Transmissions from the Radio Midnight Interview with Aki Onda
Text by Xenia Benivolski
The Spanish version published in the book La Materia del Sonido by Gris Tormenta, edited by Cinthya García Leyva
When I first encountered Aki Onda’s work Nam June’s Spirit Was Speaking to Me (Recital, 2020) at the Toronto Biennial in 2019, I was researching militarized sound technologies and recording techniques that lend themselves to speculative ideas around the paranormal, ideas that develop in the gap between reasoning and personhood, collectivity and individuality, and the nature of transmission. I was taken by Onda’s brilliant juxtaposition of the collective, seemingly endless chatter of the radio with Nam June Paik’s own spiritual ambitions. Suddenly, there was slippage between two possible truths: was Paik really speaking to Onda through the radio, or was it merely a projection of a seeking psyche? The answer, of course, is both.
The past few years have increased our reliance on communication from the authorities and each other. Seeing the rise of big activism through social media, I’ve become increasingly interested in the polyphonies that sway our temporal, political, and personal boundaries and establish new paradigms. The radio is an interminable, moving machine that shapes the narrative of the media age. By plucking small pieces out of the massive chorus, Onda invites leaky voices, augmented memories, dreams and ghosts into our reality.
Xenia Benivolski (XB) Aki, tell me a little bit about Transmissions from the Radio Midnight (Dinzu Artefacts, 2023).
Aki Onda (AO) This project started around 2006 when I bought an AM/FM radio with a cassette recorder in its compact body called Sony TCM-F59. So, I could record any kind of radio program. Around that time, I was frequently traveling all over the world as a touring musician. As I had a sleeping problem, it became a habit to tune in the radio in my hotel room in the late evening before falling asleep. And, I just loved listening to voices, which were foreign to me. Somehow those unfamiliar languages sounded very musical to my ears, and it didn’t matter if I understood the meanings or not. I also enjoyed playing the radio. I would scan through frequencies, switch between programs, and juxtapose different languages. When I stayed in a city closer to the border, at times I could manage to catch two or three languages at times, if frequencies are overlapping. For this album, I picked some of my favourite segments from radio recordings I gathered over the course of roughly a decade. Each fragment is presented as it was originally captured. Because of the unpredictable nature of radio frequencies and the manual process of tuning in, they include various accidental sounds, such as static noise and radio interference.
But actually, I had a habit of listening to the radio since I was a child, and I just loved it. So, it’s a sort of lifelong interest longer than making this album.
XB Was the radio a way for you to connect to the place, or the country you happen to be in?
AO Yeah, as I was using AM/FM radio, I would naturally tune in many local stations, and I could sense something intrinsic to the city or country.
After this habit made an accumulation of the radio recordings, around 2012, I started editing them for an album, which was a prototype of Transmissions from the Radio Midnight.I released that earlier version from London based cassette label My Dance The Skull. And, Michael Snow’s cassette album 2 Radio Solos (Freedom In A Vacuum, 1988) was an inspiration, or it was a sort of point of departure. NY-based guitarist Alan Licht and I began improvising music together with Michael in 2005 as a trio. We three were all radio lovers and talked about it a lot. Michael gave me a copy of 2 Radio Solos at one of our earlier concerts, and I played it on stage sometimes with them. Anyway, 2 Radio Solos was recorded in a remote cabin in Newfoundland, where Michael and his wife Peggy Gale spent every summer, and he caught all frequencies with his shortwave radio. We hear a series of fragmented news, various programs, and traditional music from all over the world appearing and disappearing as he constantly tweaks the tuning knob. Just one take for each solo and no post-production. I thought I could do something opposite as I was recording AM/FM radio frequencies and traveling around the world (laughter). And, as I continued this project, one thing became crystal clear to me — I wanted to focus on radio as a medium to present voice or voices. As you know, there's always speech or talking.
XB We have such a personal relationship with tapes. I was wondering what you think about the degradation of the media. Does it play a role in privileging certain memories?
