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Poly-Aural Space - Radio, Reverie And Ether
Bart Plantenga. 2002. ninplant@xs4all.nl
"A creature with a window of perception adjusted to radio waves would have a very different impression of the night sky from the one our eyes give us".
"To drink wine in secret and not get caught, to accept the rules in order to break them and thus attain the spiritual lift ... of danger and adventure, the private epiphany of overcoming all interior police while tricking all outward authority".
Abstract Radio has always been a medium with a mystical reputation as an intermediary between worlds. A place where people were transformed by Sinatra or War of the Worlds or heard voices, presumably from the beyond, and yet, it remains an art form that dares not speak its own name. I've always been fascinated by radio signals emerging like spectral sirens from the oceans of white noise, those mysterious quavering voices on the far edge of comprehension. The "Ghost Orchid" [3] persuasively documents how the dead may be communicating with the living via radio signals. But how do we enter this fuzzy dialectic between mind and sound that "helps us escape time" [4] and induces reverie. Better yet, how do we transmit its effect in today's hypermediated world where the glories of the marketplace basically go unchallenged? I understand the distinction between what radio is (mostly a commercial wasteland) and what it sometimes attains (clandestine bower of creation or foyer leading to adventure). Being a generalist-inclusionist who believes in the interconnectedness of experience and expression, I take Breton's "Nadja", Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Reverie, Hakim Bey's T.A.Z., and the Situationists' Theory of the Derive as my guidebooks on this ethereal journey into sonic mindscapes. We must try to connect the dots and doubts and connect John Cage's notions of nurtured chance, Bachelard's reverie and the Situationists' unique notions of praxis to have a ghost of a chance.
"Keep your meat hooks off my radio".
1. Radio as Reverie One of the most moving aspects of Midnight Cowboy is the relationship between a portable radio and Jon Voigt's character - loyal companion extinguishing human loneliness. Beloved radio also reads his mind, reflects his moods and inflames his passions. Eventually, Joe Buck is forced to pawn his radio to survive - radio for food. The pawnshop scene, for me, surpasses any emotional [and existential] moment in any film anywhere, including Casablanca. This is because the radio is more than an object or a box full of circuitry, more than the sum of its parts just as the mind is more than the sum of the brain's parts. As a child, I didn't take stuffed animals to bed; I took a transistor radio. It provided lullabies, baseball games and warded off nightmares. Its soothing voices kept me company, assured me that the characters from Roger Corman's Masque of the Red Death were not living in my clothes closet. By morning, the battery was worn down to the point where I could only get the strongest station, WOR, but I held onto that station like a man overboard holds onto a scrap of driftwood. I knew this radio inside out; knew how to wiggle the internal antenna or jiggle the transistors to eliminate the static. I tested the 9-volt batteries by placing my tongue on the 2 poles. I can still feel that prickly bittersweet [Cinzano?] little jolt. I remember lying with the radio between face and pillow, slowly twisting the dial, squeezing out unusual frequencies, entire faraway worlds rolling by like celluloid reveries across the backs of my eyelids [5]. Distant towns with parking problems, local celebrities, sport teams, and county fairs in states without countries - entire other worlds - quavered by. Radio was the intermediary, the place where in led to out - way out. Where the far out led to my interior, my internal organs of reverie [6]. Or as Thomas Pynchon wrote, "Grover's room .. filled as the hour grew late with disembodied voices, sometimes even from as far away as the sea". The more I dropped my red radio, the more lovingly I taped it up and eventually, the more desperately I had to jiggle its essential organs to get it to continue speaking to me. 2. Pre-conditioned clairaudience I remember, 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 of central New Jersey, hoping (and dreading) she'd come outside. I'd ride by - no hands, red radio pressed to my ear trying to prove something I had no words for. Top 40 [Four Seasons, Martha & the Vandellas, Dave Clark Five] serenading me and creating makeshift soundtracks to fortify my imaginary next move. Red radio 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 then - something hotwired to the self, ready to jumpstart the heart.
"The only thing that keeps half the people alive in factories is the radio on all day".
