With all transparency, radio is an artform I rarely encounter purposefully. I had a minor, youthful and wholly inherited relationship with radio comedy, Hancock’s Half Hour, confused by the BBC’s ripping audio from the television series and putting that on wax as a radio version. Is that radio? Despite the uniqueness in live broadcasting of the radio medium, like many art forms, delineating the boundaries between categories is not so easy.
As an adult, I first found out about Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth’s deaths organically via workplace radios as the news broke. Vividly, I remember BBC radio on a particular early morning in February 2022 as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine commenced. I remember the desolate, history-making solemnity that cyclical transmission ushered into the kitchen. A sense that the staff’s job to make the unthinkable a digestible, formalist presentation. That uncanny, suspended tension when broadcasting without significant new information that’s a signature of live radio.
I listened to Democracy Now!, who are rebroadcasted in the UK by Resonance FM, in particular a programme from titled ‘”I Died That Day in Parkland”: Shotline Uses AI-Generated Voices of Gun Victims to Call Congress’. Host Amy Goodman conducts an interview with Manuel Oliver, father of Joaquin Oliver, a student shot dead at age 17 during the Parkland high school shooting on February 14 2018.
The spotlighting of the human voice, is a core quality of the radio medium, and the human voice is given a distressing context in this story. Using AI to resurrect the dead is a dystopian, deeply disturbing concept, yet an extremely effective lobbying tool for change. The ability radio has to spotlight unusual cultural nexus points, unique moments in history that may otherwise be overlooked make the application of radio to stress the need for political action and change a crucial means of broadcasting true varied opinion and observation on current events.
Our piece for radio concerns itself with the darker aspects of human life, memorably, Arad’s sample collage is an absurdist scraping of foaming-at-the-mouth Rush Limbaugh cursing at a caller, and Democracy Now! makes very worthwhile liberal radio programming, there is an undeniable fascination with the inanity and blatant grifting of highly suspect conservative, libertarian to far-right agitators like Limbaugh. Current affairs, and the kernels of dark, disturbing absurdity are a central throughline in our piece, from hinting and gesturing towards it, to transparently sampling and referencing specific events and individuals.