AO You know, the reason I've been using the cassette medium is, even though we have been into this digital era, I'm really interested in covering all aspects of memory. As human beings, our brain functions a certain way: we remember certain things, but forget the others. Then, we tend to manipulate them we like. It is quite fluid and it can be affected by any current state of mind. My friend and radio-activist Tetsuo Kogawa once told me “We don’t perceive the ‘clock-time’ but experience the time itself that happens only once and only here.”’ That applies to our
notion of memory for me. With the cassettes, I feel that I can mimic that sort of ever-shifting-
state and fragility of the human memory system. Because the sounds won’t be as you heard in reality but they will be modified a certain way with heavy compression, disintegration, and even deterioration.
XB When distorted, the radio becomes a ghostly, disembodied voice. It reminds me of the first work of yours that I encountered, Nam June’s Spirit Was Speaking to Me (Recital, 2020). That work includes recorded radio transmissions that come together in a sort of audio collage through which you channel the voice of the late South Korean artist, who also ironically worked with electronic transmissions, and was influenced by spiritual ceremony, specifically Korean Mudang shamans. Radio waves always seem to have paranormal associations. What causes this acousmatic effect?
AO I think it’s because the radio waves are electromagnetic radiation, and the transmission of information moves through a space like light or microwave. It’s not visible and audible but it appears through the medium such as radio. So other than the sound we listen to, there is a ghost-like flow of energy, and that forms an electromagnetic field.
XB Do electromagnetic fields affect the human body?
AO I’m not able to explain it with scientific terms. But I can tell you from my experiences … If I move a radio, interferences between my body and an electromagnetic field generate various kinds of noises and modulate sounds from the speaker - like … holding a radio with my arm, shaking with my hand, and changing a distance to my body, and so on. It’s partly controllable but partly not since not just my body, the whole environment such as room, other people’s bodies, certain kinds of materials and electronics devices around also affect. It’s really interesting to play radio. It was also the same when I recorded Transmissions from the Radio Midnight. I was in a hotel room, and while listening to the radio, I could play with interference with my body lying on a bed. Even a subtle movement - like … touching a radio gently or changing a direction of the antenna modifies the sounds. You can hear them a lot in the recordings. So, it's not just about catching radio waves. It's also about creating electromagnetic fields and being a part of it.
XB It's like the radio is always there. But when you turn a switch, you plug into it. Like there's a score you can tune into at any moment. An otherworldly shape, or entity, or a ghost… but the radio, as a system, makes it audible, understood. Something that strikes me as consistent in your work is a gesture towards that invisible, spectral aspect of sound. And in another way, a temporal practice, because you collect and release large amounts of recordings that are snippets of time.
AO Yeah, you are right. Radio is a system covering the entire globe. And, all chatters happening everywhere simultaneously and it goes on forever until the medium lasts. It’s enormous! I was imagining an ocean of voices, and what I caught on this album is a tiny drop of ocean.
In 2016, a Dutch research project, the Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision, launched a website called Radio Garden. It’s a 3D geolocation system in which you can access programs of thousands of online radio stations all over the world, and it once went viral around that time. I enjoyed it and felt a sensation of hearing all the radio waves at once, and it was like digital technology made Michael’s idea possible instantly. But, a difference for me was; since it's digital, all sounds just clean and stable. No interference and no noises! What we call radio now is actually quite different from the medium it used to be. So, I didn’t stop using an old-fashioned analogue radio and kept collecting the radio recordings with it. It’s interesting, either visual or aural, everything became so clear and crispy after getting into the digital era. You can see and hear everything. If you look back at art and music more than several decades ago, there was a mystique, murkiness, and haziness which I like.
XB I saw you perform with your collection of cassette recordings at Blank forms in New York a couple of weeks ago and I was wondering if you have a memory of making those tape recordings?
