------ FWD:
Date: Tue, 18 May 1999 16:10:21 -0400
From: emo@xxxxxxxxx
Subject: Radio & Aural Destabilization


Radio & Aural Destabilization #4a: Radio as Secret Pleasure Ground

by bart plantenga

"To drink wine in secret & not get caught, to accept the rules in order to
break them & thus attain
the spiritual lift ... of danger & adventure, the private epiphany of
overcoming
all interior police while tricking all outward authority."
* TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Hakim Bey

Pre-conditioned clairaudience: I remember at age 11 riding my bicycle back
and forth past my girlfriend's house (she didn't know she was my
girlfriend) on Saturday afternoons in the defiled terrain known as central
New Jersey, hoping (and dreading) she'd come outside. I'd ride by - no
hands, showing off - one hand holding an old transistor up to my ear, Top
40 - Martha & the Vandellas, Dave Clark Five - serenading me and creating
makeshift soundtracks to fortify my actions, or what I imagined they might
be. It made every awkward lunge toward amour seem justified, heroic,
necessary and part of the film that was playing on the backs of my eyelids.
That was radio for me - something hotwired to the self, ready to jumpstart
the heart.

Radio can also serve as a surrogate - an aural Tamagotchi for the bedless
or lonesome, drifting and manufacturing purpose out of nothing, a
transistor radio held to their ears. Radio shutting them in from the world
shutting them out. Witness alien souls riding around in their cars until
late desolate night, ignorant of their own desires, alienated from
adventure, glad another day's dead air has been killed softly with the
radio.

But radio was and still is bad. Everywhere - no amount of turning the dial
alters this conclusion.  Not bad in the good sense of bad deconstructing
false elegance but awful, stultefying, aural anesthesia that is used
against ourselves. Boring us while pretending it's doing the opposite.
Tearing us apart and, for a price, offering to put us back together again.

Bad radio's a signal that many of us have "no aptitude for autonomy,"
meaning a resignation to popular culture's absolute realities (where low
culture pretensions outwit those of high culture.) Although late at night,
some radionauts might discover signals going slightly fortuitous, less
shrink-wrapped. Fewer commercials too, revealing that strange media
capitalist equation: late night = fewer listeners = less advertising
revenue = more interesting programming. During working/commuting slots, all
radio issues mid-range Muzak as soothing workplace metronome. Our
arbitrated nocturnal heaven back then was the 3-minute version of
"In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida," say, giving way to, at the very least, B-sides or the
spacious, downright ostentaciously, bacchanalian 15±-minute album version.
During famine, crumbs become the feast.

I'd forgotten that my father had (still has!) a Norelco 3-speed
"real-to-reel" 10-kilo monstrosity of a tape recorder with which I recorded
many aimless meanderings around the radio dial - my own "radio shows" -
until a fellow dj followed my radio show recently with an eccentric piece
of electronica, "Oscillations," which I suddenly remembered recording off
some TV pop show (was it American Bandstand, 1967?) The band, Silver
Apples, were odd, out-of-time, pre-Kraftwerk. I remember listening
mesmerized, over and over for what it was that made this group so ...
weird.

The tapes held in magnetic suspension all manner of songs and bits. They
were mine, to play when I wanted, in whatever sequence I wanted, to sing
along to when I wanted without any commercial interruption ever.

I didn't become a radio dj for another 20 years but I subconsciously
carried that notion around with me until then. And by that time,
advertising had already snuffed out most of the songs and their sycophantic
memories by hotlinking them to various commodities - "Good Vibrations"
betraying associations with a classmate's yellow bikini for an orange soda.

Dérive: Urban derelict jaywalkers,  oblivious to crosswalks, wander off the
orderly civic shopping- or parking-augmentation grids through the city with
undetermined destinations, and discover ways to get places not described in
guidebooks. They're nomansland nomads negotiating the urban plexus on terms
orchestrated by their own hypnagogic concerns - free time allowing. These
wandering souls drop their "usual motives for movement ... and let
themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters
they find there."  So that dream can reinvigorate the quotidian ambience.
Before I knew this was called a dérive I was doing it. I walked. And when I
walked where light goes limp and darkness blossoms, I thought, and when I
thought, I lost all psychic ballast, becoming a sleuth; beholden to
happenstance while tracing enigmas to their source, noting autumnal
sunsets, the bouncy hems of skirts, a bullet hole in a grey steel door, the
smell of stale beer on the old man's breath; discovering the roving ghosts
of Henry Miller , Hart Crane , Hubert Selby, and Carson McCullers-their
presence like watermarks on forgotten stationery.

