Kurt Günther, Der Radionist (1927)

Max Radler, Radiohörer (1930)

June 18, 2011, 1:00am

Radio News, July 1931

March 13, 2011, 1:29pm

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Ernst Jandl and Friederike Mayröcker: “Fünf Mann Menschen” (1968)

From the album Musik für Radio, 1950-2000

This is part of a feature on the Austrian poet and experimentalist Ernst Jandl (1925-2000), in collaboration with Continuo’s Weblog.  At Continuo’s you can find a wonderful album of Jandl’s sound poetry recorded at the BBC in 1966.

Fünf Mann Menschen (Five Man Mankind) was first broadcast on Stuttgart’s Southwestern Radio on November 14, 1968.  Created by Jandl and his companion, the poet Friederike Mayröcker, Fünf Mann Menschen was credited with turning the genre of the Hörspiel (radio play) away from its literary postwar form back toward its experimental roots in the Weimar Republic (1918-1933).  While the so-called “classical” Hörspiel that took shape after World War II was usually a straightforward spoken text (a kind of “audiobook” avant la lettre), the new Hörspiel of the 1960s sought to exploit the unique potential of the radio medium, which included the entire spectrum of sound recently unleashed in electronic music studios around the world.  (An excellent source on all this is Mark E. Cory’s essay “Soundplay: The Polyphonous Tradition of German Radio Art,” in the wonderful anthology Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde.)

Only 14 minutes in length (the typical Hörspiel was at least twice as long), Fünf Mann Menschen consists of a number of vignettes that evoke the successive stages of modern life and ironically undermine the conformist tendencies of contemporary society.  Although much of the effect of the piece is language-specific, and thus meaningless to those who don’t speak German, it can also be appreciated as a kind of voice-based musique concrète.  The creative use of stereophony in this work was also largely without precedent in the Hörspiel.  It is presented here in an excerpted version.

July 06, 2010, 11:00pm

A photo from the 1931 German Radio Exhibition in Berlin.  The original caption reads:

“Was man auf der Berliner Rundfunk-Aussstellung sehen wird! Eine Radio-Tabakspfeife, welche das angenehme des Rauchens mit dem des Radiohörens verbindet.”  (“What you’ll see at the Berlin Radio Exhibition!  A radio-tobacco pipe, which combines the pleasure of smoking with that of listening to the radio.”)

Judging by the look on this fellow’s face, it seems there might be something other than tobacco in that pipe.

April 28, 2010, 3:00pm

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Velimir Khlebnikov: “The Radio of the Future” (written in 1921; radiophonic recreation by Miguel Molina Alarcon and Leopoldo Amigo, 2006)

From the album Baku: Symphony of Sirens (Sound Experiments in the Russian Avant Garde)

In 1921, the Russian futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov wrote a remarkable essay entitled “The Radio of the Future,” in which he projects a vision of the new wireless medium as a synaesthetic panacea for modern man— “the spiritual sun of the country, a great wizard and sorceror” which will unite humanity by allowing for the instantaneous, universal transmission of text, sound, flavor, and scent.

Khlebnikov’s essay, which must be read to be believed, has been imaginitively realized in sound by the scholar and sound artist Miguel Molina Alarcon of the Laboratorio de Creaciones Intermedia at the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia in Spain.  He has used the sonic references in “The Radio of the Future” to construct  a sound-collage that evokes the heady, futuristic atmosphere of Khlebnikov’s writing.

The album from which this track is taken is one of the most remarkable documents of experimental music I have yet discovered.  Consisting of one disc of reconstructions and one disc of historical recordings, Baku: Symphony of Sirens offers entry into the bizarre and beautiful sound-world of the early 20th-century Russian avant-garde.  I will be featuring more of it in due time.

March 27, 2009, 10:15am