“Bodies Are Always Transmitting”: An Interview with Radio Earth Hold

A conversation with Rachel Dedman, Arjuna Neuman, and Lorde Selys about radio and “the colonial voice,” for Beirut Art Center’s The Derivative, October 27, 2020

Excerpt

The broadcast opens with a command from an unknown source, addressed to a confined listener: Lie very still. It is the summer of 2020 and I am this confined listener, absorbed by my headphones, seated at my desk, in the same position I have spent hours, weeks, months, since the spread of SARS-CoV2 placed much of the world under lockdown. You are about to enter an MRI, the voice continues, heightening the sense of medicalized captivity and dread of a feared diagnosis. But the broadcast is not about the COVID-19 pandemic. Its capacity to nonetheless speak to this moment underscores qualities unique to the radio voice: directly addressing you as if from nowhere, it both interpellates you and assimilates into the context of your listening.

Radio Earth Hold 001: The Colonial Voice, an incisive thirty-three minute radio-essay produced collaboratively by Rachel Dedman, Arjuna Neuman, and Lorde Selys for the 2018 Qalandiya Biennial, explores subjects including the history of radio in occupied Palestine, indigenous water protection at Standing Rock, experiences of birth and the womb, and the ways that sound structures subjectivity. Linking together these diverse topics is an inquiry into the philosophical and political implications of what I called the radio voice, above, but which is in fact a more generalized and consequential phenomenon—acousmatic sound, and specifically, the acousmatic voice, the voice without visible or traceable origin. For Radio Earth Hold, this is the voice of authority, the voice of the Biblical God, the voice of settler-colonial, patriarchal power—a kind of sonic analog to and political precursor of the Panopticon. Yet the acousmatic also carries a more ecological and egalitarian potential, manifesting in the interdependent and coextensive sensory experience of a mother and child or in the planetary reverberations of natural radio (low frequencies produced by disturbances within the earth’s atmosphere). “The Colonial Voice” closes with a hopeful challenge to attune ourselves to the sonic fact that, across species and scales, and bridging the subject-object divide, “bodies are always transmitting.”

I recently spoke with the Radio Earth Hold collective about the themes of “The Colonial Voice,” asking them to further explain their political analyses of acousmatic sound. Below is an edited transcription of our Zoom conversation.