Volume 9/Issue 3
Gregory Whitehead
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Let Us Lay on Splendid Nights
Wings of Eros, Birds of Prey
Gaston Bachelard, Radio Reverist
Way back in 1951, the philosopher Gaston Bachelard published an obscure little essay titled Radio and Reverie, a gentle manifesto that called for radio stations to hire creative radiomakers. These “psychic engineers” would venture forth into the logosphere and craft sublime soundscapes. Listeners would then experience deep reverie through acoustic immersion in nocturnal worlds of their own choice.
Bachelard writes: “Radio really does represent the total daily realization of the human psyche.” Thus the psychic engineer would enter into the daily flows of broadcast representation, to sound out and give voice to the prevailing spirit of the times, and to offer broadcasts that might bridge alienation while opening up an “axis of intimacy”. Through time, such sound bridges would serve to reconnect listeners, one by one, to the “power of the fantastic”.
Even though much of the rest of the essay becomes lost in somewhat misty ideas of archetypes and the unconscious, I love Bachelard’s conception of a psychic engineer because it implies a creative practice for radio that is as subtle and complex as the medium herself.
First, the idea stirs reflection upon the experience of Psyche, a mortal born with a beauty to rival that of Aphrodite. One day, she is carried away by Zephyr into a dark forest where, that same night, she will become the involuntary but not unwilling lover of Eros.
Aphrodite, wild with jealousy, attempts to put Psyche in her place by treating her as a lowly errand girl, and sending her on what Aphrodite hopes will be a terminal journey into the Underworld. Zeus eventually intervenes, and Psyche then joins that small group of humans who may take a place among the immortals, as wife to winged Eros. Psyche soon gives birth to a daughter, Voluptua, who is and does exactly as she sounds.
I sense the spirit of radio everywhere in Psyche’s story: in the capricious winds; in sparky frictions between erotic possession and the treacherous underworld; in the dull bass throb between mortality and eternity; in the time zone of Night, whose son is deadly Thanatos, who is himself the twin of Sleep; and in the birth of sensual delight, because the art of radio gives nothing, and sustains nothing, and creates nothing, unless it can deliver significant jolts of pleasure along the way. Psyche demands it!
Every Radiocast Cuts Both Ways
The word “engineer” in this context is equally as suggestive, as it descends from the Latin ingenium, a term that invokes both pure mental power and its pragmatic application to the world. Alas, the first engineers were more concerned with crushing heads than with stimulating the imagination. Their first engines were weapons such as ballistas and trebuchets, designed to launch hard and heavy projectiles into or over the walls of cities under siege.
Ancient Shock Jock
Sometimes, the invading army would hurl rotting corpses into the cities. These were intended to spread disease among the citizens, giving us an early and perversely ingenious incidence of biological warfare.
Radio would seem fully present in this image as well, since the illuminative promise of ingenuity mixes inside every wave with the power of oblivion. For every broadcast that heals wounds and creates community, there is another that foments violence and hatred as shock jocks lob rotting copses into the midst of their grunting mobs, not to infect them, but to feed their rage.
Anyone setting out to make something within the medium must be alert to these crosscurrents, for radiophonic space is as complex and contradictory as the human psyche; one twitch of the finger, and the radio of benevolent community mutates, or mutilates, into a radio of command, control and dispersion. How could it be otherwise, in a medium that gives voice to ubiquity, and a powerful pulse to thin air, vibrations that seem to resonate and replicate with the voices of the gods?
The primal potency of such air born resonance has not been lost on those who fabricate ever more ingenious engines of destruction in the present. Sound waves have been weaponized in a variety of forms, each designed to mess with the psyches of designated adversaries, and eventually to debone them, in every sense of the joint.
One might well imagine an ultimate weapon in the final stages of development in some dark corner of the Pentagon — code name: Joshua. When the word “glory” is transmitted at the proper infrasonic frequencies by the weapon Joshua, a simulacrum of the Voice of God (VOG) explodes onto the battlefield. Exposed psyches collapse into the sucking black hole created by deep vibrations, and the bones of warriors and citizens alike are instantly transformed into jelly.
Sad Songs From Severed Heads
What about casting Orpheus as the prototype for a radiophonic psychic engineer? Orpheus, whose voice and lyre, an ancient acoustic engine invented by Hermes, could reshape the landscape by changing the course of rivers, and by luring trees and stones into nocturnal dances. Even the hardened hearts of the immortals were moved by his song.