3. Radio as Tamagotchi Radio can also serve as surrogate partner. Wander around NY or other urban Disneysector for a day and you will notice them outside the velvet ropes [7] which separate queues of tourists from the hordes of nomadic untouchables. Guide-bookless and homeless they drift from anywhere to nowhere with grungy recycled transistor radios held to their ears - the aural equivalent of a Tamagotchi - manufacturing purpose out of nothing. Radio shutting them in from the world shutting them out. Radio speaks to anyone. Opium, armor, pet. 4. Consumeration vs Collected Unconscious It's also a weapon wielded by the empowered and moneyed. Just witness America's rightward-reeling talk shows used as para-political cudgels against the general listener "hypnotized by production and conveniences" [8] while most music radio soothes and smooths over that very fact. Muzak + disinformation - call it Murdochization or the Time-Warner-CNN Bandits... Or it serves as desperate weapon - bomb of noise - a boombox that declares the very disappearance of the self while max decibels proclaim the prowess of their utter despondency. Human quickly noticed and, as irritant, instantly forgotten. Meanwhile, commercial radio tautologically and perpetually informs us how great the world we live in is - it's the only way to live. In a traffic jam, you dream of being their contest winner. The prize: an escape vacation out of this very world. Wander through the middle of any nowhere landscape and you'll witness alien souls riding around in cars until late desolate night, waiting for instructions, ignorant of their own desires, alienated from adventure, glad another day's dead air has been killed softly with a radio. Radio has been bad everywhere for a long time and no amount of turning the dial will likely alter this conclusion [9]. Not bad in the good sense of bad deconstructing false elegance but awful, stultifying, 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 is evidence that many of us are resigned to popular culture's absolute realities (where low culture pretensions outwit those of high culture) [10]. Although, late at night, some radionauts might still discover signals going slightly fortuitous, less shrink-wrapped. Fewer commercials too, revealing that strange media entrepreneurial equation: late night = fewer listeners = less advertising revenue = more interesting programming. During working/commuting slots, all radio issues mid-range Muzak [light-country, light-classical, classic-light-rock] as soothing workplace metronome - unlistenable, yet somehow, mysteriously undeniable [11]. Our arbitrated nocturnal heaven back then [1971] was the 3-minute version of "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida", say, giving way to the spacious, downright ostentatiously, bacchanalian 15ħ-minute album version. During famine, crumbs become the feast. I didn't become a radiomaker for another 15 years, but by then, advertising had already effectively snuffed out most of our most privately underwritten 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!
"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".
5. Inter-medial Air/play Dutch philosopher, Johan Huizinga, identified one 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 might be considered today's radiomakers, serving as the obverse to commercial radio's axiom: The more one has to say (express, create), the less one is "compensated" for it - "the starving artist syndrome". So be it. Three S-S-Sound Eventures... 5a. WFMU [NJ/NY] = Sex
Met a beautiful black woman on the 34 bus from Newark to East Orange [earlier home of WFMU & carjacking capital of the US]. I was going to the station and she to her home a few blocks away. I introduced myself and she said, "Oh, so you're the one..." She knew my show, liked it, a fan, my impressionable and esteem-hungry brain thought. That busride initiated a series of late night telephone conversations that evolved from the curious to the amorous at a frightening pace. Into hour 2 of her second call she asked, "How's your sex life?"
The following week, instead of going straight to the station, I went to her house, bag of tapes and discs strapped to my back. There we were in a middle class tree-lined neighborhood, nice couch, pleasant smell of Caribbean spice. She got me a beer, we sat down on the couch and soon we were talking and outlining various under-appreciated body parts with intrepid fingers. An hour later I watched her position her provocative self on my lap as she began rocking me like an old hobby horse. She even went so far as to unzip my fly when suddenly from the corner of my eye [seat of paranoia] I noticed her mom in the kitchen tidying up. I was amazed how seamlessly Y. had fused amour with a perfectly mundane conversation with her mom, just short of simultaneously talking to mom while tongue-kissing me.
Another hour later, her mom had quietly disappeared, presumably to bed and there was Y. dark glimmering quasi-naked body atop mine, telling me about growing up an intellectual black woman in the middle of NJ, while deftly yanking my already opened jackknife from its snug acrid pocket - slap-flap-giggle. She had 2 brothers, one in the Navy and the other, L., worked odd jobs and ... hated white guys. I immediately thought of how I could convince him I wasnıt a white guy at all as she continued on about his explosive anger while guiding my hands over her lovely proud porcelain teacup breasts. It was midnight when the front door opened and L. swaggered in...
