Perceptual Gymnastics and the New Context of Radio Art

An Interview with Radio Artists Rev. Dwight Frizzel and Jay Mandeville

This interview is already, in a sense, history. The "new context" of radio art has, in some respects, passed since this interview was conducted in 1995. The interview happened sometime between the relative obscurity of the concept of radio art in America and a minor surge in scholarly and creative interest that is still with us. From the moment in 1992 when Douglas Kahn said that "Only recently have individuals begun to describe themselves as sound and sound installation artists, audio and radio artists" (Wireless Imagination) to today, a kind of consciousness has evolved that operates in the awareness that perhaps the radio artist has always existed, but in ways that eluded the descriptive process. (We can speak, now at least, of those radio artists whose madness or spiritualism was the source and substance of their transmissions, or of artists who, in aestheticizing this madness fostered new cultural insanities that cast disrepute on their methods—the work of the Italian futurists has only recently undergone reevaluation.) Thus, the theoretical work of Allen Weiss, as well as others, raises the question of the possibility of historical redescription; radio’s Edenic exemption from signification and from disciplinary as well as inter-disciplinary structures has resulted in a sort of present tense overload. The repressed of a visual art history returns. The results are not displeasing, for example The Cultural History of Ventriloquism (forthcoming) that Steven Conner pieces together is a sprawling and brilliant history of the thrown voice, from sibylline oracles to the sonic revenants of a post-Charlie McCarthy world.

Work with radio has come to resemble the mediumistic, the shamanistic, or even the mad from which its repressed history has emerged. At the same time, radio as a technology and as a paradigm for thought now suggests computer virtualities and cybernetic feedback. Somewhere in the space between these two poles (archaic, supernatural and futurist, hyperreal), the radio medium enjoys its present lack of a proper account of itself/himself/herself, while reinventing information for newer contexts. The radio artist takes on a variety of epistemological challenges, thinks across paradigms, and broadcasts even without the presence of an apparatus. If radio is, potentially, an "engine of perpetual renewal," then accounts of its art should be no less.

Radio artists Reverend Dwight Frizzel and Jay Mandeville have performed their perceptual gymnastics within this open space of radio. If Edison’s process of invention was 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration, Frizzel and Mandeville’s ethereal and electronic inventions go beyond an idea of wholeness that any 100% would imply. Their 1% is a manic, flawed, and spiritual force connecting up with all the 1%’s that ever floated through radio’s ionic force-fields. 1% is not nearly enough; Frizzel and Mandeville exceed and are successful in that. When I first met Frizzel, what struck me, apart from the elusiveness of his status as "Reverend," was that while maintaining his eccentricities, he was able to negotiate production politics with ease and irony. I have never met Jay Mandeville, who has collaborated with Frizzel for over fifteen years; his presence in the following phone interview was stunning. As was Frizzel’s. Much was in the voice. Single words took on a life of their own, untranscribable here.

The following is an edited version of a phone interview with radio artists Rev. Dwight Frizzel and Jay Mandeville of Kansas City, Missouri, which took place on August 16, 1995. Frizzel and Mandeville are the producers of the radio series From Ark to Microchip which includes such shows as "The Phenomenological Telephone," "Some Indeterminate Moments with John Cage," and "Elvis: A Space Odyssey." These works combine original music with free-floating poetic commentary on a wide range of media and cultural happenings. In a press release for their production company, Wabi Media (wabi is Japanese for a flaw which creates an elegant whole), they describe their shows as, "designed to hold attention, exhibit a novelty of sound, illuminate cultural and historical trends towards self-realization, and provoke unusual association in the listeners." What radio became in this interview was both ghostly and mundane, a machine that blurred its own mechanical borders, a technology with a history, and a technology that challenges history.

* * *

Milutis: One of the things that I want to ask you first off is something about radio history, radio art history, and avant-garde practice within it. People have raised a lot of questions about "sound history" recently, and no one account is satisfactory. It is almost as if radio's intimate space is an incommensurable space, because we experience it interiorly. It's so subjective that to talk about its history, you are immediately doing something false. It just seems that everybody has a different take, everybody has a different mix. One of the things about your pieces is that they incorporate historiological as well as futurological subjects. Since avant-garde radio art tends to challenge temporal structures, are your aural "histories" challenging the very possibility of historiography?

