Tulips & Radio History

… it’s nothing short of daft that a superabundance of radio-driven experiments in audio fiction and composed non-fiction is being disappeared in my own adopted country in a neo-liberal inspired narrowing of the ‘listener offer’ …

—Sherre DeLys

Why bring radio history into debates around new audio?
Neil Verma
 
Recently, audiobook powerhouse Audible–long dabbling in science fiction franchises and thriller drama–announced 5 million in commissions for new one- or two-person audio scripts to be judged by a group of famous playwrights, stage directors and actors like Lynn Nottage, Trip Cullman and Annette Bening. I have three observations about this development.
 
First, a competition like this undermines radio art as a precursor to audio fiction. From what I can tell, with the exception of Tom Stoppard, none of the judging panel dramatists has long experience in radio; in this way, the structure of the competition is a disavowal of broadcasting. Is that so terrible? Audio fiction’s well-known habit of forgetting its own roots is dismaying for scholars, but I’ve argued in RadioDoc Review that as an artistic precondition this forgetfulness is also a source of energy. To cure audio fiction’s amnesia is to remove what has historically been a generous naivete, and that’s not something to undertake lightly.
 
Second, Audible needs directors more than writers. Poor direction plagues the medium, while effective work goes unnoticed. That’s always been the case. In 1940 legendary director Earle McGill put it this way “If Max Reinhardt should be working in Studio 3 and across the way in Studio 4 Gordon Craig or Komisarjevsky were whipping up some four dimensional radio treat, countless die-hards in the trade would refer to them–if they were aware of them at all–as production men and not as directors.”
 
Finally: be wary of borrowing from the stage. Outreach to theater has happened before. CBS did it in the 1930s, drawing on luminaries of New York theater to help it become the “Tiffany” network by offering middle-brow audio fiction. After a decade, many considered the use of theater technique on the radio an error.

In his 1947 Handbook of Radio Writing, for instance, radio writer Eric Barnouw advocated techniques drawn from novels and music rather than from theater, which he called merely radio’s “foster parent.” Contrast his view with that of Trip Cullman, one of the Audible judges, who comments that the chasm between theater and audio fiction “is not so wide.”
 
But why not let it be wide? Let it be vast. Let audio fiction be radically other, let it be impossible to stage. As I’ve written elsewhere, podcasting needs to be twice as weird as it is now if it is going to be nearly as weird as radio is all the time.
 
Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy about Audible and I’m excited to hear what it produces in this project. But if history is any guide, and it took a flirtation with and eventual abandonment of theater technique in order to find a true “radio technique” in the last century, then today we should be even more interested to hear what’s too non-theatrical to even compete in a contest like this.
 
As audio fiction grows, in other words, keep an ear out for what’s inaudible to Audible.

* Illustration for “The Soul,” 1705 English edition, Orbis Sensualium Pictus

After all, it had only been a few years earlier …
Sherre DeLys

Sure, I was shocked when, near the beginning of the ‘renaissance of narrative radio’, no keen young American radio producer I asked had heard of New American Radio. After all, it had only been a few years earlier that NAR was ‘the key place for artists in American radio.’ I’d assumed they’d know NAR because its producers Helen Thorington and Regine Beyer were part of the same networks that linked me and my colleagues at The Listening Room (1988-2003, Australian Broadcasting Corporation) with writers, musicians, sound sculptors and sound poets, tape collagists and radio remixers, filmmakers, dramatists, auteur documentarists and experimental feature makers, environmental sound recordists, video, online, transmission, performance and installation artists, pirates and other provocateurs the world over—through our shared interest in radio as a creative medium.

But this culture of forgetting isn’t unique to the U.S. At a presentation to indie radio and podcaster types in London a few years back I decided to play works by Barry Bermange when a straw poll revealed the British radio experimentalist’s name didn’t ring many bells. And it’s nothing short of daft that the unruly close cousins of today’s inspired experiments in podcast and radio, namely a stunning array of radio-driven experiments in audio fiction and composed non-fiction, is being disappeared in my own adopted country in a neo-liberal inspired narrowing of the ‘listener offer.’

But we should remember that the collapse of the market for tulips in Holland in 1637 didn’t diminish Dutch flower painting, in which roses, forget-me-nots, honeysuckles, narcissi, iris, lilies-of- the-valley, cyclamens, violets, hyacinths, marigolds, chrysanthemums, poppies and even pineapples hung out together improbably, along with the greatly admired and numerous species of tulips, in extravagant orchestrations, to create outrageous sprays of colour.

The cautionary tale of Tulip Mania is only glibly transferable, but in our own frenzied times it’s worth thinking about the role of audio visionaries whose speculative bubbles are of a completely different kind. Those that inspire me have skin in the game, yes. But the game is the art, with its audacious and hybrid histories. Through their strange writings and art they teach that if we make our most daring and personal work, people will learn how to hear it.

Radio has become a small club that only looks at itself.
Olivia Bradley-Skill

We should talk about how radio can become a breathing, creative enterprise again, rather than a blind regurgitation of a limited perspective on culture. The kind of discussion that most radio practitioners are having today is too practical and too focused on industry. Radio and podcasts need to lose their professional veneer. Even college radio is slowly getting consumed by music promotion companies, the commercial radio sphere, and public radio formats. Increasingly, students are encouraged to market themselves and think of radio as a professional step. The creative and “alternative” forces that have historically existed within college radio are getting pounded out.

As a result of these forces, radio has become connected with consumption, not creativity. Radio has become a platform to sell music and pitch news. DJs and producers are mostly curators, for lack of better term, but not artistic practitioners themselves.

Where’s the ingenuity?

I like to think that I am pushing boundaries. I produce radio at a community station that mostly focuses on music. My show blends music with narrative, dialogue, and extraneous noises; there’s a lot of layering. I think that this approach proves how intimate and strangely alluring the human voice can be, as well as how cinematic radio can be. My show is also largely improvised, and often becomes as surprising to me as it might be to listeners. I think this spontaneity and surprise, the ways in which my experimentations figure themselves out as we go along, are also a refreshing take to today’s radio. Most radio has been reduced to a talk-show format, when it can actually be much more vaporous and ambiguous.

Negativland’s Over The Edge was a huge revelation for me in learning how radio could sound. I must admit that without listening to their program, I wouldn’t have been able to fully formulate how music, dialogue, and other distinct textures could bounce off one another all at once, without academic pretension. In that sense, more transparent and accessible canons are necessary in providing models that budding radio artists can wrap their brains around, study, and circumvent.

Voices like Gregory Whitehead, Alan Weiss, Delia Derbyshire, Hildegard Westerkamp, the Tellus series, Ubuweb.com, etc., have been fundamental to expanding my mind and practice. I still go back to their works (audio and written), further uncovering new meaning and new understanding each time.

Furthermore, experimental film documentaries, film theory, film criticism, and general art history have also served as an important anchor in my development. Chris Marker, Michel Chion, among others, have been particularly useful. Radio has a lot to learn from other fields. It would be a disservice to the medium (and its myriad possibilities) to only engage a canon directly related to “sound” and “radio.” For example, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man is extremely sonically rich and it’s incredibly interesting to analyze it from that angle. Ellison himself is a wonderful writer on music, which unveils a great deal about how we listen and how we can discuss listening.

Sound is omnidirectional. It also exists in the internal as much as it does externally (you know those voices always bumping around in our heads?). We’re always balancing the narrative in our head with the multitude of sounds around us (whether these sounds are songs, voices, industrial clangs, etc). Radio can be a perfect vessel to explore our relationships through sounds.

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