A few weeks later, she called me, asked if she could "come down and see the studios".
5b. Radio Libertaire [Paris] = Scandal Libertaire used to be located in a cramped apartment halfway up into Montmartre and one day, into bottle of wine 2, me and B. decided to give the general anarcho-info-activist audience a new spin. We had as our weapon a box of old French pop 45s and after spinning some we quickly discovered the one that would best serve as our ammunition of choice - "Ma Petit Canotier" [My Little Straw Hat] by Maurice Chevalier. We spun it at 33, 45, 78, slowed, in reverse...a half hour into our Acousmatic Annoyance Agenda, the indignant phone calls started coming in - phoneline 1, 2, 3... My friend, on the fly affected a Southern accent and answered the phone, "American Embassy, Seargent Benjamin Cartwright speaking!" It was a necessary moment of pure spontaneity that dictated we cast all assumption and predictability to the ether... After our show, we headed down to the Pompidou Center for the opening of a Situationist Retrospective [1989]. We pressed through the post-Situ protesters outside and ended up in the room where Jamie Reid was part of the opening ceremonies. All around us hung his Situationist-inspired work such as the first Sex Pistols record jackets and behind him a huge collage mural of his work where I, in an instant provided by the courage that 2 bottles of wine provided I became a surprise part of the opening. I took one of my signature CONSPICUOUS PIG stickers out, removed the backing, and slapped it onto his mural, thereby defacing [enhancing?] it. Freelance, ad hoc, guerilla and under the influence, I added a second and third as the shocked media cameramen and reporters turned to record my actions. I spoke to Reid later, and he assured me that he was not only approving, he wouldnıt mind if I did it again. A young punkette came up with pen ready, asking who I was and would I be willing to autograph the program flier. A week later, I returned and noticed that all 3 stickers had been removed. But by whom? 5c. Radio Patapoe [Amsterdam] = Sirens The war in Kosovo, May of 1999 - I became part of a very unique action conceived by Amsterdamıs Autonoom Centrum which advocates on behalf of refugees and stateless people. The idea was for all 3 independent radio stations in Amsterdam [Radio Patapoe, Radio 100, and Radio Vrije Keyzer] to broadcast an hour of air raid siren sounds and turn our speakers set on window sills outward, into the streets of Amsterdam. Listeners were also encouraged to turn their speakers outward to create the effect / ambience of dread, of a city under siege. It worked magnificently. The sirens could be experienced as an irritant or as a reminder of the sonic feeling of panic, of fear of approaching bombardments in Kosovo. There was the chance, however, that it could end up being difficult for those reminded of their own horrific experiences with air raid sirens during WWII. But for most of those born after WWII, the sonic effect was meant to reverberate through our nervous systems and, in a way, circumvent our logical systems of justification and denial. As people passed our sonic site - one of many - one could observe passersby being forced to deal with some aspect of the war as they passed by in the comfort of their thoughts and cars. Other campaign participants handed out leaflets explaining the action to passersby and neighbors. Police appeared but seemed disinclined to take dramatic action, especially after they were handed the leaflet and assured that the sirens would only last for one hour. They just idled around outside the old Kalenderpanden squatted warehouse, bemused and non-threatening. A magnificent sonic statement that continues to resonate in my deepest of inner ears. Radio as creative resource requires a creator, a player. The DJ, or spinner of product (LP / 45 / CD / K7 / MD / DAT / DVD) must evolve into what the Dutch call a radiomaker - a prankster, a playful soul. The so-called Amsterdam School of Radiomakers reveals that the state of [some] radio here [and, of course, likely anywhere] 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 ... Radiomakers at unaffiliated, invalid, illegal, outlaw, clandestine, and pirate frequencies propose various sorceries via radiowaves. Participants create a psychic/physical/psychological space that prepares us for, what Hakim Bey calls, "the metamorphosis of quotidian place into angelic sphere" [12]. Radiomakers become alchemists, converting resources/disks/opportunities into temporary moments of ecstasy. True radiomakers 'require' few technological prostheses but can operate many - a turntable, tapedeck, a palette of appropriated / arranged sounds, disembodied voices, a skit for a radio play, quick wittedness, 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. During any broadcast, some listeners will happen upon the radiomaker's program with radiomaker as Lorelei beckoning the unsuspecting curious, enchanting them with unique negotiations between