Introducing Radiophrenia - Worm - A Rotterdam based organisation working at the intersection of culture and arts.

Radio WORM has a long and happy history of collaboration with Radiophrenia, including 2021’s visit of the Dr Klangendum team at the Radiophrenia festival in Glasgow, which hosted a live radio play with the former, much-missed WORMie, Eothen Stearn. We asked Mark Vernon who co-runs and curates the station a few questions ahead of their residency here. The residency will also incorporate a show at WORM’s wonderful 25 Hour Radio Relay on 24-25 January.

What is radio for you? What are its possibilities? Maybe a mad double question, but we don’t believe you can understand radio until you see it for yourself…

Radio for me is about community – it’s about listening together, simultaneously to the same thing with a bunch of strangers that you will probably never meet. One of the joys is that you never know who or how many other people might be listening in.

In the case of the radio station it’s about making radio happen, together, with purpose. Providing a platform for other people to share their ideas about what radio is and what it can be.

Radio is about ephemerality – it’s here and then it’s gone. It is a live medium with all of the energy and excitement that implies. This is why we don’t archive our broadcasts and have no playback function or ‘listen again’ facilities. It’s a live broadcast. If you miss it, that’s it. There is no impetus to listen in the here and now if you can just press play and listen again anytime and that sense of listening together as a community is lost. To me radio should be an event, it should be fleeting.

I’m particularly interested in the creative possibilities of radio – possibilities that are under explored by national broadcasters and commercial stations, especially in the UK. The gradual decrease of interest in radio as a mainstream medium has freed up frequencies on the spectrum, opening up space to community groups, to artists and other creatives who have different visions about the purpose of radio than bland playlists and inane banter.

Radio is a medium that encourages us to play with ideas of transmission and reception and to explore the intimacy of the radio voice. Its strength is that it is not a passive medium, it requires active participation from the listener, relying on their imagination and engagement. The ‘radio space’ created by a broadcast is a place to experiment, to try out ideas, to play with the malleability of sound, to twist and bend time. The possibilities are endless – the only limitations being our own imaginations.

Photograph of four people standing in front of a window: the Radiophrenia team

Tell us in your own words about Radiophrenia, Mark?

Radiophrenia is a radio art collective, festival and FM radio station based in Glasgow. Our activities are centred around a roughly annual 2-week long radio broadcast and festival which includes newly commissioned productions, live-to-air performances and an international open call for radio works that forms the majority of the schedule.

The project began in 2015 and has expanded into a collective that is now run as a co-operative with the core team being myself, Stevie Jones, Timothea Armour and Elina Bry who will all be coming over to WORM to work on our first in-house production. We also run public engagement activities and workshops with a variety of local community groups. The public engagement programme is run by veteran radio producer Steve Urquhart and is intended as a platform to empower marginalised voices giving them the skills and experience to tell their own stories through sound.

More recent initiatives include one-off live streamed performance events out with the festival period and a series of events under the umbrella title ‘Lost in Transmission’ where we present a programme of non-English language radio works from around the world with subtitles in cinema spaces so that the works can be heard in their original language.

Cindie Islam live in the studio, sitting cross legged with a patterned handkerchief over her face.

When did you first become aware of what was happening around the radio at WORM?

I have a long history with WORM going back almost two decades now. Myself and Barry Burns, the two founding members of Radiophrenia, did a radio residency at the WORM soundstudio way back in 2010 when the organisation was based in its previous premises at De Achterhaven. There, we produced a live radio play for the Hørspìl series tiled ‘The Silver Smokescreen’ – a sort of silent film for radio using intertitle cards from old silent movies as an ad-hoc script. At the time we performed and recorded under the duo name ‘Vernon & Burns’ and we had already produced another radio play ‘The Eldritch Transmissions: A Study in Radiophrenia‘ back in 2008 which was originally commissioned by WORM for Café Sonore on VPRO Radio 6. That was was also first time we made use of the invented word ‘Radiophrenia’.

Ever since then we’ve followed closely all of WORM’s radio related activities and of course the Dr Klangendum team. The first Radiophrenia radio art residency at WORM was back in 2020 with the artist Cucina Povera. Having no permanent base it’s only in more recent years that we’ve been able to host artists from WORM over here in Glasgow as a sort of exchange.

Poulomi Dessai playing live radio, his head hidden by red laser lightss

How do you see WORM as a place and a sometime partner?

I might be better placed to answer that question following the residency. We have never been to WORM in its current location so a visit is long overdue! That is one of the reasons we decided to come over ourselves this year. From all the reports we have had from the artists we have sent over on previous residencies they have all had an incredibly productive, fruitful and enjoyable time and that has been born out in the ambition and scope of the works that have been produced during their time there.

It’s great to see the community of radio makers that have formed around Radio WORM. And it has been a pleasure for us to host Rotterdam based artists Antrianna Moutoula and Ash Kilmartin in Glasgow in recent years and we are very much looking forward to working with Radio WORM regular Vianna Afoumou AKA Vixnde next year. We’re trying something new this year with production time spent primarily at Cove Park, an artists residency centre in the countryside of Argyll on the West coast of Scotland.

In short – we couldn’t ask for a better partner, really. We both trust each others’ judgement, curatorially, and I think we are closely aligned in our thinking and ethos – the desire to give artists the space and time to create, to make work and to thrive. It is an amazing place, with some excellent facilities and the support it provides to the local art and music scene is invaluable. We only wish we had facilities of a similar standard to offer visiting artists here – maybe one day.