The First Decade of the Radia Network Knut Aufermann

How It All Began “The Radia Network emerged from a series of meetings, clandestine events, late night club discussions and a lot of email exchanges between cultural radio producers across Europe.”1 This quote from the Radia website suggests that the network was a product of the zeitgeist but leaves the reader without any specific details about the events which lead to its formation. How for example did the radios know of each other’s existence? I can only answer this from the standpoint of Resonance104.4fm in (hereafter referred to as “Resonance FM”), in which I was involved from its beginnings as a temporary project in 1998 and more fully when it became a permanent fixture in 2002. Resonance FM has its roots in London’s experimental music community and was blissfully unaware of any like-minded stations in Europe until it was approached by Diana McCarty of Reboot.fm in Berlin to come and join their official launch party in early 2004. There I became privy to an already established web of personal contacts between a dozen or so radio stations around Europe. The Reboot.fm inauguration in Berlin was followed by a small European tour of Resonance FM artists, which included a visit to Radio Campus in Brussels where we met Pierre de Jaeger, who would later become the anchor for Radia stations in the Belgian capital. Later on in these travels we came face-to-face with Elisabeth Zimmermann of Kunstradio in Vienna, who had commissioned a radio series from Resonance FM.2 The year 2004 also saw another meeting of radio art practitioners at a two-day conference called RE- INVENTING RADIO at the inspirational Garage Festival in Stralsund. This forward-looking event was hosted by Kunstradio and lead by Heidi Grundmann. After receiving so much hospitality on the continent, Resonance radio artist Sarah Washington organized the “Radio Art Riot” in London in October 2004. “The four-night event brought together radio artists and thinkers from around the world in a studio-as-creative-lab situation which featured round table discussions, live radio art, performances at venues around London and streamed events from other countries. This was the first time that some of the radio stations that would later become Radia worked together—Resonance FM from the U.K., Reboot.fm from Germany, Radio Orange and Kunstradio from Austria, Tilos Radio from Hungary and Radio Cult from Bulgaria.”3

Congratulations, It’s a Network! The opportunity to meet so many like-minded radio practitioners in a relatively short space of time provided the impetus to seek out some kind of formalized cooperation and inspired the next get-together, which took place, again in Berlin, during the transmediale festival in early 2005. Under the auspices of Reboot.fm, members of ten independent European radio stations sat together and discovered that they felt closely related in their work. Whilst discussing what they could offer each other, it became clear that the most commonly available commodity for exchange was airtime. Almost everybody could commit there and then to free up a whole hour per week in their respective schedules for a joint network production—unthinkable in any traditional radio environment. The group quickly settled on the idea that the stations would take turns producing a weekly radio art show that would be broadcast across all stations in the network. “Every round of shows is called a season.” This production cycle, whereby each station invites an artist or group of artists to produce a show for the network, remains the main aspect of cooperation in Radia today. An additional artistic purpose of the network is to accomplish the joint production of ambitious live radio events. Collective live work was also a feature of the first Berlin meeting: a small FM transmitter was used for an impromptu pirate broadcast in the main transmediale venue, the House of World Cultures.

First the Show, Then the Name In April 2005 the first syndicated show was aired. It was produced by the Resonance FM program-maker Dan Wilson, who decided to record and arrange experiments with resonating pieces of metal in various states of corrosion. Unfortunately, one of the strong magnets needed for the excitation came too close to the recording laptop and erased the first and almost finished version of Corrosion Suite. Undeterred, Wilson carried on and produced in record time a second version that not only was the network’s first broadcast but also won him the prestigious Arts Foundation Award for electroacoustic composition. At this time, a permanent name for the nascent network had still not been settled upon. The working title of NERA (New European Radio Art) was, after long deliberation, abandoned in favor of Radia, which was deemed at once vague and clear enough to reach agreement by everybody involved. “The name freely refers to La Radia, Futurist manifesto written by Federico Tomaso Marinetti and Pino Masnata in 1933. The network’s founders dropped the La to distance themselves from the Futurists’ political views. As it stands alone, ‘radia’ is simply ‘radio’ or ‘radios’ in some languages.” With hindsight, this choice over NERA has allowed the expansion of the network beyond Europe without having to change its name.