Like Psyche, Orpheus survived his journeys through the Underworld, protected, it seems, by the resplendent tonal quality of his resonating chambers. As companion to Jason and the Argonauts, Orpheus served as a sort of sound cancellation machine, neutralizing the dangerous transmissions from the island of the Sirens, who, like so many radios, promised wisdom and delivered oblivion.
Psychic Engineer in Hot Water
Later, Orpheus, his own psyche severely damaged by the loss of his beloved Eurydice, refuses to sing in praise of Dionysus. During the frenzied climax of a Bacchic ritual, a Thracian girl gang known as The Maenads tear off his head, and toss it in the river, together with his lyre.
The head continues to sing as it floats down river to the island of Lesbos, where it was pulled from the water by another girl gang, The Nymphs. They place the head at the center of a shrine, where I would like to imagine it still sings, at least when the wind is right.
A few years ago, with Orpheus in mind, I imagined and then documented an exclusive social club in New England, founded during a Gilded Age previous to the one that has recently imploded. In the course of excavating for the club house, workmen had unearthed two buried Mohawk skulls. During the summer season, these skulls, given the nonsense nicknames “Mahkenoose” and “Pompynoose”, were placed upon the end stakes of the croquet court, a macabre trophy tradition that was then passed down from one generation to the next.
When players strike the stakes with their balls, they shout out the names of the two skulls, to the great amusement of those watching from the veranda. When such sounds float through the late summer evenings of this elegant nihilism, my psyche longs for Orphic narcosis.
Why American Noir Is So Fantastic
In 1962, when nobody except his own parents had ever heard of Jean Baudrillard, Daniel Boorstin, who would later become head librarian for the Library of Congress, and could never be mistaken for a fashionable theorist of the simulacrum, wrote that “the American lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality, where the image has more dignity than its original. We hardly dare face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly iridescent, the solace of belief in the contrived reality is so thoroughly real.”
Not Jean Baudrillard
I have inhabited the Grand American Delusion for my entire life: a country where evidence is routinely fabricated to justify grave and frequently lethal actions by corporations and governments; where private and public securities are exposed as elaborate Ponzi schemes; where public discourse and reportage become ever more subordinate to entertainment and obfuscation; where everybody is a star in their very own reality TV show; and where any idea of transparency begins to sound quaint, which was, as you recall, the same word used by a former United States Attorney General, regarding the provisions of the Geneva Convention as they pertain to prisoners of war.
The fact is, in order to build our perpetually shining City On A Hill, we have created one bewildering blood bath after another, with the killing invariably executed in the name of God, for we are nothing if not righteous. That is our psychic core. What sort of radio casts forth from such a dark idealism? And what sort of radio casts forth when events force us, without warning, to face our bewilderment?
Consider the case of world famous hedge fund manager Sir Harry Hammersmith. In the summer of 2007, he announces a legacy gift of one billion dollars to his Alma Mater, an elite private college south of Boston called Plymouth Mather. He plans to deliver the fabulous gift in person, arriving by parachute to land at the dead center of the college quad.
Local dignitaries and the global media gather at the appointed hour. Harry does indeed fall from the sky, but there are a few little glitches: he has no parachute; he is stark naked; and he has no head. Within minutes of his body striking the turf, global markets crash, and the world plummets into the Greatest Depression. In this scenario, “pleasant iridescence” becomes terribly hard to come by, as you can hear in the voice of the Plymouth Mather president, Dr. Walter Woodworthy.
Night Birds Know How to Hunt
Come Fly With Me
Returning to Bachelardian reverie, my favorite passage in the essay proposes “that if our psychic radio engineers are poets concerned for the welfare of humankind, tenderness of heart, the joy of loving, and love’s voluptuous trust, then they will lay on splendid nights for their listeners.”
Possibly I am so attracted to this idea because I first fell in love with radio during late solitary nights as a twelve year old boy, with a cheap transistor under my pillow and the great Allison Steele, the Night Bird, on the air. It could be that I was still unaware of the beauty of the medium and was simply in love with her voice, and her irresistible invitation, “come fly with me”. The Night Bird, whose splendid flights of fancy, delivered with cool precision along an axis of intimacy, provided welcome adventures for my adolescent ears.
In 2003, partially in homage to my first encounters with a quietly seductive disembody, I imagined a young psychic engineer from New England. She spends time as an intern at WGBH, but soon becomes frustrated by the byzantine rules of a game she neither anticipated nor wanted to play. So she packs her bags and heads out west, where she starts a one person low power pirate station called WDOA, in the naked state of Nevada, the W and her pronunciation of “Nevada” emblems of her stubbornly rhizomatic New England roots.