Mandeville: Well there's always a disjunction between history and the way that we reinscribe it. Each generation. On the one hand, there's an extreme limitation created by historicism, on the other hand there's a kind of explosion that enables the message value to re-orient itself and determine it toward expansiveness and multi-signification. Instead of keeping cyclically turning in upon itself, radio creates an engine of perpetual renewal.

Frizzel: We work with radio from that point of view. By expanding the possibility of subjective and multiple points of view, we are asking the listener participating to image and re-imagine a radio work. So we're trying to develop an aesthetic of listening and participation in a medium that is generally thought of as broadcast (where you're disseminating information from one point to many). So there's kind of an irony in that mix of attitudes.

Mandeville: The ear taking hold and then the body creating its own speech, in response.

Frizzel: With radio, part of the effect of radio is to disengage the body, or disembody the voice; the effect is similar to the effect of the phonograph, the "wireless imagination," the consciousness across void. It's almost like a mediumship or an oracle for something in that way.

Mandeville: A Hindu or an Eskimo can dream radio without an apparatus.

Milutis: In your pieces, especially in the "Ark to Microchip" series, even though radio, as you say, is disembodied, you also seem to collect a sort of star system; I mean you have everybody from Erik Satie to Diamanda Galas, John Cage, Emanuel Swedenborg, Marconi, Philip Dick, Elvis. So you do have these "bodies." How do they function within a disembodied medium?

Mandeville: They are the cogs and wheels of the desiring machinery, you might say, to be anti-Oedipal for a moment. They are the servants of the enlightenment that we wish to navigate.

Frizzel: They are signposts. They're catalysts for us, for our own kind of gyrations in experience.

Mandeville: It's like they are flowing without borders, they move into an ahistorical mode outside of their biography and become ghostly embodiments.

Frizzel: But very present. "They picked us" is more accurate, I mean, from the way we do research.

Mandeville: Satie made us do it.

Frizzel: They become alive, and they have personality and nuance, and they're complex. People have all of that. They also encourage us to imagine and move in ways that expand our experience and open up things and us for our own individual experience. In that sense, it's like a gnostic orientation. We're sharing that same kind of impetus and navigating through and imagining these complex personalities that also intersect with all various kinds of cultural happenings.

Mandeville: And the interiorization of the voice is what catalyzes it.

Milutis: The way you speak about your work seems very mystical and a lot of your pieces have a mystical orientation, intersecting spirituality and the voice (the disembodied voice) and the technology. Could you speak a little more about that, because that interests me?

Mandeville: Well, we're imitating nature in the manner of its working.

Frizzel: And we're also working in a peculiar medium that is inspires these intersections. The word itself "medium" is interesting and would have its antecedents in nineteenth-century table-tapping and seance.

Mandeville: The whole mystical extension of the mechanization miracle that was taking place was also extending, as Dwight was suggesting, into the spiritualist realm. Popular spiritualism was a kind of a dark mirror through which subjectivity was reentering the machine paradigm.

Frizzel: Exactly. All of a sudden, the authority of who was telling you what--the authority of facts--was challenged. Virtually anyone could be a medium and a table could tell you information, or other objects.

Mandeville: The authority becomes purely subjective. You choose your own authority. What do you want to believe? You wanna believe a table or the president?

Milutis: And that subjectivity that the "spiritual telegraph" (as they called it) ushered in also ushered in questions about things like the rights of women and socialism. So there was already some kind of radical import once the voice was taken away from its Enlightenment moorings.

Dwight: Exactly. That's probably why there were so many women in the spiritualist movement.

Mandeville: But the alliances and flirtations of the various spirit-masters and their melodramatic encounters and rivalries became exactly a refabrication of the whole imperialist pull-and-tug going on in this relentless mechanization impulse.

Frizzel: You were talking about the way we look at history. You can look at a text as fact, you can look at it as a narrative structure with these details, you can look at it as names of places, as poems.

Mandeville: Or as a machine, or a trap.

Frizzel: We are using information that was probably collected under a very different paradigm. We are reinventing or reimaging that same information. It's a mulching process, really.

Mandeville: An attempt to create a deliberate short-circuit back into the erotic universe using incantatory rhetoric, the tribal drum if necessary. Perceptual gymnastics create an absolute exercise, you might say, that prepares us for another kind of context.

