collective radio



GW: In the age of internet, radio becomes more compelling, in my view, because of its inherent randomness and ubiquity, as opposed to the point/push aesthetic of netmedia.    
JJ: The radio is more wild than internet (without talking about this kind of sound materiality more sensitive with radio than internet because of the dawning remote control technique).Internet brings head (mental attraction), eyes (for the screen), hands (for typing), legs (because you are sitting). You navigate on Internet because it's an activity and you search something you want (the role of attraction of the information) Radio purposes the possibility of listening or to be occupied or to be .... -in french we call it "etre entre deux eaux" !!!- to let himself drift. Impossible to drift with Internet (in the multimedia way), only to be drowned. CM: but I wonder if the inundation caused by the internet could not still engender a type of drifting. Perhaps a shifted notion of drifting, one in reaction to its constraints. For isn't drifting also possible (and even desirable) from the most linear activities (I'm thinking of reading and watching films)? To return to the internet, its drifting potential is apparent when one does a search and with links (at the simplest level). Those two basic internet activities have often led me far astray of the intended destination. A drift is often but the first step to a drowning. And my present interruption into this first tentacle is a drift that might either inundate the octopus or drown on its own. If "radio is more wild than the internet," what of internet radio? Radio's "randomness and ubiquity" on the internet is exponentially amplified due to the fact that it is not longer local (or to be more precise, it is no longer only local). I can enact the continental drift via realaudio skips and jumps (but I must say that I only indulge in this when I have the sort of access to the internet which does not tie up a phone line).
GW: exactly my thought as well ---- and I am most definitely a drifter, on the reception end as well as transmission.
GW: I'm game for anything -- but will rely on you to keep the questions buzzing.

all well here:
just finished a theatre gig as "the voice" in valere novarina's Theatre of the Ears -- do you know his work? very interesting form a radiophony perspective.
JJ: yes i know valere's work and he's one of my preferred french writer, i know his works in the beginning and the middle of the 80's but i don't know what is his works now. I'm very happy you know him, because he's one of the artists who are astonished me. i really like his work on the language and the tongue (and the throat, and the brain, and so on) even if sometimes his own languages and theatralization goes out the "real" life in a kind of outer world, instead of the treatment of his languages very close to the human (being an intelligent beast). I prefer his work when the language is really brushing with the reality. Maybe i prefer hear his dramas better than to see them. he worked with a very great unknown actor called Andre Marcon, a kind of avatar of Valere, he integers the language of Valere in a very astonishing physical and mental manner. A real life, this man.
I remembered his 15-hours drama of 1985 i think (I was young, nearly 24), called "Le drame de la vie" for 2587 actors. he was a kind of Zatopeck of the enumeration ! In these years, I liked his volontary poor scenography, it was very efficient. with these "glossolalies" !
I think he made some versions of his dramas for radiophonic programs, in France...

Of course this work with (into) the languages and the birth of new word and new word associations as a new question: how to name these things and these animals around us, without speaking with a prattle, but with an extended language? how the language can brush the world? how the world can enter the language? I never thinking about the language as a closed question, or as a fixed structure.
Maybe the first time I heard strange and unfamiliar voices, it was from the radio and from my countryside where I lived (the accents, deformed pronounciations, and so on). I don't know if it's realistic or no, but I always bring together in my mind and into my experiences, the radio and the countryside (or the forest, the concave curve of a valley, ...), and the radio and the fact to listen at the door.
I never see a spectacular effect with radio, and i like this non-spectacular aspect. It's one of these things very important into my works, never adding spectacular effects...
don't you? 		ASW: Indeed, Novarina poses fascinating problems for radiophony. The genesis of the "play" that Gregory refers to is not without interest. When I was first contacted, by Richard Foreman, to direct some of Novarina's work, I was very sure of what I wanted to do (a montage of short pieces that would simultaneously serve as theater and manifesto, staged somewhat in the style of André Marcon's monologues), but not so sure of whom I would have liked to do it. As Richard and I mused, we settled on one name, the only person we thought could pull it off in English David Warrilow. But, alas, he was already extremely ill, and died soon afterwards. A tremendous loss. Of course, that choice was obvious, and it brought with it the weight of Beckett, etc. a readymade modernist theatrical tradition signified in a particular voice. Perhaps a too easy solution. Soon afterwards, Gregory and I chatted about the potentials of the project, and we realized — or rather I realized, something that Gregory probably knew all along — that Novarina must be staged without actors, in a veritable "theater of the ears." For his work is profoundly paradoxical: many of the "characters," for example, exist as hapax legomena, in name only. Their presence is purely linguistic, their existence ungraspable, fleeting, as they never appear on stage, but are only named. How does one give life to a word alone, to a name; to linguistic mutation and literary permutation ? Through the viva voce. And not just any voice, but one that is many voices, one capable of virtuosic breakdowns and self-degenerations. So we worked out the Novarinian paradoxes by seeking the adequate signifier of inadequacy, the unique signifier of multiplicity: the voice(s) of Gregory Whitehead. The result was "Theater of the Ears," a play for electronic marionette (constructed by Zaven Paré) and taped voice, which premiered at the California Institute of the Arts last November.
GW: >Of course this work with (into) the languages and the birth of new word and
>new word associations as a new question: how to name these things and these
>animals around us, without speaking with a prattle, but with an extended
>language? how the language can brush the world? how the world can enter the
>language? I never thinking about the language as a closed question, or as a
>fixed structure.

