Is There Really a Place on Radio for Experimentation?

[Clip from Wet Sounds 4 track]

My name is Vicki Bennett and I am an audiovisual collage artist. So by that I mean I use preexisting material or more precisely preexisting media to create new audio and visual compositions.

[Clip from Wet Sounds 4 track]

I've been publishing work under the name People Like Us since 1991, and the output has been across various platforms, records, CDs, radio shows, radio art, video, gallery shows and 360 degree audiovisual installations.

[Clip from We Don’t Know track]

I think it would be fair to say that radio was the first medium for public output for me, in 1990. I was living in Brighton on the south coast of England at the time, and I was self-unemployed. In other words, I was on government benefits and working out my “career” inverted commas, or lack of, at home on a very much local/DIY basis. I was part of a community of people around the world that would share mixtapes with each other. This was pre internet and pre high speed computing. And I was working with hifi based machines, such as tape deck, and record player but also inputting are the hifi like radio, and also the TV and videos. And I realised that what I was recording onto a cassette was more than the sum of the parts at which point, I thought perhaps this was something I could release.

[Clip from We Don’t Know track]

And around the same time, a radio station emerged in Brighton as part of the Brighton Festival, which is every month of May. And like many radio stations, they were looking for some people to fill up the overnight slots, which they filled with people who were making experimental radio and spoken word material. And I sent them a tape and immediately got a show, which was called Gobstopper. Also known as a “jawbreaker”. It's a sweet which you suck, and it keeps changing colours. In the end, you end up with a small piece of aniseed. And it all seems a little like you don't know what that journey was all about, or why you ended up with the aniseed in the middle.

[Clip from Guide to Broadcasting track]: “In the beggining things were pretty bad. So what happened was, somebody you couldn’t see came on — and (…) on the programme — and the sound was switched off, and somebody you couldn’t hear and could barely see, came on and sang a song…”

A year later, I then self-published a LP with some friends from Glasgow, Scotland, and that was a hundred copies. And that all came from, I guess, you know, the influence of Hip Hop. And Hip Hop in the UK was, I suppose things like the On-U Sound label, which was using samples and also experimental music people like Nurse With Wound.

[Clip from It Just Ain’t So (Slight Return) track]

Seeing that they were releasing things and people were buying it. And so those were the my main two roots.

[Clip from It Just Ain’t So (Slight Return) track]

At the same time, my main tool was a double cassette deck, which in the 1980s was very much a thing and it was called a MIDI hifi system. Not like the Musical Instrument Digital Interface“MIDI”, but just like something that does radio, cassette recording and record playing in a box, which teenagers had and so I had my teenage double cassette deck.
And I lived in an area in the mid 90s near Brighton, which was rural. And it had BBC local radio coming through terrestrial radio, which is... it was talk radio so it removed music from the equation and it used to pride itself in being "all talk all the time". But the problem with that is there wasn't anything to talk about a lot of the time. So you'd have this wonderful Cageian radio of people talking about nothing for a really long time. In the kitchen, I would just be recording. It was called Southern Counties Radio, BBC.
I'd be recording tapes and tapes of the radio without listening and then once I had a pile of them, I'd go through them and I'd make radio out of radio and make these cut ups of conversation. Um, one example would be a track I made called the Millennium Dome, where a listener called in and accidentally got put on the air. And I made the conversation into a new kind of repetition variation and spatial edit, which is kind of the way I taught myself composition.

[Clip from Millennium Dome piece]:
“Presenter (P): “Hello!”
Listener(L): “Hello!”
P: “Who’s that?”
L: “Pardon?”
P: “Who’s this?”
L: “Do I need to know that?”
P: “It would be helpful.”
L: “Pardon?”
P: “What’s your name?”
L: “Is it (…)? Right, it’s a… regarding a (…) guide.”
P: “A what?”
L: “I understand you are gonna put this information on file.”
P: “Rather the best thing for you to do, my darling.”
L: “Yeah.”
P: “On Monday.”
L: “Ohhhh.”
P: “9 to 5, call our reception.”
L: “Right.”
P: “Did you know what time of day it was on?”
L: “Pardon?”
P: “Did you listen to it?”
L: “Yes, yes…”
P: “Right… Was it a man or a woman talking about it?”
L: “It was definitely a man… two men, actually.”
P: “Two men?”
L: “Yeah… And in fact, what I wanted to talk about was the product that is going to be shown in the Millennium Dome.”
P: “The best thing to be done it is to ring on Monday.”
L: “Monday… Between what hours?”
P: “Between 9 to 5 our reception is open.”
L: “Yes…”
P: “Right? What’s your name?”
L: “It’s not about the programme that’s on the moment.”
P: “A what? Did you listen to it?”
L: “Do I need to know that?”
P: “It would be helpful.”
L: “Between what hours?”
P: “Between 9 to 5.”
L: “Okey.”
P: “And where are you calling from?”
L: “In the Millennium Dome.”
P: “Right. The best thing to be done it is to ring on Monday.”
L: “Yeah.”
P: “You are on the radio now within a phone-in.”
L: “Yeah, ok… I’ll come back to your programme now.”
P: “Yeah, you’ll tune it back on again.”
L: “Okey.”
P: “All the best, bye, bye.”»

And then that… the Dutch radio station VPRO were interested in my work, and I made a bunch of radio pieces for them around 1994. I continued to work this way and do also concerts and presentations around the world. And WFMU in New Jersey, Jersey City, across the water from Manhattan, we caught each other's attention in 1998. I'd just got an email, I received in that year, an email from Brian Turner, who was running the music department asking for People Like Us music. And I also heard from Kenny G. That's Kenneth Goldsmith who was curating an exhibition, I think, at the Whitney and it was of American artists. And he was asking me if I was American, because he wanted to include me and alas, I was not. And then, kind of everything changed, in 1999 and 2000 with the advent of high speed broadband, and affordable computing, which changed everything. The tape swapping network changed very quickly to the global network, faster than a fax machine.

