Villa Aurora X Lookout FM Radio - Episode 9 of "if the house could speak"
In January of 2025 the Palisades Fire came within feet of Villa Aurora. Miraculously, the house survived, and with it the radio transmitter that broadcasts from there throughout the Santa Monica Mountains and the beaches below.
This series explores the voices, past and present, that reverberate at Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger’s former home. For the past 30 years, Villa Aurora has been an artist residence, a place where exile and expression meet, where history and contemporary events converge.
During the process of rebuilding and awaiting our artists’ return, we will be broadcasting newly produced, archival and historical footage for you to listen to and maybe wonder: Is this really only a house or, like Carl Jung suggests, can the composition of a room induce the realization of new truths?
Each episode of if the house could speak will be broadcast on a loop for 24 hours with no interruption starting at 12 PM Pacific Daylight Time. For our listeners across the world, that corresponds to 7 PM Coordinated Universal Time and 9 PM Middle European Time.
Episode 9
Thomas Ankersmit Double Feature
Part 1
Figueroa Terrace is a 37-minute composition by Dutch artist and composer, and former Villa Aurora resident, Thomas Ankersmit. Ankersmit is one of the foremost contemporary practitioners of the Serge Modular Synthesizer, an instrument originally designed at CalArts in the early 1970s by Serge Tcherepnin as a democratic alternative to the costly modular systems of its era — a “people’s synthesizer” intended for communal experimentation and education.
In the winter of 2011–2012, Ankersmit was invited to CalArts to record new music with the school’s restored Black Serge system, a unique instrument built and continually modified by generations of students. The sessions took place both at CalArts in Valencia and in Los Angeles, culminating in a premiere at REDCAT, Downtown.
In Figueroa Terrace, the city’s presence is abstract yet tangible: expansive, unstable, bathed in voltage and heat. The piece drifts between near-silence and roaring density, mirroring Los Angeles’ vastness and volatility, its electric hum, its distant horizons, and its layered history of art and invention.
Part 2
Thomas Ankersmit and Valerio Tricoli
Zwerm Voor Tithonus is a track from Thomas Ankersmit and Valerio Tripoli’s collaborative album Forma II. Their compositions on this album feature layers of static, hum and dissonance, as well as electroacoustic field recordings that range from metal foil floating on ultrasonic sound-beams to mechanical clickers recorded in abandoned radar domes at Teufelsberg, Germany, a site that once housed a Cold War spy station.
About LOOKOUT FM
LOOKOUT FM is a West Coast terrestrial radio home for the broadcast of "transmission art:" experimental audio composition, modern serials, data sonification, radio plays, multi-day compositions, and radio-centric performances. Their licensed stations in Burbank, Hollywood, and Pacific Palisades function as FM exhibition spaces where radio art is presented without regard to constraints of time, structure, or commercial consideration.