that is what I find so stimulating about novarina, his radical understanding of language as a provisional bag of grunts, cries, laughs and growls, forming words, yes, but not words that you can slice up into intelligible slices, like, he says, a "salami", but tubes of physical eruption, air, sweat, blood, lungs. Language that brushes the world, if at all, through the gristle of the actor's voice. Yet what he asks from the actor is close to physically impossible, he is begging for an actor that has yet to exist. Which makes him an ideal playwright for the radio, where every "actor" is a kind of prosthesis, a temporary and provisional hypothetical building that either makes the play dance, or fades out without a trace. Novarina is so intensely aware of what is at stake in the risk to communicate, in the failure to brush against the world: the proximity of death in his writing, if you cannot make that brush, then you may as well be a pile of mud, ashes, bone, dust. For a voice performer, there is only one other body of work that raises a similar challenge: Artaud.

>Maybe the first time I heard strange and unfamiliar voices, it was from the
>radio and from my countryside where I lived (the accents, deformed
>pronounciations, and so on). I don't know if it's realistic or no, but I
>always bring together in my mind and into my experiences, the radio and the
>countryside (or the forest, the concave curve of a valley, ...), and the
>radio and the fact to listen at the door.
>I never see a spectacular effect with radio, and i like this
>non-spectacular aspect. It's one of these things very important into my
>works, never adding spectacular effects...
>don't you?

I love your image of the radiophonic forest. Perhaps you know the work of the poet/gardener Ian Hamilton Findlay, who I have always thought of as a brilliant writer of radio plays, though they may never have been broadcast. He floats ideas, words, fragments in a landscape that must be navigated in open air, a strong sense of narrative, but one that is elusive, that must be "tracked". Like your radiophonic forest. For me, I find my imagination roaming out to sea, to ocean waves, to the wild wilderness that nevertheless has a deep rhythm, and pattern, if you can read the signs. Both forest and ocean are anti-spectacular, becuase the emphasis is on the JOURRNEY, not on the EFFECT. I loathe "effects" in any medium, they display a kind of arrogance with regards to the mute audience, who is expected to be in thrall to them. Yet the most provocative, revealing and even forbidding journeys are those that leave no "impression", but rather require new forms of orintation, navigation, echo-location. A play not of sensations, but of relationships.
JJ: >intelligible slices, like, he says, a "salami", but tubes of physical
>eruption, air, sweat, blood, lungs. Language that brushes the world, if
>at all, through the gristle of the actor's voice. Yet what he asks from
>the actor is close to physically impossible, he is begging for an actor
>that has yet to exist. Which makes him an ideal playwright for the radio,
>where every "actor" is a kind of prosthesis, a temporary and provisional
>hypothetical building that either makes the play dance, or fades out
>without a trace. Novarina is so intensely aware of what is at stake in
>the risk to communicate, in the failure to brush against the world: the
>proximity of death in his writing, if you cannot make that brush, then
>you may as well be a pile of mud, ashes, bone, dust. For a voice
>performer, there is only one other body of work that raises a similar
>challenge: Artaud.