entertainment and the element of surprise [13], the delight of astonishment for both maker and listener. The trick of mind is to suspend ALL cynicism and continue to believe/hope that listeners still need/want to be surprised. Because the essential element of delight and illumination - Zen satori, Western epiphany - is triggered by surprise, serendipity, which leads to "growth of being" [14]. Give and take; listeners arenıt passive; s/he interacts, not as in cliched cyber-interactivity, but by applying sounds to one's own bio-chemical cinema. Radiomaker as soundtrack composer, listener as private cinematographer/projectionist [15]. Don't think, however, that this is well thought out or that s/he has huge blueprints somewhere of the soulıs inner-workings. This is mostly spinning in the dark, an unconscious agenda that happens not via intent, polemic, or flights of consciousness [necessarily]. It happens through the mostly subliminal and imperceptible arousal of "the hormones of the imagination" [16]. The ironic 'convenience' of an unstable [read dynamic or migratory] radio station that is cobbled together from spare parts and secondhand equipment is that technique can never become so smooth and rarefied that the human being, however faceless and ephemeral s/he may remain, disappears. Glitch as signature. One day the mics don't work, or the headphone cords are shot, or turntable one has disappeared, or somebody has spilled some mysterious gelatinous substance on the soundboard... Happenstance and human error remain, then, grounds for reverie and creation, which can lead to amazing occurrences that have no author other than fortuity. Radio in all its guises, death knells, and permutations remains fairly fluid and pervious [17]. Necessity, in other words, remains to some extent, the mother of invention. This remains particularly true of lo/no budget radio where invention has an almost unseemly direct relationship to the paucity of sophisticated tech-gadgetry [18]. 6. Derive The Derive, the Situationists' "transient passage through varied ambiences" [19], depends on the delight of surprise for its kick. Call it preconceived improv, controlled happenstance or a strolling seance where your desires play the divining rod [20]. Just as one Situationist notion was that Haussman's rechanneling of Paris was dictated by a concern for discontent and revolution. He made the major boulevards perfect military vectors for maximized mobility. In other words, radicals and contrarian merrymakers would no longer be able to ally themselves with the inaccessible obscurity of the labyrinthine narrow streets to disappear without a trace. This analogy can also be applied to today's resistant radio frequencies. Derelict jaywalkers [21], oblivious to crosswalks, might wander off orderly civic shopping- or parking-augmentation grids through the city with enigmatic destinations [allusive places, places no longer in their places], and discover ways to discover locations not described in any guidebooks. Theyıre no-mans-land 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" [22], so that dream can reinvigorate the quotidian ambience. Before I knew this was called a derive 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, became a sleuth; beholden to happenstance while tracing enigmas to their source. In other words, allowing chance to determine orientation. We can also apply the notion of the derive, to sound. I call my radio shows "aural derives" and Hildegard Westerkamp combines sound and peripatetics in the soundwalk [23]. This perambulatory technique is not so much scientific method as it is an organic trigger, which allows phenomena to occur and be noticed. Things happen precisely because we're not in our 'right' minds. The derive can also be applied to the fingers - let your fingers do the walking, to quote the Yellow Pages - on the old radio dial or - jumping the groove to the next realm - as a radiomaker in a radio studio [24]. 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 and its arteries and vectors are rendered passe. Sound sculptor Brandon Labelle connects these peripatetic realignments of urban geographies with making sounds: "The derive 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 re-imagining 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" [25]. 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" [26]. 