On the back of that, more travel emerged, more networks and visits to people emerged. And including being asked to go on Kenny G's radio show on WFMU as a guest.

[Clip from I’ve Got You track]

We got on really well. And so I went back the following week, and we did a three year… we did a three... I was gonna say a three year mix, it kind of was, where we just played everything in the room at the same time and just pressed between them, pause, play, pause, play, the whole room just played itself, which any artist will know that that magic moment when you put your hands in the air and you, you no longer have a part you're just... what you really are is just some kind of portal for action.

[Clip from I’ve Got You track]

And so on the back of that I got offered a radio show called DO or DIY, which is a pun on, I don't know what it's a pun on... it's “do it yourself”. So DIY, but then do it or do it yourself. Anyway, there you go. I like puns. So I started a radio show called DO or DIY, whereas the aim was to mix avantgarde or hard to listen or unknown with pop, popular, to kind of not really too much to challenge genre, or taste, but yes, that... it's a John Cage kind of thing but also, I'd say a Buddhist thing to do with what's the essence of things and the essence of taste, the essence of personality. It's all… everything changes all the time. And we think we like this genre, and we don't like that. What kind of music do you like? Everything? None? You know. And I continue to do this radio show. It's the 20th anniversary of DO or DIY now.

[Clip from Dancing On Hot Coals track]

In terms of my working with creating radio pieces, I've made a few for German radio, I've made one called No One Is An Island for WDR in Germany, which is about the essence of ideas, about where they come from, how we use them, and how we give them away. What flows through all my work is that no one owns anything, that everything changes, and that we have no point where we end and something else begins. And in the context of this. I see ideas like air, we breathe it in, we use it and we give it out again. If we hold our breath, things don't go well. Not for anyone.

[Clip from No One Is An Island piece]:
«“No one is an island. Where do ideas come from? Are they our own or are we channelling some spark from a larger flame? In this programme, we examine the relationship between artists, writers, scientists and philosophers on the receiving, possession and transmission of ideas. Culture is a complex process of sharing and signification. Meanings are exchanged, adopted and adapted through acts of communication. The tools we use - the photocopier, camera, computer, encourage, in fact, insist upon the act of cutting, copying and pasting. It is second nature. Through memory and repetition, we learn.” “In the beginning, the beginning was the word, in beginning, the was the word…”»

So that analogy I'll put through everything. And that's my analogy of using collage. When you work with collage, you're cutting into things, and you're unpublishing them this concept of publishing and naming things and owning them is very convenient, but at the same time it shuts down the future. Much like closing down libraries. And also the idea of using preexisting material being different from using anything else as a palette is not true because we're all working with preexisting material. We're all working with the past but actually really we're all working with the present.

[Clip from No One Is An Island piece]:
«“(…) No withering, no death, no end of them.” “Originally we were nowhere. And now again, we are having the pleasure of being slowly nowhere. If anybody is sleeping, let him go to sleep.” “My mind is going. I can feel it…”»

Other works that I've made are, for WDR is a piece called I Can Fly. Where I basically crowdsourced through social media, mainly friends to self-record me their answers to specific questions, which I did for No One Is An Island as well, by the way. And the idea was that I asked people about real experiences where they flew in some way, and then dreams they had where they could fly and then mix them together.

[Clip from I Can Fly piece]:
«“In the future everything is about to change. That’s the thing about air travel, everything is about to change when you are in a plane because you are going somewhere else and this was stirring me very young, so I has from a very early age the sense that things can change, they will change, and aircraft is that occasioned that. But air travel… air travel…”
“Hello…”»

And at the moment, I just made a radio piece for Deutschlandradio called Changing Your Mind. And it's about people's meditation practice and existential answers to questions such as “what is consciousness?” And once again, the process of that was collecting other people's thoughts and experiences. And then I use mind maps, or apparently, they called Murder Boards as well, where you collect lots and lots of information. And I've been doing this since the beginning, I've been doing this since 1990, or before, where I collect large amounts of information, way too much for me to think about in my head, or anyone really think about in their heads. So I write it all down. And then I cut it all out, and I put it all over the floor. And then from that, I actually look at all these different ideas, and I start to join them all together as having different underlying and umbrella themes. And I use that to make the different areas that I'm going to be looking at. And I do that with video, I do that with making music. And I do that when making performances. And I do that with radio.

[Clip from Tweety Takes A Holiday track]

How do I see or think the radio of the future will be listened to? I think there's always this kind of preoccupation with technology and platforms. But really, underneath there's always the same concerns. As human beings. There's always the same zeitgeist, there's always the same questions, fears, anxieties, insecurities, which kind of changes, but it stays the same as well. And so it's gonna be just the same as before. But there might be different platforms. And hopefully, there'll be more platforms, which will mean that there'll be more access, but less focus, which is the same with everything, it's like, in the old days with the analogue, for instance, when you're making work, you've got your local and you've got a limitation of what you can access financially, etc. Whereas now you've got digital, you've got global, whereas the community might have changed, the localness changes, but access increases. But with that comes a lack of focus, and the need for discipline. So we've always got these kinds of dynamics going on between, with access, lack of access, community, and the size of the community, compared to the locality of the community. And those are always the dynamics going on I think.

[Clip from Awful fun Track 3]

Is There Really a Place on Radio for Experimentation?