Frizzel: We don't have any journalistic pretense, so, if a fact is interesting and compelling, then it's in.

Mandeville: We don't necessarily consider the source from a traditional journalistic manner. We just more or less consult the text and try to understand the spirit of what we are reading in history.

Frizzel: And some of these personalities really grab us. Like I said it is almost as if they choose us. At times, we are able to establish a sense of reality and hold and dialogue with them.

Mandeville: We siphon off different kinds of flows and redirect them back to the postmodern relations that we are all living through now.

Milutis: To segue from this "now," and from talking about the personalities that you have used in your radio art, I want us to swing into the personalities of the people who are making radio art, or maybe the conditions of making radio art, the material conditions, as opposed to the spiritual. I was just reading a heated exchange in The Drama Review between Richard Kostelanetz and Jacki Apple all about the politics of broadcasting radio art in America: where it gets made, and who makes it, and if it is actually here or elsewhere. Could you talk about broadcast politics, because you mention the dynamic of broadcast, but you also distribute tapes and you have live performances in real space? On the one hand, what are your comments about the constraints of broadcast structures, and on the other hand, what are the possibilities that are there?

Frizzel: First I want to reiterate that when we are talking about radio, it is from one point to many, and because of that, of course, there has been this gravitation of control and subversion and the way that it is used--by its very nature--it has a kind of fascistic network that it has set up. We are trying to subvert that set-up by what we are doing. What we are doing is very much an alternative to the way radio normally operates.

Mandeville: We operate in a kind of fullness, a full awareness of the independence of the articulated voice and the independence of the listening ear and the absolute freedom that dwells in that paradigm or symbiosis.

Frizzel: And meaning can come from a collision of elements rather than from espousing our opinions or even answering the usual journalistic "who, what, when, and where." It is a different game. So in that sense, it is alternative radio. For us, to a certain extent, it is a struggle. We don't always have funding, we are always struggling to have the facilities and the money and the things that are needed to put these programs together. On the other hand, we have also slipped into mainstream radio stations, or, I should say, strong, powerful, widely acceptable radio stations that like to broadcast our shows. But it isn't something that is supporting us, or anything like that.

Mandeville: It's done out of a desire to overcome barriers and societal codes. If that's Platonic, we have more or less have disengaged ourselves from, as you were saying, the journalistic "w's", and that includes investing in the politics of what coterie decided what, what priority is placed on the production and its tangential accessories. To us that is clutter, it is something that has to be disregarded to continue inscribing or creating.

Frizzel: For me, I do have to navigate that kind of thinking, that world, to communicate and to do the business that is necessary to keep our show on the air.

Mandeville: But only with the proper seriousness that it deserves, rather than an excessive veneration or obsequiousness.

Frizzel: It's a roll that can be taken on. We are not trying to necessarily change radio from without, or even necessarily trying to change it from within.

Mandeville: We are using radio to talk about everything outside of radio.

Frizzel: Right. About the space in between, about this virtual theater in our minds.

Mandeville: Vertigos ...

Frizzel: Possibility of multiple points of view that can be imagined ...

Mandeville: Journeys through intensities ...

Milutis: Why do think that radio as a technology has (through its history as it intersected with art and television culture) these idealistic possibilities, these utopian possibilities, or even a possibility to critique, if one could only do something that was "faithful" to the radio medium? By saying "faithful to the radio medium," I mean, like you said before, playing with the multi-signification, the craziness of radio untamed.

Mandeville: What we want to do is like a synthesis, a synthesis that takes us beyond these society-engendered negative disjunctions of our shared reality and becomes more inclusive and eliminates distance using those terms and allows us to drift between terms without constantly asserting primality and putting that in concrete, and allowing some drift to take place in the listener and carrying them along that stream in order to reach a singularity which takes us beyond encoding, previous encoding.

Frizzel: To be faithful to radio is to have respect for the listener and that is almost even seen as a singular experience, rather than this mass media model. A listener should have the mobility to make up his or her own mind.

Mandeville: To be alone with radio in any space.

Milutis: You mentioned encoding. The issue of encoding and writing as a force of violence reminds me of your piece "The Inaudible Postscript," which of course has a very titillating title in that sense, because it is playing on the written and what can be heard. Maybe you could talk about your writing process or the intersection of words--as Marinetti called them "words in freedom"--with a broadcast medium. Do they have a different function? What is it that you want to be doing when you create your radio poetry?