Teething Problems The rapid preparation for the first season of programs included building a website4 and learning how to use the Brussels-based open source platform “Radioswap” to share the audio files. Each station had to fulfill its promise to clear an hour in their schedules for the Radia show, and production deadlines needed to be taken seriously since delays affected everybody. Besides these technical problems and solutions for the dissemination of radio works, one question had not yet been thoroughly explored: What do we mean by radio art? The individual responses solicited by the network’s members did not always result in unanimous approval. Most stations started from a blank canvas and transferred the responsibility of answering this question to the artists they recruited to produce a show, providing them only with a minimal briefing. The question of what precisely constitutes radio art continued to be a topic of debate within the network but was never answered successfully. An attempt in 2008 to come up with a definition by instigating a Wikipedia entry for “radio art” eventually ran out of steam due to the disparity of the accrued contributions.5 The Radia Network remains committed to the production of shows as a practical way of exploring the question in further depth. After four seasons it was decided to halve the length of the shows to twenty-eight minutes, so as to reduce the workload on Radia artists who were challenged “to make radio that works all across Europe and beyond.” Remarkably, there was no pressure from the station programmers to vacate precious schedule time: some asked local radio artists to fill the remaining half hour, or they established a repeat slot to preserve their commitment to airing one hour of Radia offerings per week. At the same time, further discussions took place which cemented the norm that contributions should be original productions for the network. Now—ten years, thirty-three seasons, and more than five hundred shows after its inception— Radia can look back on an impressive catalogue of radiophonic experiments: conceptual, funny, multilingual, silent, anarchic, educational, traumatic, fictional, bold, beautiful, and sometimes even positively unlistenable.

The Golden Years of Radio Festivals The establishment of the Radia Network was greatly aided by a rapid succession of festivals that showcased the international radio art scene. Additionally, the majority of the founding Radia stations started working together in late 2005 as co-organizers of a project called “radio.territories.” This EU-funded series of interventions in public space, broadcasts, and meetings was led by Radio Orange and culminated in a conference called media-space-society in September 2006 in Vienna. At these gatherings, there was always time set aside for informal meetings to ensure that Radia would be the lasting legacy of the radio.territories project. During the same period, three other radio festivals took place that provided ample ground for consolidation of existing contacts as well as the chance to recruit new stations to the network. These were: Engrenages in Marseille, RadiaLx in Lisbon, and RadioRevolten in Halle. Both Radio Grenouille, the radio station that hosted Engrenages, and Radio Corax, the organizer of RadioRevolten, went on to join Radia a few months after their festivals. RadiaLx in 2006, the first festival in a series of radio art biennials hosted by Radio Zero in Lisbon, reinforced the already familial atmosphere in the network. Here it was suggested that Radia should try to double its membership of ten stations. Later in 2006, the first station outside Europe joined, New York’s free103point9, and the goal of twenty stations was finally reached in early 2011.

The members of Radia at the time of writing,6 ordered by date of their first production for the network: 2005 Resonance104.4fm (London, UK) Radio Campus (Brussels, Belgium) Rádio Zero (Lisbon, Portugal) Kanal 103 (Skopje, Macedonia) Reboot.fm (Berlin, Germany) Orange 94.0 (Vienna, Austria) Kunstradio (Vienna, Austria) – non-contributing affiliate 2006 Radio Grenouille (Marseille, France) free103point9 WGXC 90.7-FM (New York, USA) 2007 Radio Panik (Brussels, Belgium) Soundart Radio (Dartington, UK) Radio Corax (Halle, Germany) 2008 (Frankfurt, Germany) XLAir (Brussels, Belgium) CKUT (Montreal, Canada) 2009 Radio One (Dunedin, New Zealand) CFRC (Kingston, Canada) 2010 Radio Helsinki (Graz, Austria) Radio Papesse (Siena, Italy) Radio WORM (Rotterdam, Netherlands) 2011 Escuela Creativa de Radio TEA FM (Zaragoza, Spain) 2012 Radio Student (Ljubljana, Slovenia) JET FM (Nantes, France) 2013 Radio Nova (Oslo, Norway) 2014 Radio Campus Paris (Paris, France) 2015 Eastside FM (Sydney, Australia) 2016 Kol HaCampus (Tel Aviv, Israel)

Almost without exclusion, the radio stations that make up Radia are independent local cultural broadcasters. Three of the most common official designations are “campus radio” (e.g., Radio Campus and CFRC, which are based at universities), “” (e.g., Resonance FM and Radio Grenouille, which serve local communities or groups of interest), and “free radio” (e.g., Radio Orange and Radio X, which advocate free speech and grass-roots media). In reality, each station inhabits its own unique ecological niche on the dial. Some have outgrown their original remit, outwitted their original host, outlived their initial temporary license, or simply camped out on the Internet. More than a few have a history of pirate broadcasting. Those who broadcast on FM owe their legal existence to tireless campaigning of media activists and the goodwill of radio regulators. Independent radio does not necessarily mean impartial radio. This can cause consternation on a political level, as was witnessed at the beginning of 2011 when the new nationalist government in Hungary took a disliking to the aptly named Tilos Radio (Forbidden Radio), one of the founder members of the Radia Network. An international media outcry saved the station from crippling fines and possible closure, however in 2014 the media regulator created new obstacles for their license renewal. Tilos’s regular contributions to the Radia Network petered out in 2007. When thinking about the various forms of radio stations that are collected within the Radia Network, it becomes obvious that this so-called “third tier” of radio adds extra color and unpredictability to an FM dial that is dominated by “format radio” from commercial stations and state broadcasters.

