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SLOW FM

role: Artist, Director, Curator, Technical, Performer

SLOW FM was a temporary FM and online microstation dedicated to SLOW music, broadcasted live September 2014 and existing as an online archive afterward. It received a visit by the FCC and its FM signal was shut down. In addition to the live broadcast SLOW FM featured live in-studio concerts.

Beginning in the mid 80s, the slow food movement began in Italy and over time grew a rabid following worldwide that continues to this day. Starting in the early 90s, a subgenre of southern hip hop called screw emerged with vinyl albums were played and re-recorded 20-30% slower with added beats, introductions and other effects. This subgenre bubbled beneath the surface for over a decade, and took off in the mid-2000s as the phenomenon of chopped and screwed music was applied to hip hop mixtapes. Experimental musicians have mined this technique to combine hip hop, electronic, ambient, noise and other experimental music. SLOW FM commissioned artists internationally to create new slowed-down compositions as well as broadcasted a range of slow music from ambient, dub, drone, contemporary classical, dance, hip hop and cross-genre music. Artists included: Tim Hecker, Lawrence English, Aaron Roche, Greg Fox/GDFX, Cars Will Burn, Yung Pharoah, Thin Gaze, Selfies, Lil ‘Merica, Ulalume, Chattr, Eartheater, and Indridi Ingolffson. Additional works performed live and slow by Lee Tusman and Jacob Herschel.

In 2012, The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, in partnership with Andrea Clearfield and artists and presenters from multiple disciplines, created the “New Spaces / New Formats” research group. The group’s mission is to investigate how the Philadelphia music community can use alternative performance spaces and new formats to reach out to potential audiences in new ways and in new parts of the city, and to develop cross-genre programming. The projects presented at Christ Church, Neighborhood House, and Burial Ground during the week of September 24–29, 2013 in a culmination of this research.

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