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 tackle realism, and the possibility of radio as a window on the vérité encounter.

[Read Part 1: Radio Fabulism here]

Part 2: Radio Realism

Radio is fast and responsive, untethered by the more complex production needs of film or television. It requires fewer decision makers to be realised. A zero budget show can fulfil the same expectations of fidelity and value as a national broadcaster; a simple mono-signal can be enough. All of this affords radio the possibility of capturing unstructured and unspoiled ‘reality’ in a way perhaps other formats cannot so easily. The microphone, as opposed to the focused and unblinking camera, is an indiscriminate piece of hardware; an ever open omni ear that allows more space for the encounter, the raw, the natural or the real.

In Hildegard Westerkamp’s Soundwalking Radio works for Vancouver Cooperative Radio begun in the 1970s, she fully embraced this openness of the microphone. A central member of R Murray Schafer’s World Soundscape Project, Westerkamp broadcast sound walks, sometimes narrated, revealing the environmental sounds of various locations around Vancouver: parks, zoos, shopping malls, mountains, and airplane flight paths. Her Kits Beach Soundwalk (1989) introduces us to the microscopic foregrounded sounds of feeding barnacles, against a distant backdrop of the Vancouver bustle, gently guided by Westerkamp’s own soporific proto-ASMR voice. For Westerkamp this elucidated thinking around acoustic ecologies; the balance of natural and human-made sounds in a given environment, and one's own position and responsibility within that. She rethought the traditionally (imbalanced) unidirectional flow of information in radio broadcasts, treating the medium as one that listens at least as much as it speaks albeit modulated through the physical, psychological, cultural, political choices made by herself, the operator.

Antoine Bertin’s 12 Hours In The Life Of A Fox (2016) goes one step further by removing the human entirely. Attaching a collar microphone to a rescue fox in Surrey for half a day, the resulting work is an unedited 12-hour mono recording that functions as a radio broadcast. Originally broadcast on Resonance Extra, there seems to be no intention for a listener to engage with the entire thing – one can tune in for a while to hear rustles, bangs, the odd grunt, and come back 5 hours later to hear much the same. The work is documentary in some kind of pure sense; we get a strong idea of place and context through the scratchy, semi-identifiable recording, but it’s almost atemporal, or inhuman in its scope and presentation. The work is distinctly non-anthropomorphic in its rhythms, structures, and simply what it offers us as listeners. Bertin’s beautiful NTS show Edge Of The Forest then feels almost classical in comparison, as he guides us à la Westerkamp on walks through The Faroe Isles and beyond, encrusted with electroacoustic sounds, drones, and other natural and synthetic artefacts.

Sophea Lerner’s radiophonic practice is extensive and complex, but often concerned with notions of broadcast and reception as not just open and democratic, but nourishing and fearless. Her work as part of Delhi Listening Group has engaged frequently with marginalised committees in the city, often affected by encroaching gentrification. Taking the profoundly unbroadcastable medium of food, and the universally cohesive act of breaking bread as a point of inspiration, in 2007 she opened up the airwaves of New York’s free103.9 radio as a live feed “snack line” for Delhi residents to offer meditations on street snacks.

That cusp between documentary and composition is rich territory, perhaps because in the decelerated listening space of radio we are more amenable to projecting ourselves in an active way. Jennifer Walshe’s radio skits Now There’s A Job To Be Done toy with this cusp, recording her father, hyper close-miced, describing in great detail how to fix a shelf or a catflap, as well as other minor DIY tasks. Luc Ferrari’s seminal Far-West News, created for the Dutch Radio Station NPS in 1998-1999 veritably thrives in this space. The work plots the composer’s travels across the southwest USA, his spoken observations, reflections and importantly encounters with friends, colleagues, and strangers along the way. Similar to Bertin, these encounters are blended with conspicuously post-produced studio sounds, electronic manipulations of voice, layered and collaged audio recordings, and other composed elements. Ferrari considers this very much a ‘radiophonic composition’, rather than an audio diary or reflection of some kind of vérité image, and rather aims to keep the composer’s hand conspicuously present throughout in his own sound newspaper, his own perverted game with truth.

Perhaps then the microphone is less of an agnostic truth-teller than originally proposed. The direction one points it in, the polar pattern selected, its distance from source are all intentional acts of storytelling and composition. Maybe the only true candidness lies in the blooper reel; those moments of corpsing and error caught on tape for an eternity of embarrassment. Co-founder of Resonance FM Ed Baxter’s masterfully simple The Exeter Whisper (2018) trades elegantly on this. Working with several primary schools in Essex, a series of tricky phrases are passed along by a line of school children as whispers, spoken and captured one by one. Gradually, of course, these phrases transform through a plethora of giggles, stumbles, shuffles and errors. It feels like genuine eavesdropping in both its content and its grain, a performance that isn’t a performance, an unadulterated act of listening captured in its most innocent form.

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.