You're right. To approach the physical production of sound or of forming word or un/intelligible articulation, towards a mental situation, YOUR situation among different things, to whom (which) you're speaking, and vice-versa (the mental production ... towards a physical...), are the awareness of the relation. Your link to the world. The language as a rubbing of (on) the world.
And the ultimate context, to speak to humans, not only to things, is really the conversation. To speak to humans about things, to speak to humans about humans, to speak to things about humans, to speak to thing about things. To speak normally with common words is to take risks too, it depends on HOW you speak, HOW you "put" your voice into the world. Thus you can see extensions.
Valere speaks often about "monologues" for calling his dramas, I think that they are rather dialogues. How to imitate the reality of the world with your voice? How the surrounding "voices" of the world are becoming suddenly your voice?
We' re working about recognition.
what you recognize and what you don't recognize.
what you love and what you hate.
just our work is to give some clues.
Yet, this asks to approach some borders, psychological ones? artistic ones? economical ones? and so on. But the sensation and the necessity of telling that the things are becoming interesting when you're pushing them to their knocking over, (to be out of line), as far as is humanly possible (or impossible), is the only condition for crossing the appearance of our activities.
A work is available when you had pushed its limits.
Now, I know the psychological phenomenon of transmission of this kind of "commitment", you know I'm composer and I'm working with only some instrumentalists who work with me in closely collaboration since several years, always the same instrumentalists (because it's hard to enter a language and it's hard to develop it). And I'm working always this "evaluation" of a collective realization, for obtaining each time this physical presence, this physical and mental quality from them (the instrumentalists) but from the audience too. I don't work with time (the common sentence about music: music is a work about time), but I'm working with memory. How to recognize where and when you are, and why and how you're listening to and looking at a man who is gesticulating with a kind of "hindrance" and who is playing strange sounds which are not fitting to what you see and what you know about these "noble" instruments. And the aim for me is not to obtain music, or to add music to our world, but to obtain the quality of the silence and of the concentration, resulted from these little troubles and confusions...
But here I'm using the eyes and the ears, because of the context of the concert. I think it's maybe the same for Valere, because the context is a context of performance, privileged time and place. And because of these "greek" parameters, you can as a listener remember some little things or elements and move them to the outer of this place, into your own life, and maybe you can recognize these little things into other things (real things) around you, and you're making the link, and maybe in front of your mirror, into your bathroom, you can astonish you in making the same sounds, too incongruous yesterday, with your mouth, your tongue, your clothes and so on, as if you imitate what you hear yesterday, but now it's your own.
It's the same thing about the little common melody, which is staying into your head, and which is appearing at different times during the day, accompanying our common activities. The "ritournelle", as suggested Gilles Deleuze...

But if you only use the ears, as for example, in my piece for CD, Megaphonies, the sounds is mixed immediately with your sounding context. In surimposition. I think it's the same thing with radio, you've got only ears. And my question is maybe, how to approach this same kind of commitment, of knocking over as in the context of performance? because the body isn't here at all. How to retrieve the physical impression? How the specific manners on radio for working on memory and on recognition? How brushing and rubbing the world, a new time?

>I love your image of the radiophonic forest. Perhaps you know the work of
>the poet/gardener Ian Hamilton Findlay, who I have always thought of as a
>brilliant writer of radio plays, though they may never have been
>broadcast. He floats ideas, words, fragments in a landscape that must be
>navigated in open air, a strong sense of narrative, but one that is
>elusive, that must be "tracked". Like your radiophonic forest. For me, I
>find my imagination roaming out to sea, to ocean waves, to the wild
>wilderness that nevertheless has a deep rhythm, and pattern, if you can
>read the signs. Both forest and ocean are anti-spectacular, becuase the
>emphasis is on the JOURRNEY, not on the EFFECT. I loathe "effects" in any
>medium, they display a kind of arrogance with regards to the mute
>audience, who is expected to be in thrall to them. Yet the most
>provocative, revealing and even forbidding journeys are those that leave
>no "impression", but rather require new forms of orintation, navigation,
>echo-location. A play not of sensations, but of relationships.

