#549: Radio Sur Global
Iván Medellín – WORM Sound Studio, Rotterdam
Radio Sur Global is a sound and radio artwork by Colombian producer Iván Medellín, created at WORM Sound Studio in Rotterdam using an extensive collection of analog instruments and synthesizers, encompassing sound technology that ranges between 1950 and 2025. The piece unfolds as a series of interconnected compositions that merge electronic improvisation, sonic collage, and conceptual radio fiction.
Across ten tracks, Medellín explores the technical, emotional, and political layers of radio as both medium and metaphor. Using modular synthesizers, DIY circuitry, and early optical sampling instruments like the Optigan, he reconstructs the ghosts of obsolete technologies to question how communication, data, and memory circulate in the post-digital era.
From the ironic pseudo-soundscape Radio Sur Global (Colonial Cut) (a deconstruction of exoticism embedded in sound archives from the global north) to the hypnotic pulse of Last Day of Radio and the reflective interludes Onda and Pulso, the work traces the transformation of radio from an ethereal transmission medium to a disembodied digital concept. The closing piece, Epílogo: Muerte Digital, meditates on the disappearance of analog frequencies and the illusion of eternity in the digital realm.
Medellín’s work, which also extends through his project Conjunto Media Luna, investigates sound as a political and poetic tool, bridging experimental electronics with Latin American sonic imaginaries inside the Cumbia universe.