Half an Hour, Half a Day, Half a Station Every now and then the opportunity has arisen for Radia to go beyond the self-imposed twenty- eight-minute radio art capsule. The most elaborate cooperation between the networked stations to date was a four-hour-long live radio show called Radioactive Radiophony which happened during the Radiophonic festival in Brussels in October 2007. The final evening of the festival was bequeathed to Radia to create a broadcasting experiment that would appeal to a live audience in an old church and to listeners at their radios alike. It was decided to divide the broadcast into twelve twenty-minute time slots, three of which were filled by live music acts in the church, with the remaining nine being outside broadcasts by Radia stations. These incoming radio streams were not left untreated, however, but became subject to real-time “contamination” by radio artists present in the church before being sent out again for the actual broadcast. There was a table with assorted foley instruments, live musicians, and a text about a demented flea that were woven in and out of the incoming offerings of the remote stations. The audience enjoyed witnessing the hustle and bustle of the radio show, and also the blend it achieved with the performances in the church. Altogether thirteen stations broadcast the final live mix of the evening. This included a temporary festival frequency driven by a 500W transmitter on the church top that caused some disgruntlement with the City of Brussels, one of the festival sponsors, who at an inconveniently late stage refused to officially sanction its use. Another transmission experiment that grew out of the Radia Network was called Station Melt. In 2010, triggered by the transmediale festival in Berlin, two Radia members decided to find out what happens when you fuse two radio stations together, along with their producers and schedules, into one joint channel. Resonance FM from London and Herbstradio from Berlin agreed to meld together for four days, intermingling shows, presenters, and languages with a decent dose of live input from transmediale guests. Given that Herbstradio itself was a conglomerate of Reboot.fm and its slightly reluctant partner in the adventure, Radiopiloten, this potential recipe for disaster worked rather smoothly and proved that members of the Radia Network were capable of collaboration right up to a complete amalgamation of partner radio stations.

Satellite Dreams Some ideas for further collaborations within the network did not come to fruition, often due to financial constraints. Here I would like to mention just one, namely, the proposal for a Radia station on a satellite channel. The idea to create a Radia satellite station for a European geostationary orbit emerged shortly after the founding of the network. The content of this meta-Radia station was to be a “best of” the collective live output of all the member stations, a kind of controlled channel-hopping from one show to the next across all borders and languages. Eventually the immense effort needed to raise funds for a satellite channel and to run the operation consigned the plans to a drawer. In 2013 the idea was resurrected in the form of the Radia Relay. With the help of the open-source software “Airtime,” a public audio webstream7 was created that picks up and relays the live output of Radia stations according to a schedule that was volunteered by the network members. In this ubiquitous format it could now also feed into other forms of transmission. Radia stations are typically found on local FM bands and online yet have an interest in the use of hitherto unattainable broadcast technologies. For example, it is currently difficult to acquire access to AM shortwave and transmission for artistic play. If we are lucky, that might change in the future with the coming obsolescence of analogue formats. Organizational Structure The organizational structure of the Radia Network has been the subject of many rumors. Is there a steering committee? Who decides which stations can become members? Are the artists paid for Radia shows? Do they have a secret handshake? The exact nature of how Radia functions is often not completely clear even to its own members. That’s because there is no official structure, no president, no treasurer, no statutes, no steering committee. The individual member stations are by and large tightly run entities, often with a nonprofit status, who can provide a legal framework should it be required, for example in the case of applications for funding. The week-to-week running of Radia is done on a purely voluntary basis. Those who have the time and feel so inclined do the essential housekeeping and provide support for the lean infrastructure. Even though some of these responsibilities have changed hands over the years, there has always been an up-to-date website, a working file-exchange mechanism, and a backbone of committed members willing to draw up schedules, send out reminders, and ensure that the output is up to standard. Radia is an on-air community: its members experience each other mainly through transmissions. The commissioned artists are rarely paid a fee;8 having their works broadcast on all of the network’s radio stations is the only enticement Radia can offer the producers. The promotion of the network is up to the individual members and stations. Reboot.fm supported the nomination of Radia for an award at the Ars Electronica Festival, which led to a honorary mention at the 2007 Prix Ars Electronica in the category “digital communities.” This came as a great surprise to the other stations that had previously been unaware of this effort. Rather than being a lobby organization on behalf of its members, Radia offers solidarity and support among stations by sharing funding applications and writing letters of support should a member’s broadcast license be in jeopardy. Radia grows at an organic pace, adding a few stations to the network each year. Potential new members are introduced through personal contacts and are vetted by discussion on the Radia e-mail list, to which the coordinators of each station are subscribed. It speaks for the strength of the network that it attracts and integrates budding and seasoned broadcasters alike.