7. Radio as Wreck We move from the manipulation of the dial [active audition] to active sound manufacture. But what is radiomaking in this context of 'radio'? The name of my program has been "Wreck This Mess" since 1988. "Wreck" means causing the ruin of any structure - iconoclasm. "This mess" means the inner ear as reshaped by the marketplace - consumption aesthetics, aesthetic consumption. WTM is meant as an abstract explosion inside utilitarian traffic-weather-blabla radio [27]. WTM is a strategy of contrary seamlessness [working in loose collaboration with hundreds of other radio programs the world over] - against the notion of time without pleasure, labor without meaning, menace without fun unclogging the aural and imaginal pathways [28]. Prodigal uninterrupted sonic voyages, where one sound integrates with another, a daisy chain of overlapping instants, conversing, collaging, mutating. Seamlessness dematerializes song as passive product - music becomes more of what it is. And anonymity becomes a signature, absence an obverse presence - wallpaper becomes wall, wall becomes structure. Does it always work - No! I've been on the air 15 years now [12 as WTM] and so it has been many things including a disaster from time to time. Variety of themes and sounds has kept it interesting. One week might 'require' country + western, another week, an homage to a musician who has died. But the most consistent un/format or non/genre I return to is the sonic pastiche, the ambient collage where a variety of sources including those hard to pinpoint or measure - like circumstance, emotional state, synchronicity - are thrown together to create a kind of aural print of personal existence. By forcing sounds up against traditional music and fusing them, we arrive at that extended instant of sonic foreplay known as the segue which is, effectively, play, chemical experimentation, instants that document the dissolution of the integrity of individual music sources. Musics and sounds are crammed into a room, a party ensues and strangers are forced to interact with one another. WTM 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, market-driven playlists, logic [29], partially beholden to chance, odd bacterial mutations of musics - where one ended and another began remaining unclear - indeterminacy 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. Guided misguidance or nurtured chance? The Situationists and John Cage would've agreed on these frameworks of nurtured chance. Cage believed that our role is not to shape the world but 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" [30], but also "promote ... an atmosphere of uneasiness extremely favorable for the introductions of a few new notions of pleasure" [31]. 8. Radio pirates Autonomous or pirate Stations exist in most Dutch cities. Amsterdam has anywhere from 3 to 6. Currently I operate out of two semi-clandestine radio stations - Radio 100 and Radio Patapoe. Both are located in sonic redoubts out of the public eye, discreet, maintaining their own frequency, and thriving in much the same manner as prostitution and soft drugs carry on here, in a quasi-legal, tolerated manner. Seldom a bust was heard of or much worried about. The barometer of quality or style is up to you. One must, of course, show a certain mastery of the logistics required in producing a show, learning the equipment, and intuiting 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, the 2 stations remain as autonomous as practical considerations allow. The styles vary and clash but ultimately the 2 stations are able to accommodate, endorse, AND ignore both R. Murray Schaefer's orthodox soundscapism and Pierre Schaeffer's libertarian objet sonorism. Radio 100 has been located deep within the entrails - no windows - of a legalized squat for some dozen years and here the Dutch version of radiomaking, of radio beyond mere blather and spinning is taken to its zenith. Sound as a raw material to sculpt/sample/mangle into something personally symphonic or crucially frenetic are a regular order of the day here. It is organized around an invisible structure so that it appears to operate on autopilot. Styles vary wildly: conceptual talk (with the renowned Willem de Ridder), avant doo wop (with erotic philosophe, William Levy), '100 years of Polish punk', militant poetry, dub-reggae, constructed sound films, improv, and inveterate noise-morphing with everything from sequencers and samplers to sound chips found in stuffed animals and the young desires of noisemonauts spinning and splicing through the lonely night, generating and hybridizing music[s]. Most of 100's rules revolve around maintaining a safe, efficient, covert studio to assure its survival. Meanwhile, at Radio Patapoe, which has been around since the early '80s, you have a situation even less entangled in bureaucracy than 100 and, in its own style, and to its credit and enthusiasm, it maintains an avowed distrust of nonconsensual structure and hierarchy. It is gelatinous, unpredictable, humane, all over the place and then suddenly nowhere, amorphous and devoutly autonomous. Things disappear, reappear, [d]evolve, grafitti morphs, equipment is replaced, hundreds of self-help tapes are donated, cord and input configurations change almost daily. By-laws give way to suggestions, rules to desires, obligations to volunteerism, and schedules are mere faint templates fitting uneasily over the complex lives of characters who are sometimes radiomakers. A free-for-all, in other words, which leads to what can only be characterized as a moveable feast, a nomadic TAZ, Bedouins of the ether, a voice without address, neither fixed nor