Margin notes for a radio piece

René Farabet

Bazaar debris with mucho multimedia glitz; the crackling of an old radio set wanders in from somewhere, giving off a noise akin to buzzing bees in flight, a horde of zigzagging sounds that invade the space, furrowing and deforming it, veering away towards the corners, crashing into walls as if they were dykes, scratching the bottom of the cupboards, making glass and porcelain vibrate. I am in occupied territory, I am on the lookout. Submerged in the sound space, about to be deafened, perchance, have I been taken prisoner? Am I condemned to thrash about and fritter away amidst this lava issuing forth from the loudspeaker?

In some of her plastic oeuvres, Concha Jerez imagines a see-through glass partition that allows the spectator on the outside to see their own reflection, therefore feeling included in the installation. Shouldn’t the radio also offer a kind of invisible screen-–cum-mirror that coaxes listeners into becoming part, albeit knowingly, of the soundscape, and therefore hear themselves
through what they are listening to? Therein lies the challenge.

• • •

Let us return to our point of departure. A sound is emitted in a real space. It is recorded: it bears the finger print of the architecture that generated it, it is moulded by it. It makes the place its own, it takes its measurements, it affords sounds to volumes, full and hollow spaces, off-levels, recesses, uneven surfaces: it exposes the structure. Even the professional studio, that no-man’s land conceived to neutralise and eventually sterilise sound, imparts the character of sound, colour.

Thus, in the world of the radio, myriad spatial silhouettes, partial, even truncated figurations of the world, struggle to unite, and all together tell a story. And all of this in a new space, more indefinite, not delimited, immaterial (?), namely the radio, a space we might define, despite its being confined to the perimeter of my listening booth, as unlimited, because in reality it is wandering through my head, where, governed by bar lines and modules, the work will be subjected to other pulsions. Behind the screen of my eyelids it glides about in the realms of the imaginary. Listening is fantasy, we are cast adrift, it opens up new spaces of resonance.

What has the artist done? He has appropriated a concrete space. On joining the game he has disturbed the order, he has displaced things. By intervening he has spawned a process of knowledge, he has sparked a movement. By bringing this imbalance, he has egged us all on to find our own place. The artist is the first leg in a relay race, he hands over the baton. And the listener himself will also become this artist who is defined through the work (cf. Argot).

• • •

Let us abandon the image of the living room furniture unit where slippered feet listen to concertos. Strolling about with her small radio receiver (a sound lantern) in la Casa de España in Paris (Labyrinth des Langages), Concha Jerez is not proposing a simple miniaturised reproduction of what she is listening do at that very moment, but leads us to perceive, simultaneously, what is going on further away, on the other side of the partitions, on the stages, etcetera. She stretches the representation scenario, with a type of portable antiphonary from which everything that sounds in the multiple latomies of the show escapes (this is the case of the ear of Dionysius at Syracuse). Or in other words, it reminds us, in a very concrete way, that the radio, more than a mere medium specialised in trucking prefabricated musical ideas or commodities, is a mixer, a sound forum, a place for pluralities, a node of convergences. This pan-auditory power enables it to collect disperse data, make it coexist and therefore pick up the ensemble of events. A multiple witness, it stages, orders and coordinates; its approach is global. By playing with compartmentalised space it broadens our horizon.

• • •

And despite its limited duration, radio work instigates an elastic time where strata overlap, expanding or contracting now and again, where cascades of interference bubble out, both in overlay and collage (each element projects its shadow over the adjacent one, contaminating it cf. Force in). The work, composite, arranged mesh-like, slowly uncovers a narrative path of stokes through the latticed lines. Realities more or less distant are sometimes reconciled, or sometimes rise up against each other, forming a recess or a counterpoint. The radio is the theatre of the deterritorialisations (to use Deleuze and Guattari’s term), of substitutions of places, of movement: of migrations of nomads. An irreverent geographer, the artist is he who has the boldness to plot new maps.

