Radia Show 837: "Increasingly worse" + „540“ by Mark Kanak (Radio Helsinki)
“Zunehmend schlechter” (“Increasingly worse”) is an absurd audio farce that came about after Kanak heard the phrase “increasingly worse” (in the media, in the supermarket, on the street) several times in one day in late 2020 regarding the pandemic. It’s not meant to downplay the crisis, but rather to provide a bit of humor in the face of an extraordinary situation. We are told that things are getting “increasingly worse”, we repeat that things are getting increasingly worse, therefore, they must be getting increasingly worse. Or: perhaps the pandemic is over (“Die Pandemie ist vorbei!”). Alas, no, in fact, things ARE getting increasingly worse…our first inclination was true. And round and round it goes … The second part, “540,” refers to the sort of circles we’re running around in as we are confronted with this problem, both on personal levels and in terms of society at large. First we see it one way (180°), but then decide that maybe that first consideration was wrong (360°), but then actually decide that our first guess was actually right (540°). As Bernhard wrote so beautifully: The truth we know is logically the lie, which, by not getting around it, is in fact the truth.

Each week one member of the Radia Network produce a show for all the others. The Radia Network emerged from a series of meetings, clandestine events, late-night club discussions and a lot of email exchanges between cultural radio producers across Europe. The topics vary and the reasons for forming a network are many, but Radia has become a concrete manifestation of the desire to use radio as an art form. The approaches differ, as do the local contexts; from commissioned radio art works to struggles for frequencies to copyright concerns, all the radios share the goal of an audio space where something different can happen. That different is also a form in the making – radio sounds different in each city, on each frequency. Taking radio as an art form, claiming that space for creative production in the mediascape and cracking apart the notion of radio is what Radia does.

It is producing radio stuff that is hard to describe. Some of it can be labeled radio art, or experimental radio, or creative radio. Sometimes it talks, sometimes it doesn’t. It can be noisy, or a kind of soundscape, or a documentary, a document, a talk, a performance. Each and every week, one of the partners will provide the network program, commissioned and produced especially for this purpose: being broadcast by all the partners and made available online.

Some things have to be said about all those partners. They are radio stations, of the independent, non-commercial, community, cultural species. They all speak different languages, and this should create interesting problems. Although initially they were all European radio stations this has changed over time and Radia has become not only larger but also more diverse: 17 partners in nine countries and growing all the time.

Radia Stations

* Campus Paris (Paris, FR)
* CFRC 101.9 FM (Kingston, CA)
* CKUT (Montréal, CA)
* JET FM (Nantes, FR)
* Kanal 103 (Skopje, MK)
* Orange 94.0 (Vienna, AT)
* Radio Campus (Brussels, BE)
* Radio Corax (Halle, DE)
* Radio Grenouille (Marseille, FR)
* Radio Helsinki (Graz, AT)
* Radio Nova (Oslo, NO)
* Radio One 91 FM (Dunedin, NZ)
* Radio Panik (Brussels, BE)
* Radio Papesse (Firenze, IT)
* Radio Student (Ljubljana, SI)
* radio x (Frankfurt/Main, DE)
* Rádio Zero (Lisboa, PT)
* RadioWORM (Rotterdam, NL)
* Reboot.fm (Berlin, DE)
* Resonance FM (London, UK)
* Soundart Radio (Dartington, UK)
* TEA FM (Zaragoza, ES)
* Wave Farm WGXC 90.7-FM (New York, USA)
* XL Air (Brussels, BE)

Affiliates

* Kunstradio (Vienna, AT) More information at http://radia.fm