just read a book of Julien Gracq: "Les eaux etroites".
He lives in the same region from which I'm native (west of France, Nantes). I'm curious that I remark that people from the same country can have the same sensations and the same manner to place their bodies into the "countryside". I'm speaking about same signs and descriptions during "promenades" concerning marks, remarked branches arrangements, volume of the voice (to speak about that with a low voice or a louder one), and so on. And always these little things can be strange, if you extract them from their context or their principal reference. For example, I think that these little dispositions (of the body, of the voice, of the intonation and so on) refer directly to a general "actor", which is the pole of the concerned countryside (river, mountains, plain, sea, hills, forest, etc.). And of course the climate... how the voice is taking the coloration of the climate?
But this exists because we're crossing everytime the territory, even if the journeys are very little, some kilometers or more. All is relative. But with the radio, you lose this disposition of distances sensations, of marks included in the territories. In life, you need marks, in radio, you must get lost, be confused.
GW: >PS/ I really love this conversation, I don't know where we are going. Is it
>ok for you?
>I hope my messages aren't too long, just tell me. i can write them in being
>more concise. But I like these kinds of strolling. Be quiet, the next ones
>will be shorter.
>Maybe you prefer only questions as an interview?

no, I love this just as it is --- let's keep strolling, the most wonderful way to travel. but I need to let my response marinate for a few days, because it is thanksgiving weekend here, and I am off to nyc for a few days to visit family and friends. will write then --- and when we are "done" (or when we decide to stroll "home"), we can always edit down, select, recompose. just like how we do audio work ---
GW: >You're right. To approach the physical production of sound or of forming
>word or un/intelligible articulation, towards a mental situation, YOUR
>situation among different things, to whom (which) you're speaking, and
>vice-versa (the mental production ... towards a physical...), are the
>awareness of the relation. Your link to the world. The language as a
>rubbing of (on) the world.>And the ultimate context, to speak to humans, not
only to things,
>the conversation.

----

and yet look how few of the prevailing media are rooted in anything but a shadow of conversation, of a "crossing with": the dominant projection is a lone mouth pressed against the microphone, the voice of power that echos through every decade of mother radio's century.
when there is a second speaker, it is most typically in the position of the ventriloquist dummy, an organ for the "host", who feeds the lines. There are moments, of course, when the dummy takes over, jumps off the script, and these moments are sublime. but the Host/Guest model, so dominant in a celebrity culture, is a sort of pale residue of the ideal of dialogue, dialogue but with all the "rub" dried up. I like to imagine Socrates on a show with Howard Stern --- Socrates, the master of playing the Dummy, only to end up pulling the strings.
-----

>Valere speaks often about "monologues" for calling his dramas, I think that
>they are rather dialogues. How to imitate the reality of the world with
>your voice? How the surrounding "voices" of the world are becoming suddenly
>your voice?

which is why the idea of finding one's "real voice", in the language of the New Agers, is so terribly silly, for we are all polyphonous composites, and how could it be different in when we live in such thickly saturated air, full of microwaved bleating and banter at every frequency: better to break the One Voice down (if you can find it) into the many, let them sing their unwholesome song.

Then of course there is the Scream, which is as close to a Modernist Icon as we have in the acoustic world --- the scream as a direct, physical eruption of what cannot be coded, compressed or channelled. thouh, of course, screams can be faked and exported as well, a cottage industry in hollywood.

>for me is not to obtain music, or to add music to our world, but to obtain
>the quality of the silence and of the concentration, resulted from these
>little troubles and confusions...


You hint at a jouney not of expression, or IMpression, but of navigation, of reading the diverse, often contradictory, signs that stimulate thought to find a way, or perhaps, if confused, to get hopelessly lost. but far better to be lost, and thinking, then in the groove, but dead dumb.

>But here I'm using the eyes and the ears, because of the context of the
>concert. I think it's maybe the same for Valere, because the context is a
>context of performance, privileged time and place. And because of these
>"greek" parameters, you can as a listener remember some little things or
>elements and move them to the outer of this place, into your own life, and
>maybe you can recognize these little things into other things (real things)
>around you, and you're making the link, and maybe in front of your mirror,
>into your bathroom, you can astonish you in making the same sounds, too
>incongruous yesterday, with your mouth, your tongue, your clothes and so
>on, as if you imitate what you hear yesterday, but now it's your own.
>It's the same thing about the little common melody, which is staying into
>your head, and which is appearing at different times during the day,
>accompanying our common activities. The "ritournelle", as suggested Gilles
>Deleuze... >

well, and some of them are like infernal bugs, scraps and jingles and theme songs, bits of flotsam and pure garbage, and that's fine, if they become a personal mythology, an auto-orchestration, another deleuzian motif. they key is to resist being turned into prsotehtic speakers, or acknowledging that yes, we ARE the prosthesis, but then suddenly doing something ELSE, a kidney that decides to dance a jig, or a lung that wants to be a heart.

