Drone Tones and Other Radiobodies

• Gregory Gangemi: Can I just ask you to begin at the beginning, with your broad definition of radio art?
• Gregory Whitehead: Well, for one thing, taking experimental audio and then passively broadcasting it does not qualify for me as radio art. Radio art has to be some kind of event or performance or presentation --- a “play” in the broadest sense -- that deals with the fundamental materials of radio, and the material of radio is not just amorphous sound. Radio is mostly a set of relationships, an intricate triangulation of listener, “player” and system. It’s also a huge corporate beast, and the awareness that you’re working within a highly capitalized network. Finally, there is the way in which radio is listened to, frequently in an extremely low-fi environment, with people listening on a car radio, or they’re in the kitchen and they’re cooking and they’re listening with only half an ear. To me, radio art comes to grips with all of that, it comes to grips with both the context of production is and the context of listening. That’s why when I write about radio art I try to stress the idea of relationships, not because I don’t love to play around with sound, but because cool sound is not enough.