Flight Path of the Hungry Raven
Her name is Ava Ravenella, The Hungry Raven, live to air on WDOA: Dead On Arrival, Deserts Of America, Degenerate Or Artful? The choice is yours along Route Five Zero, as Ava flies into the tense borderlands of the American psyche, over and out into the desert night, a flight that swoops down into the final verse of The Loneliest Road theme song, as performed by The Books, who are themselves remarkable psychic engineers:
A Hungry Raven in the sky
an injured rabbit, slow to die
Bones piled in the sun
America has all the fun
Note on sources:
The Bachelard essay is included in his book, The Right to Dream. For more about the power of the fantastic, find a copy of the extraordinary little book by Allen S. Weiss, Phantasmic Radio. The audio excerpts are from Bring Me The Head of Philip K. Dick (2009); Project Jericho (2005), produced in collaboration with Mark Burman; The Club (2006); The Day King Hammer Fell From the Sky (2008);The Loneliest Road (2003).
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when the shepherd Aristaeus wondered why his bees were suffering, he went to his Nymph mother, who told him he needed to wrestle Proteus, who in turn told him the story of Orpheus, whose end was precipitated by his nymph mother, at which point he was told to propitiate Orpheus with a dead bull carcass out of which bees spontaneously regenerated . . . a plan for the regeneration of radio??? or the state of the art.
Joe
Jay, thank you for that intro, and very nice to be here, across the Transom.
I would say that I have never been more ENcouraged by the medium, as it exists in various undertones and sub strata, though it is true, I am also DIScouraged by most of what I hear on mainstream airwaves, including those which remain nominally "public".
I used to think the absence of cultural ambition reflected a crisis of politics trumping poetics, but I’ve come to hear it as a plain vanilla crisis of the imagination, and inside them apples, as a crisis of philosophy.
So forgive me the scary P word — but we need to talk about it. And we can also talk about directing voices, or why there is so little space for radio plays in the USA, or about the relationship between music and stories (that’s an Orpheus question).
Or even what happens to the whole notion of "public" when everything goes digital? Do we want to let this happen?
From Third Coast, to Resonance FM, to Megapolis, to Deep Wireless to La Radia, to Radiophonic Creation Day, to Acousmatic Theater and on and on:
I know there is abundant energy out there to create something new, whether a new sort of network, or a new sort of radio vibe, and if it takes a bull’s carcass to get there, so be(e) it!
GW
Hi Gregory,
I’ve worried for a long time about the lack of room in public radio for creative work. You hear little things here and there every once in a while. But overall it appears that public radio exists in a very restricted space, with restrictive rules, and with a certain attitude (not a good one) towards those who don’t understand or get (or want to get) those guidelines.
But then there is the question of… why even think of public radio as a place where creative radio should happen?
That’s one question… but I have another one for you:
How do you find the energy and inspiration to keep creating in such a hostile environment?
GW, I think (hope) we all can see the value in someone creating these longer-form theatrical radio productions with some heft, but what is the best way to absorb them? Long gone are the days of the family sitting around a radio on a cold, dark night, hanging on every last word and sound effect until the however bitter climax, in lieu of disparate visual media (tv, movies, videogames) and a general lack of communal ‘ingestion’ in a public setting — does the listening habits of the modern world, and WHO you think is listening, affect the way you construct a radio play?
The question seems in part to be one of scale and resources. Experimental radio is definitely alive and well, esp. here in Canada on independent radio stations that are volunteer-run. But this same state of (relative) radiophonic freedom also comes with the need to scramble for gear, only use volunteer labour, etc. It can and is done, but people tend to move on to other pursuits, rather than being able to earn even an honorarium that will allow them to hone their show or their long-form pieces.
Even though I tend to champion the small-scale, there is also something meaningful about broadcast in the broad sense–that is, radio heard across a lot of geography. It’s a way for different ears to hear something, to share as listeners in something. Micro-scenes tend to be peopled by those of like mind, so I do appreciate that radio, for instance late night national public radio, has the possibility to be both as experimental and diverse as its many unknown listeners. I like that I spent some formative years listening to Brave New Waves on CBC overnight radio, and then later met a lot of different people who stayed up late for the same show. Sharing stories isn’t just about telling them, it is (as Justin points out) about gathering to listen.
Now if public radio programming would just stop being driven by ratings and the lack of imagination that the government appointees bring to the table (that’s our dilemma up here)…
Miguel,
I can say that there are plenty of *listeners* out there who are very hungry for new sorts of radio play (whether docs or fiction, or hybrids), and their response is usually enough to keep me going. Plus, I guess I’m just plain stubborn in my passion for the pure beauty of la radia, even when she’s dragged into the trenches.