>But if you only use the ears, as for example, in my piece for CD,
>Megaphonies, the sounds is mixed immediately with your sounding context. In
>surimposition.
>I think it's the same thing with radio, you've got only ears. And my
>question is maybe, how to approach this same kind of commitment, of
>knocking over as in the context of performance? because the body isn't here
>at all. How to retrieve the physical impression? How the specific manners
>on radio for working on memory and on recognition? How brushing and rubbing
>the world, a new time?

again, I belive it comes down to forgetting about sound, and placing the flesh into a play of relations, positions. evry radio play (and I mean play in the broadest sense) is a game of position, bodies put en jeu. that's what is at stake, and what is at play. To enter into the actual apparatus of ther media, turn things this way and that, not knowing, as a kind of live-to-air hypothesis, what to make of it? A broadcast of questions camouflaged as voices ----
JJ: >well, and some of them are like infernal bugs, scraps and jingles and
>theme songs, bits of flotsam and pure garbage, and that's fine, if they
>become a personal mythology, an auto-orchestration, another deleuzian
>motif. they key is to resist being turned into prsotehtic speakers, or
>acknowledging that yes, we ARE the prosthesis, but then suddenly doing
>something ELSE, a kidney that decides to dance a jig, or a lung that
>wants to be a heart.

yes, we must develop these aspects of appropriation, circulation. What do we keep really? We are today in societies with over-saturation of music, of amplified voices, and some of actual concepts are about the indexation, the samplification, the duplication, the replications as works on our context. Can we add? can we remove something? how can we auto-orchestrate?
I like the term "to break in" (in french "par effraction") as a way of involving a kind of "reality principle" for removing some dissemblings (concealings?). These ones (dissemblings and metaphors - not camouflages because these ones break in really) are the subjects of all these activities (artistic or not) which functions today with an inoperative tautology.
aporia ou elegy?

>again, I belive it comes down to forgetting about sound, and placing the
>flesh into a play of relations, positions. evry radio play (and I mean
>play in the broadest sense) is a game of position, bodies put en jeu.
>that's what is at stake, and what is at play. To enter into the actual
>apparatus of ther media, turn things this way and that, not knowing, as a
>kind of live-to-air hypothesis, what to make of it? A broadcast of
>questions camouflaged as voices ----

to place the flesh and to go at the rate of thinking. a thinking velocity. a quickly one and a slow one. what is really the importance of the live broadcast? Some things can be pre-recorded, differed? with radio, each listener have its own reality context, auricular context. but to work on hypothesis, i'm ok, i do so.
GW: >what is really the importance of the live broadcast?

if it is broadcast, it is always "dead" ---
you can invest a huge amount of labor into the fabrication of "live". of simply accept that everything is material waiting outside the dance hall.
the ideal model is a celebratory mix of living and dead, as in a new orleans jazz funeral.
the more dead, the more alive....
JJ: extensions of the body ..... dislocation of the body ... of the voice .... is the voice dislocated when it's multiplied? ... heard from different points .... received ... launched towards different points.... maybe the voice is brought to bay ... to approach the body with a blind media, with blind operations ... how can we approach the body with/without voices? one thing can be to make listen some "noised" activities, or to make listen the possible places of reception of these voices (excavation) ... excavation .. throat ... what is exactly your implication into this mix of living and dead, g? ... the body is searching everywhere, everytime, to extend itself... to build some prothesis ... the radio offers each time the possibility to move something from one place (its proper one) to another one... moving, shifting, transfer ... one listener could piece or gather the dislocation from himself... all he has to do is move so ... to enter a fabrication, whatever it is ... is it recognition? recognition of what? you can enter simultaneously in different points of the world (the large multiplied voice with broadcastings) ... but each time with different ways, instead of himself... when i dig the ground with my arm, my arm is becoming my voice ... how can you dig the ground with your voice? on radio? maybe all I've to do is just move a little ... to move a pebble from its first place, just five cm away from its first place, and this area or this context will change ... a little ... 
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