This temporary delight can be attained by drifting, treating the paths the
way mediums treat a Ouja Board or zen buddhists "augur" satori, that
delectible moment of surprised revelation. In other words, allowing chance
to, in part, determine orientation.

We all eventually discover that tuning and twisting the radio dial back and
forth does something similar - it exposes time and audition to chance - and
logic is rendered passé.

Brandon Labelle connects these peripatetic realignments of urban
geographies with making sounds: "The dérive becomes a model for making the
pulsations and gyrations of perception, the very corporeal interpenetration
of the self and the world ... productive ...Within the space of
sound-making is an ideological desire to immerse oneself in the reimagining
of a different set of relations. ... sound-making offers a way in which I
may negotiate how ... I become a part of the world around me."  Like
Labelle's sound-making, radiomaking can be seen as "a kind of
sonic-writing: a vocabulary [that] takes shape in the process of handling
objects and producing sound, focusing onto a particular noise and drawing
it into a space of attention." But what is radiomaking in this context of
"radio?"

Covert:  Radio's everywhere - and nowhere to be seen. The more obviously
omnipresent, the more absent. It oozes into shopping-dining-loving and yet
seldom can we recall any one moment, name or location on the glowing dial.
If you want to lose track of something, live with it day and night.

The more into absence radio seems to retreat however, the freer it becomes.
The freer it becomes, the more that freedom needs to be extrapolated and
nurtured in secrecy to realize radio's pre-commercial ideals - (pre-1940)
radio was intended as interpersonal communication, radiowave email if you
will.

Commercial radio, conversely, pins happy faces on the new nihilism that
worms its ways into every clown's heart - the fear of depths or heretical
surfaces has made almost all radio sonic valium. Meaning is consumed as
myth, a complex impoverishment: ever greater "rewards," ever slighter
opportunities for reaping those rewards; widening gulfs between desire and
fulfillment - random shopping manias are imbued with the hype of ersatz
adventures.

Commercial radio is a perfect illustration of the axiom: the less one has
to say, the more one's paid to say it - i.e., commercial radio
personalities aren't personalities so much as talking heads who fetch fat
salaries - they don't write, emote, choose music, mix it or even cue it.

Although most radio justifies/nurtures the market, sometimes its signals go
awry, seep into an open, un-ful-fill-ed space where creation can flourish
and that space may as well contain you. Once you accept this space as
y/ours and accept that radiowaves convert electricity into sound and that
sound stimulates the human body's bio-electrical units, you can accept that
bio-electricity activates reverie, sexual arousal, the urge to dance,
dream, sweat or contemplate just as easily as it arouses the shopping itch.
We carry on with our own vengeance in secrecy, outside the infected realm.
Here our reward is the joy of that time at play - simple, free, no exchange
rate, no credit rating necessary.

Why secret(ive) and clandestine? Because discretion is the better part of
survival. Secrecy remains the better part of freedom, anonymity the better
part of satisfaction. By circumventing the enforced language of expected
radio/experience anonymity becomes a must. This is not paranoia, this is
mere masked ball for the events called living. This is what we wear to
avoid having to participate in their courts / galleries / malls / amusement
parks because here they always win and their victory always means more
ennui to purchase your way out of. They own all the judges, fix all the
prices, water all the drinks. We do radio in secret (radio is nonetheless
projected outward rather than inward - the wine passed around rather than
imbibed alone) to not get caught doing unconventional (inconvenient) radio.

Imagine a park at night, no curfews, moontans, the sounds of crickets
drowning out the ambience of the workday, strange games of hide and seek
..

"The universe wants to play. Those who refuse out of dry spiritual greed ...
those who refuse out of dull anguish ...lose their chance at divinity"
* Hakim Bey

Play: Dutch philosopher, Johan Huizinga, identified a type of human as homo
ludens, humans at play, the suppressed participants of social history,
every bit as important as reasoning or productive people. Those homo ludens
are today's radiomakers.

The obverse of commercial radio's axiom might be: The more one has to say
(express, create, mean), the less one is "compensated" for it, i.e., "the
starving artist syndrome". So be it.

Radio as creative resource requires a creator, a player. The DJ, or spinner
of product (LP/CD/K7) must evolve into what the Dutch call a radiomaker. A
prankster, a playful soul. The Amsterdam School of Radiomakers reveals that
the state of radio here is unlike the usual state of things. The reason:
The art of DJ-ing skips into the next groove - from interior decorator to
architect, from spinning to making. Their manifesto contains the very
obliteration of each numbered proclamation in that manifesto ... "this tape
will self-destruct in 5 seconds" ...