AO Yeah, I remember some of them - when and where they were recorded. But I have thousands of tapes made myself. I just don’t remember so many of them…
I started making cassette field recording when I was around 20-years-old, after suffering from heavy mental depression. In order to not look back at the painful time, my brain started blocking my memories. So, I lost so many of those that fell into a deep void … As I recall now, my cassette practice started as a therapeutic process to deal with a trauma. If I carve my memories onto magnetic tapes, I can keep them and play back as I wish … It was an obsession first, then, after more than a decade, it somehow became my art practice. In a sense, my field recordings are documentation of both external and internal worlds.
XB With the radio, or music in general, you get used to the company of another voice that can’t hear you - just a voice, without a body. At some point we accept it because we can also replicate voices inside our own head. Memories overlap with memories, creating interferences. Do you have an internal monologue?
AO When I was a child, my sexuality was ambiguous and I identified myself as a girl. I liked wearing girl’s clothes and, in my mind, I spoke female language. But when I spoke to other people, I used male language, although it was a bit feminine. The Japanese language has certain gender terminologies that you don’t have in English, and they are very different. My family name is “Onda” and the female gender in Japanese is “Onna.” So, kids around me jeered at me and called me “Onna.” I hated them but actually liked that they thought of me as a woman. I don’t have that sort of internal monologue anymore. But I still have double personas. When I perform, I feel I am a completely different person, which allows me to channel spirits and connect me to something bigger than myself.
XB Anne Carson, in her essay The Gender of Sound (from Glass, Irony and God, New Directions, 1992) talks about the disembodied voice, as in the voice that comes like a message from above. I am currently researching the idea of the voice or, more particularly its connection to power in Europe, which I think is not particularly universal. Recording technology was world-changing for politics. This idea that you can duplicate yourself and be projected here and there, because all of the sudden your voice could travel.
AO Maybe it's a kind of same mechanism - the voice from above.
XB The re-television term anchorman or anchorwoman comes from a translation of Latin proreta, meaning the person on a ship who is in charge of the anchor. You also often speak of the electromagnetic field as an ocean, but I think that is something that’s somehow collective understood.
Most talk radio is news, which are not supposed to be made permanent because it's like the daily newspaper, which becomes irrelevant the next day. So, what happens to set time when you play back those recordings of the radio?
AO When I play my cassette recordings, I'm juxtaposing time and space to re-contextualize them to something new. It’s not really about the past, but alternative reality which belongs to the present and future. It’s probably the same when I use radio recordings. I'm trying to create different intersections of time and space. So, that sort of disjunction doesn’t matter to me.
I had a funny idea, which I decided not to do at the end - I wanted to translate all radio broadcasts in different languages on this album to several languages, and print them on an insert. So that, listeners would understand what exactly broadcasters are saying, which is a sort of conceptual collage text. Maybe they are saying something serious or completely silly. It’s a way to make the words abstract, like a sound poem.
XB When you abstract something, you're creating a vessel where people deposit their projections and dreams and thoughts. How do you decide what to record?
AO It was quite arbitrary. I just turned on the radio and tweaked the tuning knob. Then those appeared. I wasn’t thinking about how to use them either.
XB So you're not really recording what's on the radio, you're recording the moment that you're having with the radio.
AO I've never thought in that way. But that’s true.
XB Artists often seek answers to work in science. Do you ever find yourself trying to explain these things that animate your work in concrete terms?
AO Probably not, but I would like to think there’s a clear logic behind my work. Science can be helpful at times to understand complex phenomenal outputs we call art. Artists and composers actually don’t make anything unique or original. Everything is related to others – history and context matter in that sense. That’s why I feel it’s quite important to channel to our collective consciousness. Thinking about radio or electromagnetic fields is inspiring to me because of that.
XB Dealing with something so abstract, do you have the desire to make sense of it? Do you find yourself looking for patterns for repetitions or for rhythms or coincidences or something like that?
AO As I worked on this project for a long time, roughly a decade, and amassed the recordings, patterns and repetitions naturally appeared. They talked to me, and helped me to understand what’s there.
XB Often conversations about radio tend to come back to paranormal ideas. I'm trying to wrap my head around this manifestation of a collective consciousness that is being created by that immeasurable field of information, as in some sort of meter for the world.
AO It's the sound of the human psyche.