Good collaborators help, too (people like Mark Burman, The Books, and my remarkable ensemble of actors, who have taken radio voicing into entirely fresh territory).
The tightness in the system is just a symptom of the more general crisis of American imagination, psyche, spirit. There are two possible resolutions: increased tightness to the point of suffocation or a rejuvenated spirit of open experimentation and renewal.
What sorts of attitudes have you witnessed, in response to proposals for more creativity?
When I give master classes, I encounter all sorts of talent (conceptual, acoustic, literary) from young potential audio artists or radiomakers, but sadly, they generally end up doing something else within a year or two, because there is no place for them to go. (Web audio is beginning to change that, but it will take time to incubate a new kind of network, and also to address issues of providing adequate payment for high quality work.)
It would be so incredibly easy for every public radio station in the country to offer the position of an artist-in-residency, or "resident psychic engineer", whose sole purpose would be to push and cross boundaries, and to offer moments of radiophonic invention, humor and pleasure.
It would not be an expensive project, certainly not in proportion to the bloated salaries of management. I would be very happy to help define such a role, and in recruiting, and giving guidance. Any takers out there?
Anna,
I love the micro radio scene north of the boarder, and pirates everywhere, as you know. But as you say, it is hard to sustain such work — and even the most talented night birds tend to move on.
(I thank Psyche and Eros that you are still in the mix!)
Toronto events like Deep Wireless and Radio Without Boundaries have been so essential in keeping creative juices flowing, and are another source of inspiration themselves, providing a welcoming chance to listen, and to hear some sort of future.
I do believe that large organizations, through their sheer complexity, get to a point where any sort of difference, or polyphony or creativity is actually punished. Then consultants are hired to tell everyone how to keep creativity alive — but it is cutting against the grain. Thus ambitious and politically skilled people are rewarded, and talented loners (essential to any culture) are in way or another exiled, fired, or they simply drop out on their own, and retreat to their cabins in the wild wood.
GW
Hello Gregory and everyone at Transom,
I’m enjoying the discussion, and of course, I enjoyed the manifesto that started the discussion. Gregory Whitehead is one of those muses for me that made the idea of Deep Wireless not just conceivable, but necessary.
The creative restrictions on commercial and public radio in Canada (which are just has bad as they are down in the states) have meant that the actual radio output of Deep Wireless has never been to the scale or proportion that it should be when you compare it to the performance and conference output of Deep Wireless.
With the move last November for New Adventures In Sound Art into the Artscape-Wychwood Barns we have the opportunity to reverse those proportions. Our new space provides that much needed physical space for radio to happen – despite the virtual nature of radio there still needs to be a physical infrastructure in place for it to survive.
This May at Deep Wireless we are planning a 28 day period of broadcasting both on the internet and on the FM airwaves. The latter is still pending approval for a temporary license to broadcast within a 5 mile radius, which will arrive unfortunately shortly before we go to air. The necessity to acquire this license is born not just from the limited access to commercial and public airwaves in Toronto, but from the recent crumbling of the city’s progressive community radio scene.
The radio station we are establishing is called NAISA Radio and will include programming that reflects the local community around our new home. But it will also provide a place on the airwaves for the mounds of radio art that has been submitted to us over the years that we have not been able to adequately support with actual airplay. Instead in the past we have had to transpose radio art works to performance and installation contexts and this experiment has been a fruitful and enjoyable ride since 2002. But, radio is radio and there is a special kind of relationship that happens in a radio context between artist/creator and listener that can not be re-created elsewhere.
NAISA Radio will for the short term fall on the heels of those dedicated volunteers that make experimental radio a reality in Canada – as Anna Friz described in her posting. But, there will be a paid infrastructure there to support it. Beyond the 28 day license, we expect that NAISA Radio will continue on the internet and dovetail with other NAISA events such as Sound Travels, SOUNDplay and Art’s Birthday, so hence the name NAISA Radio rather than any direct references to Deep Wireless.
We are very grateful for the support from Transom, Gregory, PRX, Third Coast, and many of our friends down in the States. Your enthusiasm and support for Deep Wireless means a lot to us – like all Canadians support from abroad always helps to keep the fires burning on the dark cold nights of winter-time grant writing.
Cheers
Darren Copeland
Artistic Director
New Adventures in Sound Art,
presenters of the Deep Wireless Festival of Radio and Transmission Art
www.deepwireless.ca
www.naisa.ca/