Is There Really a Place on Radio for Experimentation?

[Most celebrities came in the course of many years to develop illegible handwriting. I see that with nearly everybody. Marilyn Monroe, for instance, began by printing her letters very neatly and wound up by developing a script that is extraordinarily difficult to read. And the same is true of Judy Garland, who started out with a beautiful, legible handwriting and wound up with the most vicious scrawl that I think I've ever seen. It just is almost impossible to make out anything.

Gosh. To think what has come from this dreary piece of stone.]

Gregory Whitehead: Gregory Whitehead here in my studio, a relatively easy walk to the Tanglewood of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Tanglewood Tales. And a few miles walking more would bring me to the little farmhouse where Herman Melville wrote Moby Dick. So, there are literary ghosts in the ether of Lenox, Massachusetts. And, my studio, I don't know, I'm looking around… several generations of recording technology: phonographs, needle-based sonic release, all kinds of cassette recorders in various stages of disintegration... lots of musical instruments, guitars, saxophones, a pocket trumpet, concertina, flutes, toy piano, other toy instruments, a brass megaphone, walkie talkies, various electronic junk…

A, shall we say, hybrid environment. Not exclusively centred on software and an environment that requires me to move around, which I think engaging the body, engaging kinetics and kinetic motion is extremely important for making a vibrant, vital kind of experience for listeners. So, I don't feel restrained in any way in the studio.

And I think the hybrid nature of my radio-making environment reflects also the hybrid nature of my practice, which draws, of course, from experimentation with voice and with voices, perhaps at the heart, but drawing also from puppet theatre, from toy theatre, from dance theatre, from jazz.

My early experience as a jazz musician and as an improviser for sure enters into the play. Text, sound, poetry, and yeah, as a voice performer as well, and as a singer since the age of eight, as a boy soprano. So, all of that, I think, comes into play in this studio and in my radio practice.

You take the ability to talk for granted, don't you? And why shouldn't you? You talk every day of your life and you don't think much about it. But did you realise that millions of people suffer from voice problems? These millions can't take talking for granted. For them to talk is a struggle.

[Do you have a voice like, do you have a voice like, do you have a voice like… Mine?]

GW: My first production studio was just two battered old Superscope tape recorders and cassette recorders that I would just really, essentially, just bounce tracks back and forth and also adding live voice, different layers of live voicing, and experimenting with that kind of multiphonic, entropic, disintegrating quality that you could get. The voice in relationship to multiple generations of replaying those recorded voices back into space. So you'd have that “I am sitting in a room” kind of entropy. But you also had just the entropy of the fact that it was a very low-tech technology. So, the tape would sometimes be literally decaying as I played it over and over dozens of times.

So, that was one aspect. And then with quarter-inch tape in the… this is in the early 1980s in New York City and started the discovery of working with quarter-inch tape, which was revolutionary for me, in the sense that it allowed the exploration of the cut, of a more precise cut and the energy in the cut, the kinetic energy, the philosophical energy, the musical energy that was possible now with more precise cutting of pieces of tape and cutting into the voice, mostly my own voice, but also working with dancers and choreographers and really trying to think of that dense relationship between the writing of the body and then this kind of writing of the voice that was possible through this electroacoustic montage and these kind of skits.

What I thought of as the schizophonic text… “schizophonia” the word invented by R. Murray Schafer. Our idea of schizophonia was very much related to the razor cut and the kind of… it was creative and yet there was also something violent about it. And so the tension between the creativity and the violence was… we were certainly very conscious of that.

[Do you have a voice like, do you want a voice like mine?]

GW: So, I think those two experiences, kind of pre-radiophonic experiences, one of kind of multi-generational entropy and the kind of interference that happened when just bouncing tracks back and forth. And then the experience of quarter-inch tape and that just kind of set the stage really for early radio experiments and, you know, I started thinking very early on about the twin infinities.

The infinity of the voice and its complexity, its depth, its kind of endless possibility. Just the ambiguity, the surprise, the mystery of the voice, of the human voice. And in a lot of, in those early pieces, I was very often working with just my voice. It was almost too dangerous to work with other voices.

And yet here was radio space, which had a lot of those same qualities, the same complexity, the same depth, and also that same combination of creativity and violence. We know about the radio that brings communities together, that brings people together, and yet there is also that side of radio that obliterates community and drives people apart through hate speech or through the delivery of weapon systems.

So that tension between the erotic side (Eros and Thanatos), the pulse, the kind of death pulse of radio, those twin pulses. And those pulses are also present, I believe, in the human voice with deep, deep roots in evolutionary biology, where the voice was called upon to be used in extremely different ways, given just the survival needs.

[What's your name? Tina. Little Tina, please scream for us.]