Content Hundreds of hours of radio material, live and prerecorded, have been produced for Radia. The artists who have created this body of work are the network’s vanguard. Perhaps one day their works will attract the attention of an art historian, or serve as the basis for a thesis on radio art. A large proportion of the shows are available on archive.org as well as through the podcast feeds provided by Radia stations such as Radio Papesse. Some members additionally keep private archives of all works, including those that cannot be released into the public domain. The opening of a Pandora’s box of copyright concerns has, on a regular basis, erupted into fierce debates within Radia. Should artists be forced into using Creative Commons licenses if they want to produce work for the network? In the end, the artistic freedom of the producers has always been considered second to none. Nearly all terrestrial stations are allowed to broadcast any type of content, so there is usually no problem with Radia works being aired. Subsequent podcasts, however, can only be made of the shows that do not contain copyrighted material. There are further idiosyncratic laws to be considered country by country, which do affect Radia broadcasts. UK and US radio authorities are not keen on bad language, whereas Austrian stations are forbidden to retransmit any snippets of audio culled from other radio or television broadcasters. And when it comes to the use of silence within a show, some radio authorities enter the realm of fairy tales when explaining why more than a few seconds of soundlessness contravenes their guidelines. The Radia website offers detailed descriptions of all of the programs (searchable by date, season, and member station) plus information about special events. Several Radia retrospectives 9 have been curated over the years for transmission or exhibitions, and a variety of compilations10 have been produced to showcase the network’s output in a compressed format.

Outlook After ten years of operation, Radia behaves like a well-oiled mechanism. As long as the local coordinators at their respective radio stations continue to commission new artists, it can be presumed that the weekly productions for the network will carry on for the next decade as well. Connections to other like-minded groups will most likely be extended and new member stations from across the globe will emerge. Future radio festivals will hopefully enable a long-awaited meeting of representatives of all Radia stations, bringing together artists and organizers from around the world. It is doubtful whether the collected works of Radia can bring about a unifying theory of radio art. The detected emissions in the radio particle accelerator are far too divergent to point to a single definition. Each artist develops his or her own type of radio art that is influenced by the cultural bedrock of their radiophonic home turf. There is still a lot to explore and discover in the world of transmissions, past and future.

Notes 1 Radia website, http://www.radia.fm/?page_id=2 2 The production of five shows as part of the curated by . . .s series for Kunstradio was entrusted to Xentos “Fray” Bentos aka Harmon E. Phraisyar, who instead of pocketing the fee encouraged us to carry out this tour to collect raw material for his oeuvre The future of all radio is silence, http://www.kunstradio.at/PROJECTS/CURATED_BY/RESONANCE/ 3 All italicized quotes in this essay have been excerpted from the Wikipedia article on Radia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radia 4 The first website can still be found here: http://radia.constantvzw.org 5 The straw that broke the camel’s back was the insistence of a Greek music-oriented Web- streaming channel named Radio Art (who have recently added “anti-stress” music to their playlist) to include themselves under the header “radio art programs.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_art 6 Past Radia members include Radio Cult (Sofia, Bulgaria), Tilos Radio (Budapest, Hungary), Lemurie TAZ (Prague, Czech Republic), Curious Broadcast (Dublin, Ireland), and Radio Valerie (Melbourne, Australia). 7 The Radia Relay can be accessed at: http://radia.out.airtime.pro:8000/radia_a.m3u 8 As an exception, Radio Grenouille and Radio One have managed to successfully find funding to financially reward their artists for producing Radia shows. 9 Most notably a complete retrospective with more than 200 hours of Radia material was broadcast on Mobile Radio BSP, the contribution of Sarah Washington and Knut Aufermann to the 30th São Paulo Art Biennial in 2012. http://mobile-radio.net/?page_id=1447 10 Radia compilations available from Kunstradio: http://www.kunstradio.at/2007B/16_12_07en.html http://www.kunstradio.at/2007B/30_12_07en.html http://www.kunstradio.at/2008A/06_01_08en.html http://www.kunstradio.at/2008B/28_12_08en.html http://www.kunstradio.at/2010A/03_01_10.html http://www.kunstradio.at/2015A/15_02_15.html