• • •

(cf. Limites du décor). The artist is he who constantly obliges people to accommodate. With his displacements, he“dislocates the welded forms offered to us imperiously and which we fail to duly resist, he triggers breakdowns in the parade of clichés that life proposes, he causes the scandal that lies at the very centre of banality to rear its head. The set is the soft and springy nest where we organise our habitat. It is a wall that protects us, to which we entrust our stability, our permanence. It models our behaviours, binding us to rules. It conditions our social scenography, immersing us in a formatted world, limiting our space with the pretext of offering us reference points. It is the uniform of bourgeois society. It makes hostages of us: it is a prison.

But if we tap the walls they sound hollow: they are made of cardboard, it is a hypocritical form, theatrical, made of stucco and hardboard. It falls to the artist to denounce its falseness, expose it as an impostor, make it quake, destroy the mirage, by imagining situations of a false door, of contrived false walls, the keys to transgression. The radio flows fluidly like eau de vie that can poison untroubled rivers, whip up waves and whirlpools in all the branches of the river where inert evidence has stagnated. It is like the impossible pipe dream, sometimes affected by the set and its obsessive images. The radio has this power to unleash the listener, and it can also carry him away, absorb him in the fiesta of sound, de-enebriate him, send him far away, make him go between and through (cf. Argot): this balancing movement is one of his greatest feats.

• • •

(La Ciudad de Agua, Limites du décor, Labyrinthe de Langages, Argot, Diario). In the soundscape, language no longer has the upper hand. It is unstable. Even when it yields to the development of the discourse, it is no more than one piece in the mosaic. And the motif it draws is the prisoner of the canvas.

Sound is no longer the projected shadow of the word. For example, it is the water which is pregnant with multiple modulations, determines the dripping of texts, liquefies words, diluting them. Or it is the background noise that renders the discourse discordant, knocked off balance by its perverse connotation and which produces creaking like a rusty wheel, to the rhythm of its rhetorical spasms. In addition, the verbal placard (in cross section, or as a floating banner in the diegetic course) is torn and chopped up into furtive statements. Frequently the quote and the formula open their inverted commas and become frayed and crumble even before they become frontispiece sentences. The word, coagulated and objectified, melts, as Rabelais would have said, gone astray in its own echoes and turbulences. Sometimes it disintegrates, shaken, split (competing with its own look-alikes, its sisters in foreign tongues), run through space and submitted to light-and-dark effects (gradation of colours, close-ups), strewn with ambiguous words (spring-words that impel, lock-words that imprison) fake gears that tear the narration to shreds, dismantle propositions and cast a shadow of doubt on them, stifling and atrophying the meaning. And in this ride, the sentences turn on themselves, they are caught up in a tourniquet, a spiralling structure, sometimes rendered inaudible. We will find them again in a different configuration, altered by voices that crack and twist, are stifled in the throat, or atomise the word to give utterance to sound filings. In this dispersion, phenomena shine like fragments of mica, the tongue blurts out its alphabet, it becomes expectant: simmering matter, rid of its argumental tools. The tongue is ready to be reborn: listener, the time has come for you to talk, to forge your own path, to venture forth from the labyrinth.

• • •

(Force in, The whistling of the Iron Horse as it crosses the threshold of Paradise). In reality, it is better to forget these conventional categories of radio genres, and free a vast space we might call acoustic if we wish, where all sound bodies may converge, devoid of hierarchy, serving a conceptual and artistic project.

It transpires that acoustic art, with all its musical exaltation, generates beautiful bibelots of sound inanity (the expression is taken from Mallarmé). Nowadays, technology generates a finely-honed, goldsmith-like piece, and certain sound alliances seem to float in a kind of weightless, context-less firmament: as if art could only be made with precious materials, like a paste untouched by any anecdote or reference to the facts of life, as if the noises of the world, the human orchestra, had to be excluded for their triviality.

Fragments of things real will be embedded in a free, open space, naturally. In this way...
My memory wanders... the hum of a poem by Brecht, carrying anonymous voices and pouring them into a somewhat pompous list of illustrious names...

My memory wanders... grave and pained voices, real voices, of emigrés, amidst the jolted clatter of the train that carries them, and a song that slips in from the street: the world is out there, it crosses your life...

The artist is here, today, to bear witness to this world as a totality.