What some might see as an anachronistic medium and technology represents for others a space for alternative and radical creative infrastructures, set apart from many of the frames and constraints of commercial and online media spaces.

Understood as a vast and expansive field, these four articles are a reflection of our personal encounters with radio as practised by its artists, eccentrics and accidental innovators. In this instalment we focus on radiophonic fabulism, exploring experimental approaches to narrative and fiction.

Part 1: Radio Fabulism

Radio offers a unique space for experimental narrative; here, voice, music and sound can coalesce in dreamlike, fabulist assemblages. Radio fabulism, or fiction-making, boasts a venerable pedigree: the canonical history beginning with Weimar radio plays, through those of the post-war neo-avant garde (Artaud, Beckett, etc) and reaching seminal expression in the German Neue Hörspiele of the 1960s. Since then, its fate has echoed that of the radio play generally – becoming a minor artform, practiced and appreciated on the peripheries. It is on these peripheries that it has since been continually recovered by successive generations of artists, with new approaches to sonic fabulism emerging from the 1960s to now.

Start at the end of the standard history, with these choice cuts from the Neue Hörspiele. Here, intrepid radionauts will uncover a rich catalogue of avant-radio-drama that listens like a precursor to Robert Ashley’s opera-not-opera. Ferdinand Kriwet’s One Two Two (1968) is a surprisingly hilarious collage of famous voices, song fragments and scripted material that shatters any expectations regarding the need for plot. Rigorously structured yet joyously anarchic, Kriwet’s work invokes the Fluxus life/art disintegration and makes fiction of reality while sounding like Laurie Tompkins-meets-Vicki Bennett. Meanwhile, Mauricio Kagel’s hörspiel, ein aufnahmezustand (1969) anticipates the spirit of Sean McCann’s Recital label roster, or perhaps an uncharacteristically energetic Wandelweiser disc. Concrète snippets + Kagel’s kid babbling on the mic + the late great Peter Brötzmann on reeds = a compellingly abstract story-sans-story, music-as-radio play/radio play-as-music.

Renovating hörspiel for the 21st century, since 2001 Hamburg born polymath Felix Kubin has produced 20, on subjects ranging from the relationship between electricity and the paranormal (Paralektronoia (2004)) to the sound of his mother’s voice (Mother In The Fridge (2012)). Molaradio (2004), made with Vicki Bennett/People Like Us and school children from Liverpool’s Croxteth Comprehensive, is an irreverent mashup of music, surreal narrative fragments and derealised radio tropes. This is radio play as playground, or Le Guinian carrier bag with everybody’s voices jumbling about inside together.

Another collaborative radio play unites two cult heroes: Momus and Anne Laplantine, whose 2003 piece Summerisle is a self described hörspiel based on The Wicker Man. Song, soundscape and vocal fragment cautiously cohabit, narrative spontaneously emerging from the imaginative cracks in between. Radio is often characterised as a uniquely intimate medium – here, this is felt as though eavesdropping on a private imaginary world whispered between friends. Radio fabulism becomes a kind of impressionistic world building, a game of allusion unfettered by scripts or am-dram theatrics. It is hard not to see this anticipating some of today’s narrative ambient a la claire rousay or More Eaze, whose sonic autofictions offer field recordings and voice notes cinematically interwoven with gossamer musical cues.

At its birth, radio inspired dizzy visions of a humanity united under its aegis; for Russian Futurist Velimir Khlebnikov, writing in The Radio Of The Future, it was to become “the central tree of our consciousness … [uniting] all mankind.” In the context of this utopian modernism, the radio play offered a cutting edge means for artists to commune with the masses. As the technological zeitgeist shifted, this vanguard became anachronism. But (long) after postmodernism, with culture generally taking a retrospective turn, some have tuned back into the antique form’s untapped possibilities.

Take Klangendum, the sonic art collective of Henk Bakker and Lukas Simonis based in Rotterdam’s WORM Studio, who started making and curating radio plays in 2005. Their website declares “Klangendum likes history as much as it looks ahead. To give a new twist to an old but not yet wornout genre like the radioplay”; this is not merely ironic re-appropriation, but sincere re-investigation. Their Day Of The Great Tit (2019) spins a haunted web of schizophonic voices over a science fiction noisescape of synthesised plips and plops. It’s a vision of the future, apparently: where war, and art, have both been eradicated. Klangendum stage the implications of this double disappearance in suitably conflicted fashion.

As well as making radio plays, Klangendum and WORM provide facilities, residencies and a radio station for others to make and present their own. Two recent pieces by young artists demonstrate the breadth of responses this has invited. Vagina Loquens (2018) by Eothen Stearn, Kari Robertson and Gill Partington investigates the historical relationship between speech and the vagina, adopting a playful while critical register equally informed by radical politics as experimental music. On the other hand Alexander Iezzi’s The Horse (2019) is an introspective monologue dwelling on the narrator’s experiences in psychotherapy; an unrelentingly nervous ego dissection punctuated by synth interjections of insectoid precision. These works lie worlds apart, yet illustrate the form’s endurance as it is reimagined by a new generation in wildly divergent ways.

Beyond the radio play, radio fabulism encompasses narrative approaches that draw on other traditions. Dutch Fluxus member Willem de Ridder remains a lodestar for radio storytellers – his personable oneiric digressions channelling more fireside raconteur than sonic dramaturg. De Ridder’s interventions on Amsterdam Pirate Radio in the late 1980s foreground the aesthetics of communication, of almost minimalist sonic simplicity (featuring only his voice) yet anarchically baroque in their twists and turns. Perhaps England’s answer to de Ridder, the late Frank Key pursued a comparable though singular path with his long running Resonance FM show Hooting Yard On The Air (2004-2019), transmitting outsider nonsense monologues that hit like a kitchen sink Edward Lear.

Radio essay, meanwhile, combines the strategies of avant-radio-drama with the preoccupations of documentary. Milo Thesiger-Meacham’s Audible Heat (2023) investigates the cultural history of cicadas, combining field recordings, music and narration in an extended radiophonic research binge. In Pure Volunteering (2022) Daniel R Wilson rhetoricises like a delinquent Dr Johnson, with his satirical polemic on late capitalist labour practices. Acerbic wit and absurdism collide to the sound of bin raked audio gear malfunctioning. These and other radio fabulisms straddle fuzzy boundaries, yet all evidence the medium’s continued vitality as a site for sonic fiction making.

World Service and The Wire will present Strange Transmissions: The World Of Experimental Radio live at London’s Cafe Oto and on Resonance Extra on 18 July.