fictional. Iconoclastic, dodgy, humorous, and predictably unreliable, but in that unreliability, inside this self-generated chaos theory, a pattern, a schedule emerges. Furtive pranksters with droll show names like Radio Worm, Club Mickey, Jazzmotherfuckers, Antarctica, Cuba & Swiss, Psychosers, Disturbing Faith, WW Bingoshow, running the gamut of extremisms and depths. Patapoe has been located all over Amsterdam, until recently in one of its most active squats. Admirably occupied and renovated in a matter of months, 3 years ago, Amsterdam's Kalenderpanden was a veritable beehive of cultural activity overlooking the zoo in an old historical 'pakhuis' [warehouse]. I'm amazed how these young occupation troops learn plumbing, the law, electricity, publicity, sound systems, cooking, printing, organizing and make these spaces happen seemingly overnight. The Kalenderpanden served as performance space for unusual experimental acts, cinema, art gallery, cafe, and vegan restaurant [7 guilders = $3 for a full meal], lecture hall, hostel, radio station, and living space for 15 - as well as mass lodging space. But this was not to be. While I was away in October 2000, the squat was stormed by the police and is now being transformed into luxury housing. C'est la vie. Squats have mostly always been temporary autonomous zones [their potential permanence or legalization, in a sense, undermining their autonomy as they emerge as part of the marketplace] if you will, that thrive in the social crags and interstices. Patapoe has since moved to a new location, a centrally located and very active autonomous center where play is taken seriously. There is a restaurant, experimental cinema, avant DJ evenings, wild sculpture displays, capoeira lessons, drumming rehearsals, art studios, film studios and more to come. Plus a dozen or so people call it thuis [home]. The place is currently negotiating its own legalization [amazing concept in and of itself]. The squatters are among Amsterdam's most active advocates of multicultural, mixed-purpose neighborhoods and affordable living/play space, which has made Amsterdam a fascinating place for residents and visitors alike. In official tourist guides and websites, many sites that Amsterdam touts with great pride are the cultural venues that were once squats like the Balie, Paradiso, and Melkweg, etc. But if these cultural aspects are not constantly renewed with new atelier-spaces we will soon have one boring old rotten pumpkin with a facelift sitting on the Amstel [32]. 9. Covert Space Unlike concert halls, cinemas, video arcades, or sports, radio goes anywhere, everyday - flexible, nomadic, proletarian, wallpaper, subliminal. This is why I like it. It is neither here nor there. The precise location of its source remains undivulged / unimportant. Radio precedes your arrival and prepares your environment, rolling out a kind of aural carpet to create that ubiquitous, prescient, and subconscious soundtrack of life. Radio's everywhere - and, at the same time, 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 [33]. While commercial radio pins happy faces on the new nihilism that worms its ways into every clown's heart - the fear of depth 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. However, sometimes radio signals go awry, seep into an open, unfulfilled 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, 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, and water down 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 Creative radio is inevitably located in a nebulous grey [mattered] horse latitude at either end of the dial. Here the 'trade' winds die and one must toss one's payload overboard - all of radio's glossy surfaces and cliches - everything must go before you can reinvent radio [cable/web/ether]. This includes the notion that the natural law of the marketplace is natural at all and should be allowed to determine the destiny of our public airwaves. At this point, the notion seems to be that nothing is not for sale, including such ethereal real estate as DNA, the airwaves, intellectual property, sperm, public images, parks But can any of this conflation of praxis, aesthetic, and activism be called political? Why not? 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. Even if these ambitions are sometimes mere figments of someone's imaginary hopes they will continue to threaten to exist in the meaningful patterns found in noise. The local / autonomous / community station needs to maintain its local identity [FM signal] but simultaneously be made available to the global [real audio webcast]. One can only hope for more micro/local stations and more of them going webcast-global. They can serve as the mosquitoes on the elephant's back. Radio as intimate, enterprising, exuberant, and likely lo-fi. In my experience, these stations are as idealistic as reality allows them to be to remain functionally on-air - certainly a tricky frontier to negotiate.
Footnotes ......
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