GW: And evolved accordingly. So, we have the capacity within our voice to do both terrifying things and also very gentle and very healing, actually deeply healing things with our voice. And all of this was… there was tremendous excitement in New York around radio, among a small group really, but Susan Stone and I started a series called “Radio Schizophonia”.

[The ostensible purpose of my lecture demonstration Principia Schizophonica is to explore in some detail both the expressive or artistic and the philosophical implications of the expanding cultural predominance of communications technologies and electronic media.]

GW: Where a lot of this started to come into play and… sometimes we would just get overwhelmed just with the sense of possibility and kind of the excitement of discovering this extremely public space in which all kinds of rather private things were possible. So, and that tension between public and private, between publicity and intimacy, was also something that attracted me, very strongly, in those early days.

[Remain in the body. In the human corpus. The speech apparatus becomes materially attached, distended.]

GW: So, that sets the stage for Dead Letters. I started working on Dead Letters in 1984.

[My ambition is to memorise the entire Iliad. As far as I have been able to ascertain, no one individual has ever recited the entire Iliad. There is one reference in ancient Greek literature in Xenophon's Symposium; Xenophon mentions a man by the name of Nikeratos who, at a dinner party, stated that he could recite by heart the entire Iliad and the Odyssey.

There is no proof, however, no indication, that he actually did so. The length of the Iliad is 15,600…]

GW: In a sense, it's an intervention, really, in public radio space. So much of what I was hearing on public radio, public broadcasting, in particular in the United States at the time, was a kind of words and music that was incredibly predictable. And it was very producer-driven or journalist-driven in terms of making a particular… arriving at a particular conclusion or destination, assembling facts to create a certain kind of linear story that only had one interpretation to it.

And in case you missed it, as a listener there was the host who could underscore what you were about to listen to, or what you had just listened to. And it just was all from a, I don't know, from an aesthetic point of view it was very one dimensional and from the experiential point of view as a listener it was very, actually, rather numbing. And it just struck me as so contrary to the spirit of the medium itself, which is capable of so much vibrancy and mystery and surprise.

[I am entertained...]

GW: Dead Letters begins in the “Dead Letter Office”. I actually went into the “Dead Letter Office” in New York City and spoke for several hours with the artisans — I thought of them as artisans of the indecipherable trying to figure out how to deliver mail which was considered by the delivery people to be undeliverable.

And there was actually a designation that would be stamped on that mail called “The Finger”, and the language within the “Dead Letter Office” was, “well that's ‘a nixie’”, they call it. There’s no way that can be deciphered. That was considered to be undeliverable.

And so I thought of the “Dead Letter Office” as a kind of warehouse of undelivered feeling, and these artisans of the indecipherable were there to try to find a way to bring that communication to the intended recipient, which I thought was, you know, kind of a beautiful calling, a beautiful craft, really.

And their passion, the intensity of their commitment, was very moving for me. So that was where it began. And then from there really just following my… just intuitively working not as a journalist, but really trying to work poetically. I've always believed in radio space as a space of free association, as a space of poetic navigation.

So, you're navigating not in the linear way, dot to dot, but you’re kind of navigating by your wits and by your intuition. So I wanted to replicate that.

[You have raised a very provocative question, because in the case of Judy Garland, we saw a marked failing and the beauty of her voice as she grew older. By the time she was ready to die, how old was she, 44, 45? Her voice was almost totally gone and so was her handwriting; it degenerated together with the voice.]

So just when things would resonate, I would come across, for example, a small little article in The New York Times reporting about an individual who was trying to memorise the Iliad, all 24 books of the Iliad in ancient Greek. And then the idea was having memorised all of that, an impossible task as it turns out, he was then going to perform it publicly.

And then so there was that. There was a palaeontologist that I spoke to about trying to imagine what the voices of dinosaurs were, knowing that the larynx being soft tissue there's no… we don't know what dinosaurs sounded like, so. But I invited him to speculate, an expert, a performance studies expert, on the voice of Judy Garland and, speculating about where that voice is now.

[I feel as long as I have become a part of it, I have tasted immortality.]

A film-maker, actually, who had lost two fingers in a horrific accident and just inviting her to talk, to reflect, on the fate of those fingers and also her experience of the fingers, which were for a while in her own refrigerator, her family's refrigerator.

[Of course, I did experience what people always say about amputations. The lingering sensation of the end of the finger, and, I mean, sometimes really irritating, an itch. You know, this sensation of wanting to itch my fingers and not being able to and having to rub it somewhere else and not being satisfied. This ghost of fingers, hovering.]

GW: You think you were listening to some kind of documentary that you just couldn't…  and then, the other aspect being really understanding the reality of how most listeners listen to the radio, which is often when they're doing something else or they're driving or they're cleaning up the kitchen or something else and not necessarily listening from start to finish.

