Andrew Yencken:
Sub-Tropical Radio: Boats Across The Sky

For a country that was given a jump-start into modern urban planning and industrialization, radio has been an important medium in Australia. We settled quickly along the coastline where most of us now reside but we still feel a strange bond with the interior: its seas of sand, the traces and resonances of indigenous cultures, the eroded farms that stretch endlessly between the horizons, their wire fences singing in the wind.

Since early last century we have been busy talking down the wires and over the airwaves, through the trees, across the hills, the plains, the sand, the asphalt. On AM, FM, Two Way, Short Wave, Long Wave, UHF, and Microwave we have been anxious to stay "in touch", to retain some kind of intimacy across the distance. For at least the last 30 years local artists have participated in these invisible journeys across the sky.

So many of our forebears waited for months for a letter to come from "home" on a boat and now its as if we are fabricating boats to send across the sky, to escape the isolation, eager to talk with other hemispheres. (For the networks of aboriginal communities in the north the feeling is quite different: radio is more akin to walking across the air and visiting your relations.)

As if to retain this link with "home", the ABC (our national "federal" network) for a long time has modeled itself on the BBC, borrowing from their formats and presentation styles, in the process adapting these to local needs, while commercial stations have done much the same with their more worldly cousins in the USA. But somewhere in the middle of this barrage of news, sport, and weather, opinion and expert comment, an alternative, more cosmopolitan sensibility crept in.

With the advent of FM in the 1970s public broadcasting in Australia flourished, and radio became increasingly polyphonic and muti-cultural, reflecting the diversity of our communities within communities. Local alternative rock, pop, jazz, and folk artists suddenly had exposure and many new small specialist recording labels emerged. Australian music (in whatever form it assumed) was now important and, at the same time, exotic record collections went public. Finally, contemporary art music was on the airwaves. In the early 1980's, about the time arts funding for musicians and composers was increased, shows on public radio appeared promoting local and international new and improvised music, as well as sound poetry and writing for performance.

Radio became, at the same time, specialized and eclectic, parochial and exotic, rarified and vulgarized, a kind of "sub-tropicalismo": radio that eats everything but remains resilient and aware of its homegrown identity.

In 1988 The Listening Room (TLR) was formed as a conglomeration of a number of existing production units within ABC Radio. Their aim was to commission and present creative radio making that might combine elements of radio drama, new music, performance poetry, documentaries, audio-biographies, ecological meditations, expositions on popular culture, as well as discussions on media and acoustic theory.

It was an attempt to treat sound seriously as cultural phenomena and if the idea seems reminiscent of John Cage, well, then it is. TLR and its extraordinary range of freelance contributors absorbed (amongst other things) the informality and "minimalism"of the Americans, the theatrical deconstructions of German "nues horspeil", the delight in conceptual play from the French, in the process developing a new "post-colonial" vernacular for radio.

Access to multi-track recording facilities and live-to air satellite technology allowed artists, engineers, and producers to collaborate on projects with sophisticated, detailed concepts. TLR's links with the EBU also opened up an international exchange of work. In this way TLR became as close to a contemporary sound gallery on national radio as one might imagine.

By mid-the 1990's the term "sound art" (an antipodean relation to "ars acustica", first uttered in 1963 somewhere in Cologne) was unashamedly announced at least a few times a week on air. Beyond the cutting edge hype, it seems that much of the work of this era achieved a lot in raising awareness of the use in sound both in live performance, electronic media, and as well as a componant in visual art installations. But after the recent waves of "economic rationalism", these artists are now forced to deal with a market economy, to learn to exist in an "arts industry" and produce "culturally relevant product".

And now, suddenly in the year 2000 "sound art" seems rather antiquated, as the multi-track world of Les Paul, the sound catalogues of Pierre Schaeffer, the "silences"of John Cage have been rolled into the mercenary world of post-sampler global electronica. Today dance and "difficult listening" are rapidly traded over the Internet between one cosmopolitan center and another, caught in the breathless race of self-promotion or curatorial control. It doesn't seem matter if you are from Adelaide or Aracaju, Vienna or Vancouver. Just choose your tribe.

In some cases musicians and listeners, tired of the disposable nature of sound, or "the same old morose, weird soundscapes I hear in art galleries and cafes these days"as an Italian friend once put it, have returned resolutely to the inner melodies of acoustic music. In the middle of all this whatever it was we once called "sound art" has lost its definition and I'm not sure if even Inspector Rex knows what to do.

If "sound art" for radio is fading away, like the dust on some imaginary farm, then something will soon be singing along the wires announcing new arrivals and departures, new menus, new spices. This sort of thing happens on sub-tropical radio. We eat and we build more boats.

Andrew Yencken, 11 September 2000, Melbourne