Radiomakers at unaffiliated, invalid, illegal, outlaw, clandestine, and
pirate frequencies propose various sorceries via radiowaves. Participants
create a psychic / physical / psychological space which prepares us for, as
Hakim Bey puts it, "the metamorphosis of quotidian place into angelic
sphere." Radiomakers must become alchemists converting
resources/disks/opportunities into temporary moments of ecstasy.
Radiomakers throw out the stars and the listeners discover their own
zodiacs among them.

Somewhere between mystical and practical lies the art of the radiomaker - a
DJ/radiomaker's gift-technique is (sometimes willfully) misunderstood as
either a mysterious artform - it is and isn't, anyone can learn it, not all
will do it well. While others insist there's absolutely nothing to it -
well, that's not true either; there's an art, a touch, an ear, the same way
there's an "art" to decorating a refuge, constructing a rock garden,
preparing a memorable meal.

True radiomakers "require" few technological prostheses but can operate
many - a turntable, a tapedeck, a palette of appropriated / arranged
sounds, disembodied voices, a skit for a radio play, or an agenda for
mayhem can rearrange the inner sanctums of everyday expectations. The
canvas is the listener's innermost ear upon which they scratch their aural
etchings. With intent + creativity an entire universe can be created. One's
commitment need only be as vague as a (circum)navigation of possibility, an
avoidance of the expected - reinventing surrealdadasituationism without all
the ballast of a manifesto. Let the heart maintain the manifesto. Let the
addiction be fed in that dramatic micro-synaptical-instant known as the
segue, when sounds meet and have to decide whether they fit together. This
is the radiomaker's kick.

My own approach has always been severely low budget lo-fi with the ambition
of creating aural occurrences, abstract autonomous thematic excursions into
sound partially unbeholden to planning, partially beholden to chance, odd
bacterial mutations of musics - where one ended and another began remaining
unclear - indeterminancy enhancing beauty, like Jackson Pollocks in sound.
Ephemera recorded only in memory, enhanced by a listener's innate need to
reconstruct the experience in terms of heightened remembrance, the makings
of instructive fairy tales. The benign ingredients of potassium nitrate +
sodium + sulfur = gunpowder.

The Situationists and John Cage would've agreed on these frameworks of
nurtured chance. Cage believed that it's not our role to shape the world
but rather adapt, mingle, roll with the objects and people surrounding us.
A radiomaker must orchestrate a series of chances in his surroundings "free
of individual taste ... and the 'traditions' of the art"  But also "promote
.. an atmosphere of uneasiness extremely favorable for the introductions
of a few new notions of pleasure."

I've heard some of the funniest skits, some of the strangest collages and
seen mixers, genetic-scratch engineers strip records down for parts, like a
chopshop  offering anatomy lessons in sound because in the clandestine
studios of Radio 100 or the nomadic virtual HQ of Radio Patapoe people are
making a "new" sound, bent on changing the way we hear everyday experience.

Pirate: Pirate Stations exist in every Dutch city. The Hague had 6 last
time I checked. Amsterdam supports from 3 to 6 pirates. The 2 pirates in
question here, Radio 100 and Radio Patapoe, are unquestionably 2 of the
most independent / autonomous / unaffiliated stations I've ever come into
contact with.

The barometer of quality or style is up to you. One must show a certain
mastery of the logistics required in producing a show, handle the
equipment, and intuit the vague sense of a generally-accepted (by
consensus) notion of what "quality" is. I'm sure I'd have trouble doing a
show that was pro-skinhead-nazi or one that insisted on giving away the
location of the station's studios or provoking the police or government to
close us down. Other than that, Patapoe and 100 are as autonomous as
practical considerations will allow.

Radio 100 is organized around an invisible structure so that it appears to
operate on auto-pilot. It broadcasts high quality unheard sounds and
under-appreciated musics. Most of its rules revolve around maintaining a
safe, efficient, covert studio to assure its survival. Radiomakers pay a
monthly membership for the honor of making radio. This is invested in
upgrading the station's equipment.

Radio Patapoe, to its credit and enthusiasm, maintains an avowed distrust
of non-consensual structure and hierarchy. It is gelatinous, unpredictable,
humane, all over the place and then suddenly nowhere, amorphous and
devoutly autonomous. But can any of this be called political praxis? Of
course. Any temporary occupation or use (especially in a frolicsome manner,
where play becomes subversive, instructive, illuminating, life-enhancing)
of an open broadcast corridor in the name of fun (fun as a way to undermine
oppressions) serves notice that alternatives to the status quo exist -
there are escape hatches. They are as ideal as it can be while remaining
functionally on-the-air - a difficult frontier to negotiate.

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