Mandeville: Phonemes resemble hieroglyphs and listening resembles writing and thinking.

Frizzel: And in broadcast, words occupy a vast space, I think.

Mandeville: But nevertheless, the space is being subordinated to the voice. The voice is colonizing the space and creating a world of representation that can be life-changing.

Frizzel: When you think of radio sometime you think of the voice, the resonant voice, and everyone's getting their. . .

Mandeville: Two-cents in.

Frizzel: Their two-cents in, getting their mouths really close to the mike and overloading and you get that resonance and everything--the proximity effect. But that's part of the whole mythos of radio: that incredibly full, present, deep, resonant, Orson Welles-type voice. No wonder Orson was so popular on the radio. It was the laugh of the Shadow, it was the incredibly rich voice that has all kinds of signals going on in it. If it was serious, the tongue was in the cheek. If it was violent, there was a flippancy to it. So the voice and radio has sort of been, at least historically, an inseparable combination.

Mandeville: The resonance is everywhere, on every side, at every level, as is the difference and intensity and signification.

Frizzel: Well, in our effort to exteriorize consciousness, it is interesting that certain media have emerged that also are working to disembody the voice, to debone the head. Radio is right on the forefront of that movement.

Mandeville: Right back to the spirit mediums. One of the statements that Poe made about spirit mediums concerned his quandary at their indefinability. What a medium "is" passes comprehension. Historically, radio has always been subjected to a relentless colonization with limiting definitions that we basically try to de-lyricize ourselves out of and abolish the clock and, taking the spirit literally, we breathe out the pneuma, the spirit, and create worlds (if possible). At least we try.

Milutis: You mention externalizing consciousness. The new computer technologies are sometimes hailed as things that will radically change and manipulate consciousness. Somehow, through this new technology, there is the old promise, not only of externalizing consciousness, but also, well, the New Age has been a concept that has been around since the mid-eighteen-hundreds. There's a historical imagination that says that somehow, we are all going to be connected up in this community, the whole ghostly but secular world will be present to us through various media. We will be supposedly thinking through the same issues, eradicating misunderstanding, very "together." I mean, it's that dream-time concept that is somewhat nice to think of and has the same promises Victorian spiritualism had, but what about commodification of or alienation within how information is used and disseminated?

Frizzel: Well there is always going to be somebody. You can have the most monophonic view and linear model for how you are using your information and your intent can be one thing. Take for example our shows. Is everyone going to remember the same thing and come out with the exact same conclusions?

Mandeville: Our experience has been, no.

Frizzel: Even we change our minds about them.

Mandeville: Right. Some shows are the least favorites of one friend and the favorite show of another acquaintance.

Frizzel: Anyway, the point is that the media seems to be going this way and there has been a lot of criticism coming out and the government is toying with the idea of regulating virtual computer spaces. As far as virtual reality goes, you know, language is virtual reality. We are interested in this sense of virtual theater. And when I say "theater," I mean play, a playful taking-on of various roles. There's someone acting, and they are who they are, but they are also acting like someone else. They are taking on that role as the viewer, or listener. We have that possibility too of taking on multiple roles, playing it from many points of view.

Mandeville: Ventriloquizing the spirit through multiple personalities.

Frizzel: In that sense, are you saying that everyone's thinking the same thing, or are we getting more schizophrenic and, see, it is all happening at the same time, all those tendencies, and the problem with talking about technology and technological impact and its impact on consciousness (which obviously we are very interested in) is that you risk reducing something to just technology when it is a deeper paradigm that is at issue. You know, the technology might be symptomatic of or simultaneous with other trends. That's one thing, in the way that we deal with history. We also, whether it's accurate, are getting into the mindset of people of a different time.

Mandeville: Transcending the historical tic of our own era and attempting to open these abysses of alternatives and we'll pound relentlessly against the gates of limiting, oppressive ideation that makes various historical attempts to surge up and override the transcendental myth that has been created by history. We aren't going to be pulled down by that.

Frizzel: And there are those kind of tendencies that are also somehow inscribed in the most authoritative histories. You know, there's nothing that is purely propaganda in that sense and you can navigate texts in so many ways, and they reveal something different every time.

* * *