An audio collage combining excerpts, samples and audio quotes from a range of over 20 different popular films featuring radio broadcasts. Sampled films include: ‘Play Misty for Me’, ‘Radio Days’, ‘Talk Radio’, ‘The Fog’, ‘Warriors’, ‘American Graffiti’ and ‘Pump Up The Volume’. Radio is both the medium and the subject of this programme, a unique feature that is used to play with listener expectations, flitting between fictional radio stations with bursts of static, white noise and wild long wave frequencies as though scanning between stations. As this schizophrenic collage progresses numerous simultaneously developing narratives begin to catch the listener’s ear.
To some degree this is an investigation into the common use of radio as a device within film to explore specific themes such as synchronicity, community, rebellion and nostalgia – as well as the cliché’s of shock jocks, obsessive listeners, lifelines to the lonely, pirate radio and meditations on the concept of dead air. These acousmatised soundtracks allow us to examine more closely the ways in which one technological medium is perceived through another, examining the accuracies as well as highlighting stereotypes and distortions.
Originally commissioned for the Drift festival of radio art in association with New Media Scotland. This piece was first aired on Resonance 104.4FM in 2005. An updated version was aired as part of the Radio Art Space project by CONA in Slovenia in 2011.
Featuring audio clips and samples from the films: ‘The Fog’, ‘Radio Days’, ‘Airheads’, ‘Pump Up The Volume’, ‘Classy Kill’, ‘Couch Trip’, ‘Dead End’, ‘Good Morning Vietnam’, ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2’, ‘Reservoir Dogs’, ‘The Truth About Cats & Dogs’, ‘American Graffiti’, ‘Urban Legend’, ‘Warriors’, ‘The Big Swinger’, ‘The Fisher King’, ‘Talk Radio’, ‘Good Morning Vietnam’, ‘Joe Dirt’, ‘The Ladies Man’, ‘Do The Right Thing’, ‘Grosse Point Blanc’ and ‘Play Misty For Me’.
