THIS PART WAS QUICKLY COBBLED TOGETHER FOR MY APPLICATION AND NEEDS A LOT OF WORK BEFORE I'M COMFORTABLE WITH YOU READING IT. JUST SO YOU KNOW.




Thoughts on the matter:

The successful marketing and subsequent ubiquity of personal electronic devices changes the historically social cultural practices around engagement with music and broadcast technologies. It seems to me that though marketed as a breakthrough in communication technology, new personal electronic devices and their overproduced content are often, in actuality, alienating to potential friends standing nearby.

In otherwords: say you're standing in a subway next to a friendly-looking person. You and she are absorbed in your i-pod bubble and will never in a million years speak. Or worse, you're on a Greyhound going to Poughkeepsie and the guy sitting behind you is blaring something banal from his headphones. You can't sleep.

Let's consider the following aphorisms with somnambulist i-pod bubble situation in mind:

• making music isn’t a way of expressing ideas it is a way of living them (Frith, 296)

• performance gains many of is effects through the speculative manipulation of space and time it is therefore inherently and intimately geographical… (smith)
  

and also a passage from the liner notes of my first pirate radio broadcast, Mayday 2003:

performance engages ways of knowing which stresses the unformed emergent qualities of life and which places emphasis on active engagement rather than retrospective inerpretation. And thus necessitates detournment, or the call for “a kind of resistance by the listener, and for his mobilization and redrafting as a producer”“what is called for is radio that raises the stakes, that exposes the means of production (continually, not just once), that deconstructs…” (Brecht 1927)

Word of warning for listeners intent on remaining listeners: for those living within the net…within spaces within and between ropes…for those too busy admiring the view to pay heed to immanent asphyxiation.

as party to the process, we need a typically modernist self-reflexive radio, forever foregrounding the (im)materiality of the signifier….a praxical radio…a radio that would enable vast networks of communication and participation, a radio who’s ontology would be a morass rather than a beam…


[1] the contradiction between Debord and Conrad, as I see it, lies with this concept: Whereas, the situationists seek to deflect participants from a prefabricated aesthetic, Conrad’s aesthetic invites the participant to explore an interiority she might otherwise take for granted. It is my opinion that the pirate radio’s paradoxical ontology allows for the rapid (so rapid as to be imperceptible?) movement between these two aesthetics; as a particular rough-hewn sound-field within a slick medium, its very existence is a performative push-pull for radio space.
[2] (John Corbett on Brecht 1993, 73)

Whatever the radio sets out to do it must arrive to combat that lack of consequences which makes such asses of almost all our public institutions (Brecht 1993, 15).