a national institution. Basically we started a new unit where fiction works, drama works and sound works were wanted. I gravitated immediately to the sound work, because when I studied in the United States I had an extensive music show on my university station and would often just mess around with my voice and other media sources in a really late night community radio station kind of way. That was really where that connection to that sort of material came from. So I went through very traditional journalism channels, but in the meantime was playing in my own practice with more experimental things. E.Z. I was still in school when I got the offer to organise the 900 audio cassettes, CDs and DAT cassettes of the archive from Heidi Grundmann. That was in 1991. For three weeks I stayed and arranged the archive. Of course I had to listen to some of the cassettes, because it was not written on them what it was. I remember that I liked the records of John Rose. They were a very big influence for me from the beginning. After that I went back to school. A little later, when I went to university to study comparative literature and Spanish, Heidi Grundmann asked me to make an address archive on file maker. During this time Kunstradio was already doing projects. So I ended up in Tyrol in 1993 assisting the organisation of the symposium On the air. There I met Gregory Whitehead, Concha Jerez and José Iges. That way I somehow ended up in Kunstradio and took over from Heidi Grundmann in 1998, when she had to retire. H.H. It’s an exciting and challenging task to work with artists on a radio programme. What is it that keeps you enthusiastic for that work? M.J. For me it’s that really interesting push and pull between a very intimate experience of listening to the radio and the generosity of it being free. I know it’s not actually free, but it feels free when you turn on the radio. I think it’s an incredibly generous act for artists to put their work out on the radio. There is this certain language and beauty
in the radio artistry. There is a term that they use in my work when they talk about good radio. They say, “it’s a driveway moment”. The “driveway moment” is when you’re driving in your car and listening to the radio- and then stay in your car, in your driveway to hear the end of it. So it’s saying, you’re so arrested, so captured, that you can’t get out of your car. If I can do that for a listener, if any of the artists can do that for a listener, it’s worth it. For the moment I don’t think that something like Soundproof will come back to the ABC. So now I’m trying to find hybrid ways and new homes for radio art. E.Z. The wonderful thing about radio is that radio is a mobile and accessible medium. The receiver is not expensive and it’s easy to do radio on your own. You basically only need a microphone, a mixer and a transmitter. Radio offers this lovely moment of surprise. That’s the big difference to the internet, where I can and have to choose everything on my own. Radio you switch on and you’re just there. If you don’t like it you just move on and may find something else that you like, that surprises you. On radio you can find those surprising moments when artists do their shows and think differently about the medium. The good thing on radio is that it does not say from the beginning, “this is art”, as might be the case in a gallery. So people stumble upon art in radio without knowing what it is and simply get interested. H.H. In Radio Revolten we took the chance to present all the different spaces where radio art can be found, like installations and exhibitions, performance, and on stage. Where do you want to see radio art spread out to more? What are you missing in the current handling of the genre? E.Z. Artists have always tried to push the boundaries. When the possibilities for the artists got smaller within the national radio, they went out of big institutions. Maybe they even entered from outside and are now leaving again. They create their own radio stations, build transmitters, do their own festivals. So in some way artists don’t need 301