CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO ARCHIVED KLAM RADIO EPISODES
KLAM Radio takes the best and worst parts of radio and puts them together into one mega-station. KLAM 109.5 comes to you live from the fabulous Dry Arroyo Casino in San Ranchito, California! Focusing on the absurdity and humor of everyday radio forms, KLAM Radio considers the resilience of radio culture in the digital media age, its strange power and prevalence in the Southland, and the cultural challenges facing California’s desert communities.
Listen to KLAM on these podcast providers:
KLAM 109.5 on Soundcloud
KLAM Radio is a collaboration between performance artist Lenae Day and writer Anna Kryczka. Together they have assembled a group talented put together a group of talented Los Angeles artists, musicians, comedians, voice actors designers, writers and public radio personalities to give KLAM its unique voice.
Notable contributors include Eleanor Antin, Jesse Thorn, Jonathan Goldstein, Starlee Kine, Aparna Nancherla, Betsy Sodaro, Martin Starr,and much, much more!
As a weekly podcast, KLAM offers a critical inquiry into Southern California media and culture through the subversion of expectations around normative modes of race, class, and gender representation. Combining formats and styles associated with commercial, public, and community radio, KLAM investigates radio’s place in the contemporary media context. Using websites, fictional social media accounts, voicemails, and podcasts, coupled with live events, Day and Kryczka unfold a portrait of this imagined California desert town, its people, their aspirations, gossip, disagreements, passions and politics. Listeners are encouraged to interact with KLAM Radio’s many personalities throughout the course of the exhibition through social media and 323 Projects.
Tune into KLAM by visiting 323projects.com and klammin.com and you’ll encounter the movers and shakers of remote San Ranchito.
Want to reach KLAM Radio directly? Call (323) 843-4652 to connect with station managers Larry and Jerry Frumkin OR leave messages and dedications for the KLAM DJs!!!
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Lenae Day is a Los Angeles based performance artist with solo shows at Mark Moore Gallery and Disjecta Contemporary. Her work takes the form of fabricated archives, utilizing commercial media forms to create and document conceptual universes. Her publications: DAY Magazine, Modern Candor and DAY Weekly are available in art book stores around the world. lenaeday.com
Anna Kryczka is a doctoral candidate in the University of California, Irvine’s program in Visual Studies and holds a Master’s degree in Art History, Theory and Criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her research focuses on the criticism and display of mid-century American art, design, media, material culture, and architecture. Kryczka's work has appeared in the Journal of Visual Culture and the Journal of History and Technology. Her book, co-edited with Robert J. Kett and based on a 2013 co-curated exhibition, Learning by Doing at the Farm: Craft, Science, and Counterculture in Modern California was published in March of 2014. She is currently a member of a Jet Propulsion Lab funded interdisciplinary research group focusing on the economic, cultural, and environmental challenges facing Southern California’s desert communities.
REVIEWS
This ambitious, long-term art project is a bit difficult to explain, but these recent reviews certainly speak for themselves:
"It’s got a lot going for it: genuinely absurdist (as opposed to just ridiculous), actually funny (though not every joke hits), reasonably well produced (some of the fake-ad jingles remain stuck in my head), and there appears to be some sort of social commentary happening, though as with a lot of conceptual art, it isn’t always clear what the object of the satire is actually meant to be (which is far preferable to the common alternative—getting hammered over the head with an Important Didactic Message). It seems to be saying something about urban space and society in Southern California, but I haven’t quite figured out what. Closest clear comparison is Welcome to Night Vale [commonplacebooks.com] though KLAM has a looser polyphonous vibe than that (also terrific) show. Jonathan Goldstein, Starlee Kine, and other radioheads make cameos." - Andrew Leland, Host and co-Producer of KCRW's The Organist
"If you don't understand the podcast yet, it is an ELABORATE satire of a desert-town radio station that slowly turns into a serialized melodrama of intersecting characters, grudges, and bad blood." - Writer A. Wolfe (Vice, Flaunt, Marie Claire, The Atlantic, etc)
"Strikes me as Welcome to Night Vale meets Bullseye meets the Comedy Bang Bang." - Nick Quah, from his newsletter Hot Pod
“What a universe you create! KLAM makes me think of SCTV!” - Howard Chackowicz, series regular on CBC’s Wiretap
"Reminds me of the worlds created by/as Twin Peaks and Welcome to Nightvale, but much more connected to our own real terrors and weirdness: the uneasy mix of social classes in desert communities; endless drought; radio as a bastion and mechanism of gendered speech!" - iTunes reviewer "FUR"
"This is bizarre because I was never really sure this wasn't a real town and radio station. I had to look it up to be sure. Very cool concept and production. I felt like I was listening to some rando number on the dial while driving through the desert." - iTunes review by "Zoomiez"