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 turn to radio’s materiality, considering its potential as both catalyst and content.

[Read Part 1: Radio Fabulism here, Part 2: Realism here, and Part 3: Situationism here]

The qualitative dimension of the broadcast, the carrier signal, interference, the lo-fi, have all been grist for the mills of artists since the earliest days of the technology. Challenging the cultural truism of Marshall Mcluhan’s insistence that medium is intrinsically wedded to message, DIY radio maverick Tetsuo Kogawa maintains that “in arts, you can have a radio without messages, silent radio… the technology is no more means but comes back to the authentic meaning of 'techne' the old Greek of art, that is hand-work.” Indeed, perhaps radio in all its analogue handmade accessibility has the potential to hover between medium, material, phenomenon, and hardware; a mess of wires and coils in ways that welcomes huge and unusual flexibility and creativity.

The Latvian parapsychologist Konstantin Raudive straddled these potentials when he outlined his technique for communicating with the dead via what he argued was a scientific (and, crucially, technological) method. Raudive would conduct séance-like conversations with spirits by recording radio static in their presence. Through repeated close listening to these recordings he was able to divine and dictate extensive conversations with family, strangers, and well-known figures (such as Carl Jung). Distorted and littered with noise artefacts, by playing back recordings repeatedly and at differing speeds he was able with some practice, to discern voices; “Despite my most strenuous efforts I heard nothing… After three months of practice, at last I heard a male voice”.

Whilst the inheritors of Raudive’s ideas can buy EVP (electronic voice phenomenon) radio scanners on Amazon, artists like Joe Banks through his Disinformation project debunk the occult implications of EVP and form a direct synapse to the realm of noise music by focusing on the abstracted grain of VLF (Very Low Frequency) electromagnetic waves, able to be intercepted on AM radios, shortwave sets and cheap and home-made receivers.

From the mid 80s to the 2010s, Italian composer and musical archeologist Walter Maioli undertook a body of research on extraterrestrial sounds (such as the orbital passage of Halley’s Comet) and radio communications. Recording electromagnetic tones, drones, and other emitted phenomena, he combined these with far less abstract field recordings, eavesdropped shortwave conversations, and his own instrumental performances into warped ambient soundtracks, including Clanger-esque slide-flute episodes. The concept of sender and receiver becomes blurred here, disembodied, and explicitly off-world in a way that gently ruptures conventional radiophonic listening dynamics.

Echoes of the serendipitous nature of radio astrology reverberate in the present day too, not least in the work of Shortwave Collective; an international group of artists interested in feminist practices and the radio spectrum. By consciously demystifying and democratising the technology of radio, they open up space for creative results that are truly experimental. Recently, the collective has focused on designing and building low budget and zero power radio receivers made from found or scrap materials and audio e-waste which respond to the radio spectrum, as well as atmospheric and environmental influences. The collective articulates their work through various workshop formats, collaborative audio collages, online performances, and teaching resources to their making and working techniques. Crucially, this shifts the focus of radio away from its content towards its communities and potentials for non-hierarchical and collaborative organisation.

When brought into relief so vividly, it’s hard not to think of radio as a powerfully political technology. The previously mentioned Kogawa has embraced a similarly DIY approach to collective and open-sourced radio-building, specifically inspired by the (pre-Maioli) Italian free-radio movement; a counter-cultural, Marxist, pirate radio endeavour begun in the 1970s. Kogawa’s own quasi-pirate Mini-FM, initiated by himself and his students following the collapse of the student movement in early 80s Japan sought, much like Shortwave Collective’s work, to move focus away from radio as a vessel for ‘content’ and any expectations of commercial fidelity, towards radio as model for organisation; its “systems, infrastructures and ecologies.”

Pirate radio usually is, of course, usually highly concerned with what it broadcasts, but it’s interesting to see how experimental musicians have approached it with the ear of the materialist. Improvising guitarist Derek Bailey’s seminal Domestic Jungle recordings of the 90s present recorded fragments of his living-room jamming with East London drum ‘n’ bass pirate broadcasts; voiceovers and pizza adverts included. Bailey treats the radio as a passive duo partner, with no possibility to repeat, restart, or pause. In his own words Bailey admits “the funny thing is, I've never heard a jungle record, all I've heard has been off the radio…”, enjoying its ephemerality and found concrète-ness, whilst also remaining self-aware about his own distance from the culture of D&B.

Luke Owen’s Label Death Is Not The End has published several fascinating collage assemblages of London and Bristol Pirate Radio adverts from the 80s and 90s. Listening to these is a dreamlike, nostalgic experience of broadcasts, the ‘information’ of which is useless (all the events are in the past, the businesses closed down, the services obsolete), and so what we’re left with is a heightened appreciation of the ‘grain’ of the stuff.

I get a similar feeling listening to Mark Leckey’s gloriously unhinged Abundance Dump, a monthly show on NTS Radio that seems to me to embrace the idea of the mix as a concrète mash of musics. These shows often tend towards the multilayered, the non-sequitur, genre and fidelity agnosticism, and the auto-archaeological as organising logics. Similarly Jennifer Walshe’s Ultimate Chill Danny Boy Megamix for Dublin Digital Radio compresses 200 found versions of the postcard-Irish song into an hour, completely defamiliarising the song itself, leaving us to face the empty containers of ‘genre’. These shows push the listening experience into a looser, strangely nonlinear space. Leckey and Walshe’s weird sutures reverberate with Owen’s tendency to edit in white noise dial static between clips, embracing the faulty, the flawed, the abstract.

It seems fitting to end up back with radio static as a point-zero of the materialist’s radiophonic toolbox. A sound which means one thing to the noise artist, another to the nostalgist, yet another to the engineer. These meanings overlap nowadays online through hours long playlists of soothing, palliative pink noise to induce sleep or temper tinnitus. Underneath the functionally titled YouTube video Ambient ASMR - One hour of atmospheric white noise static for productivity, meditation, or sleep the comments read like a confused and beautiful collision of interests, memories, needs, and genealogies:

“...couldn't you throw in a weak CW signal now and then to see if I am really asleep?... Would have been better if it had those… slightly warbled sounds generated when (for eg) you scroll through the freq bands and pickup an odd broadcaster (CB,uhF,etc) but you haven't filtered it correctly so the voices are offtune and sound slightly bent out of shape XD:D… I love radio static, especially from older radios without the harsh filtering… If this takes off with the ambient white noise crowd, I'll do another one during a part of the day where you hear those QRP stations down in the noise… was the band dead?... that's just messed up”

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.