The Radio Healer concerto is a programmatic music composition.  It is based upon a fictitious character developed to inspire the musical score.  This character is a cyborg shaman who struggles to preserve his tribe's ceremonial life as it survives during a post-colonial marketplace culture.  His flesh works to preserve what is left of his culture and land through machinery, these are the same machines used by others to affect his culture's decay. Analogous to his work, he finds that sometimes the machine parts of his body work seamless with his flesh parts, and at other times the two components reject each other.  When malfunction occurs, it causes him great physical pain and confusion. However, he finds that when he approaches the machine as the sacred, he is able use both the machine and flesh aspects of himself to benefit humanity.  He is a cyborg whose physicality mirrors his paradoxical and balanced condition as a healer of his people.  The concerto reflects the internal and physical drama of the cyborg as he reaches to understand his condition, and the challenging circumstances his people endure. He creates and broadcasts his radio medicine in an effort to heal people by encouraging different cultures to respect and collaborate with each other. The cyborg shaman urges all peoples to overcome fear in order to secure fundamental human rights, decentralize the powers of governance, and care for the Earth's environment.

 

Radio Healer is originally founded upon a concerto written for American Indian Flutes and their improvisational nature.  The score is also arranged for electronic analogue and digital instrument orchestration.  These instruments, within Radio Helaer music, demonstrate their ability to defy common assumptions about their roles within binary approaches to thought. An example of a binary in Radio Healer is as follows: the organic (American Indian flute) versus the mechanical (computer).  The paradox of binaries and their hybridism through points of divergence and fluctuation are what emanate from the core and physicality of the Radio Healer. The cyborg healer demonstrates that the given binary is one example of what can be can be blurred or destroyed as he expresses Native American flute with mechanical precision and machines with human organic expression. He is a being who heals and networks diverse peoples by broadcasting radio medicine. He strives to make old and new technologies more beneficial to the earth and humanity by respecting them as the sacred.

 

This concerto was composed and published as a work of audio.  This piece is provided in its entirety, and is presented in MP4 format.  It will require a fast internet connection to stream.

Requires QuickTime

Listen to Concerto (40:42 min.)

Music Composition and Arrangement by Cristóbal Martínez 

Randy Kemp - Native American Flutes 

Cristóbal Martínez - Tone Generators and Piano 

Artwork by mac n. zie and Randy Kemp 

Layout by mac n. zie 

Mixed and Engineered at tresGatos by J.C. Golding 

Technical Support by Fabio Fernandes 

Mastered at SAE Mastering on October 20, 2003 by Roger Seibel

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