So also, really, thinking a lot about circular structures in a musical way. So, there are three acts like an opera, really. There's act one, act two and act three, and within each act you kind of, in a sense, have all the themes of the whole piece present. So, there are those cycles, but even minute to minute there's a lot of returning.

There's a lot of… there are a lot of openings into the piece. So, you don't have to… there's no requirement that you tune in at exactly a particular time, which is not really the reality of radio listening.

[Our voice, it will pass it to us that little bullseye exudate approach to the estate. Take note of Santa's utter taste in action.]

[That's what you have to do. You have to imagine. And we get something from, what I call cookie mail, that writes all ways on the envelope from one pen, down and back and to the side. And this guy puts stamps on it, this guy puts a lot of stamps on it; he's demanding something, and it's all there. But you can't decipher his handwriting. We started putting stamps on it. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah. Oh, yes. I sent a letter to him. I send it, I send my mail right up here to the “Dead Letter Office”. I couldn't decipher it. And one day he wrote a little bit legible, and I said, I know that, it’s San Francisco, that's where he's coming from. So, every time I see that special thing, I put S.F.]

[That is the “kill”. We have to return this to a carrier for a kill. What we call a kill is, I don't know if you've ever seen it. Do we have any instances of the finger? Now these are letters. I just grab one by random where we have something that does not make sense… 250 west 5A.]

GW: Then there's the voice of the wound, the voice of the cut, which periodically, in the middle of a cut… At the time, that was absolutely on public radio, the aesthetic was one of seamlessness, right. To make everything seem as if no one was editing, there was no such thing as an edit, everything was intrinsically perfect somehow. And of course that's not the reality of radio-making. It's not the reality, it's not any kind of reality. It's not the reality of the human voice, of human thinking or anything, the human body. So, I wanted to give voice to the wound, to give voice to the cut.

And so periodically there are little vocal explosions or leakings, leakages, I guess. So, it's a piece of slips and leakages and circles and invitations but always with an open itinerary. So, every listening… every time I listen to it I certainly have a completely different experience.

And that was my aspiration, I think, for listeners to find their own way to put the puzzle. There's one character who actually says, well, in this jigsaw puzzle, we don't, you know, there are 4 or 5 pieces. We don't know where they fit.

[I suppose they were a monument for this event, which was a real tragedy in my family, not from my point of view, but from my family's point of view. It was a tragedy, and the loss of those fingers, a real death in the family. And those fake fingers kind of kept the memory of that tragedy alive.]

Loci is the plural of the Latin word locus, meaning place. And apparently this started with the Greek poet Simonides in the fifth century before Christ. Simonides was at a drinking party one night, and he left before the other guests, just before the roof fell in and the other guests were all killed. But Simonides had remembered the places at which the guests were seated and by that means he was able to identify the location of the different bodies so that they could identify them.]

GW: As for how the radio of the future will be listened to, well the trend towards basically phasing out, in some cases, broadcast and replacing it just with internet-based digital streaming to me is; it just completely destroys the poetic and aesthetic quality of radiophonic space. So, obviously there's no such thing as internet radio because they're very different spaces, the internet being a space of surveillance, ultimately.

And so podcast space, and this kind of trying to refigure radio, as, I don't know, as a series of downloadable podcasts or something. That kind of modular, hyper commodified future to me is very dystopic, but fortunately I know for a fact that artists are constantly discovering the possibilities of radio space.

And maybe the future will be… maybe broadcast will be all… it will just be a series of low-power pirate radios or artists, just single artists trying to drift out, finding ears one by one in a world which has been flattened by the simultaneity of environmental crisis and aesthetic flattening — the richness and the idiosyncrasy and the individuality and the vibrancy, the multiplicity, the heterogeneity…

All of this we risk losing, I think, in this particular media landscape and I think artists, producers, editors, we all have to have more courage to fight for the spaces that actually are more artistically rich and therefore more culturally valuable. The space itself has a cultural value that we need to protect and fully aware that it also has this other side, the side of the shock jock, the side of the weapons system, the side of delivering commands and all that… I understand that, for sure.

But there is this extraordinary power that is fully present and vibrant within radiophonic space at any time. And the capacity to bring buried truths, deeper truths that have been very deeply buried can come bubbling up to the surface in this strange space that I call the big sloppy… this electromagnetic swampland, this fog.

This very wet, goopy, gooey space of radio, which I think is worth fighting for. And I do believe that it will be present in the future for those willing to… maybe everyone will have to make their own little radios to be able to tune in, whatever the artists are sending out for contemplation and as invitations for thoughts and feelings with uncertain, unstable and unexpected outcomes.

[Close your eyes. And wait for the brain. To cook. You are my inspiration. Yes, you. You are my inspiration. Yes, you.]