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Statement

Composer and Improvisor, Sam Richards speaking at Soundart Radio's 5th Birthday, November 2011

I've put together five reasons why I think Soundart Radio is valuable and important. Well, there might be six reasons, as I take it as read tht it makes valuable, good, interesting programmes and it's fun to work with: certainly every time I've been here it's been really good fun as well as getting down to some really interesting work.

1 this kind of radio moves radio on from its role as exclusive property

There's a world of difference between exclusive property and inclusive property, Since the early days of radio: and if you don't believe me, read the biographies of people like Marconi and Edison, all these early radio pioneers, and they were inventors, discoverers of genius, but if you actually read about these guys they were most concerened with the material side of things, they spent many years applying for patents,. for these people it was a business, a kind of ownership, an appropriation of content as well.

It doesn't have to be like that, and radio stations like Soundart show it can be a different framework entirely. We're not talking about property, and we're not talking about making something exclusive. If there's any sense of ownership at all, it's a kind of inclusive thing.

There are industrial models: theres the famous experiment in Mondragon in Spain, which is no longer an experiment as it's been going on since the 1950s, which is run as a workers cooperative. It's very well known and does very well. I'm not saying radio stations can be run in the same way but they can certainly take the same spirit of participation and work with it in the way Soundart does.

2 opens channels of communication, it doesn't keep them closed

It's a way of sending messages, a way of opening dialogue.

Think about the microphone: as a key 20th century invention There are some really interesting storys about prisoners in the US in the 1930s, visited by folklorists who wanted to record their work songs. Alan Lomax in particular used to say they would grab the microphone from him and say things like 'now to you people up in Washington, this is what life is like down here' and they thought they were sending messages out into the world. Is very interesting becasuse. mics and recordings can carry messages but also they need to be broadcast, and what usually happens in mainstream radio is that there's an enormous process of mediation goes on so how many real voices do we actually hear on commercial radio or on the BBC? Certainly nothing like the proportion of real voices that we hear on Soundart.

3 this kind of radio frees radio from competitive systems and formulae

I mean things like the hour or half hour slot, news on the hour, traffic, weather, panel games, a very narrow range of music, nothing experimental, (and yet radio is a really marvellous experimental medium), foamy human interest, ads and so on, concern about ratings...

This is very different from community radio stations like this that don't conform to these rigid, worn our formulae. And when you do a project here its such a different experience to working at the BBC which I've also done. And I've always felt at the BBC or at a commercial station that I'm put into an atmosphere of sustained panic, basically, because time is money, you can't spend too much time in the studio, here its quite the opposite really:

Well what time is this programme going out? About 8-ish... you know... It's so much more interesting to work with!

4 it is part of the movement towards the local and the global existing together

This is really only something thats been happening in the last decade or so. Of course, Soundart is part of the Radia network...and I looked that up on the website..interesting... Montreal, New York, Vienna, Brussels, Helsinki, Frankfurt, Lisbon, Rotterdam, London, a fantastic spread of places. The first thing I thought was 'they're all in cities apart from this one.'

The important thing there in terms of resonding to economic, energy or political situations or anything like that, there is a kind of split between the local and the global. You get local soluntions that seem to work very well locally, and yet don't really bounce on to a more national situation. An likewise you get national things that sound like good solutions and yet they feel very alien to the local situation. So here we've got this whole idea of the 2 working together.

5 Soundart is a thread that provides a precious link to Dartington College of Arts

Something I feel very strongly about. Actually just being in this building, for many of us is a rather bitter sweet experience. There was the whole mess and controversy of the closure of the college, which is well known. Actually I'm quite proud of the little bit of fat I threw in the fire. But when the campaign to save the college was on, I remember the exact moment when I thought: we've lost this one. And it was when we had a meeting, and we had a reply from Tony Blair. And we realised, when we read this letter, that we were not just taking on a college, or its board of govenors, or an intransigent principal, or the Trustees of Dartington, or even higher government agencies, we were unwittlingly taking on an entire climate of values, the neo-liberal outlook of a socio economic climate which probably sarted in the 1980s. Because the language used by those in charge of the Dartington thing was exactly the same language used by Tony Blair in his letter. And we started to wonder whether someone from Dartington had actually witten that letter, because all the arguments and even the very phrasing was the same. One day, I found on a website, that the principal of this college here was in fact the chair of Tony Blair's committee on Higher Education. And that confirmed for us, basically we were up against something we could never move really. Now at the time it was easy enough to blame individuals, demonise this person, that person, but I follow very much the ideas of Slavoj Žižek, a very interesting poilitical philosopher, and he says there's only very limited mileage in blaming individuals, we need to attempt some understanding of the precepts, the ethics, the ideas, the systems that individuals are part of. This doesn't let indivduals off the hook, but it does put them in context. Those who are appointed to positions of great influence are nearly always those who have internalised the system that they're part of.

Now every institution has problems. Some of them are really huge. One of neo-liberalism's ways of dealing with a problem, a crisis or financial instability, is to just cut them out. We've got a government at the moment that's very good at doing that. It cuts things out, it gets rid of lame ducks, it drops things. Its called Market Forces: it used to be called 'the invisible hand of Market Forces'. Now if this policy worked, even in its own terms, there would be a different argument. But I think of things that are happening today. The banking thing. Greece, Italy, the bailouts.The anticapitalist protests. The occupations. This tells a very very different story. Now in previous eras I believe it was possible to have problems that looked insurmountable, and yet somehow to sort of take a stand against them, even grow like that. Theres a lovely passage in Peter Cox's book about Dartington. In the very very early days of the college of arts, it looked as though the whole thing was going to completely have to cease, to have to give up. There were money problems, there were adminsitrative problems, there were huge problems with education authorities and so on that refused to recognise the college. And Peter Cox says that Leonard Elmhirst came storming in to his office one day and he said,

'You know Peter, you know, we must never give up.'

If there had been that attitude, there would still have been a college here today. Soundart, I feel, does not operate with these neo-liberal values. To summarise what I've said, its not about making exclusive property, commercial property out of airwaves. It opens channels of communication rather than limiting them. It is free of competitive systems and formulae. It is part of the vital dialogue between the local and the global. And it retains some of the most valuable aspects of Dartington College of Arts. Critical thinking. Genuine independent thinking. Action and reflection, and an understanding of the importance of community, culture and experimentation.