make them less obvious.

Another observation that Ed gave my was that my piece was very American orientated and I totally agreed with him. Almost every news I used were about the US. I think that this is the thing that I most regret in my composition and for the next time I will avoid referencing the US, because I am also tired of American centralization of media.

Radio has an incredibly intimacy capability, being able to transport the listener to different conversations in sonic journeys. Aire Libre 105.3 fm (Free Air) is my favorite radio station based in Mexico City. This station has become notorious because of its experimental programming and its focus on social justice. One of my favorite programs of Aire Libre is Radio Barrio (neighborhood radio), this program consist of broadcasting in different neighborhoods of Mexico City, where they explore the neighborhood native music and art scene. Its basically a sonic journey through a city.

The episode above of Radio Barrio is set in the National Autonomous University of Mexico (Radio Barrio, 2019). The episode explores the current art scene of the students and the sociopolitical problems they are facing. I thought it was very interesting and I felt as if I was visiting the university among the radio conductors.

I love the concept of Radio Barrio and I would like to try a concept similar to it. With tools like Locus Sonus I could also broadcast from different locations, creating sonic journeys and experiences.

My concept for my part of the project was to create a collage of news reports that were absurd. For this I tuned to the current news and started to observe and analyze it’s content. Two main things impressed me about the news. The first one was how normalized tragic news are, they where so frequent and people didn’t seem to react about them. The second was about the abundant negativity in every news, almost every article had a negative outcome, no matter what the category. This inspired me to include among absurd news, normalized tragedies and negative news. With this creating a parody of modern news and trying to expose its absurd nature.

I started my piece with a report about African refugees crossing the mediterranean for life opportunities in Europe. Then this report faded away into reverb followed by my first absurd news. The second report was about a group of youths asking for social media followers in a court case prosecuted against them. Both news juxtaposed very extremely and that was just my objective. Later on I continued juxtaposing extreme news with really absurd ones, even sampling news from cartoons to combine reality with fiction, trying to make the piece somehow surreal. At the end I included some news of Mexico, to make the piece more intimate with myself. I ended the composition with news about the horrible insecurity problems of Mexico, juxtaposing them with gossip news about the Mexican celebrities. I wanted to expose how modern news give more importance to superficial news for example celebrities having kids, instead of national problems.

Inventions For Radio No.1- The Dreams, was first broadcasted in 1964 in BBC radio (Discogs, 2014). This piece is by the famous english experimental music composer Delia Derbyshire collaborating with the author Barry Bermange. The piece is a collage of interviews of random people, were these people describe their dreams. This collage is supported by electronic music that conducts the emotions of each description. The piece in general is very sinister, most of the dreams are nightmares, were people are running from something, creating the feeling of anguish (anton newcombe, 2012).

Because one of my goals in my radio composition was to alienate the listener, this piece was a great form of inspiration. I decided to include an electronic drone similar to the one in Derbyshire’s piece. This drone would create a never resolving tension that would leave the listener in anguish. I wanted to take this idea to the next level by also including a field recording of a train passing really near by, overcharging the piece with noise, making each sonic element of the piece unidentifiable.

Collectively, our group decided to choose the theme of absurdism for the piece that is going to be broadcasted in radio. We chose absurdism because of the absurd nature of the current world, also we felt compelled to do a piece that caressed of a single meaning.

My first approach to undertaking this theme was to investigate absurdism and choose a direction to take when composing my part of the piece. Absurdism is defined as “a philosophy based on the belief that the universe is irrational and meaningless and that the search for order brings the individual into conflict with the universe” (Merriam-Webster, 2020). The word that standout for me was irrational, and inspired me to expose irrationality in the radio and news.

One of my peers of the group explained that he would base his piece in The Myth of Sisyphus, by Albert Camus. This essay exemplify the concept of absurdism by referencing the greek myth of Sisyphus (King, 2019) . The essay explains that the task of Sisyphus is totally pointless as all human endeavors and that we should find our own meaning in pointless actions. This concept also resonated a lot in my ideas.

I decided to expose absurdism in the news, making a collage combining news pointless news and real horrifying news. This creates a uncomfortable aspect to my piece, and I expose irrationality in current news.