Station to Station

The airwaves in New York City are as polluted by the smog of bad commercial radio as any on Earth, so it's bracing indeed to hear a transmission of Iannis Xenakis' hair-raising Metastasis (1965) displacing the misguided efforts of American Idol's most recent escapee. The fact that this uncompromising choice is followed up with an extract from Harry Partsch's score for the film Windsong (1958) signposts a listening experience that seems unlikely to be interrupted by anything as undignified as a jingle. Instead, the resonant voice of contemporary composer Elliot Sharp identifies the two works as entries on his 'Mathematica' playlist: 'a selection of sound pieces based on pure mathematics'. You're listening to WPS1, 'the first all-art, all-the-time radio station'.

Launched on 19 April 2004 and overseen by Executive Producer Alanna Heiss and Program Director Linda Yablonsky, WPS1 broadcasts from The Ear, a futuristic William Massie-designed studio on the 12th floor of Tribeca's Clocktower Building (P.S.1. Contemporary Art Center's original home). Streaming online 24 hours a day at www.wps1.org, the station provides London-based Resonance FM with an American cousin and, for anyone with access to a halfway decent computer, threatens the coat-hanger aerial with total obsolescence. Presenting music, interviews, discussions and readings alongside vintage clips from the archives of the Museum of Modern Art, WPS1 is as ambitiously diverse, and as necessarily uneven, as one of its host organization's rambling group exhibitions.

While online radio is still not quite as fuss-free or as portable as its predecessor, its vastly increased range allows for a genuinely 'glocal' phenomenon, while the potential for linking to other stations, related websites and email addresses makes it more democratically interactive - and actually useful - than any phone-in. The fact that much of WPS1's programming remains playable on demand after its original broadcast is another advantage, and the lack of regulation, which leaves participants free to turn the airwaves blue without fear of the censor, is a welcome interruption in the stultifyingly polite American media landscape. The discovery that the station can be left playing while your machine is otherwise engaged also threatens to make it as ubiquitous a workday distraction as 'Friendster'.

While a portion of WPS1's spoken word programming is aimed at those with a professional interest in the art world - a slightly stilted Collectors' Forum, hosted by Althea Viafora-Kress, with veteran collectors Arthur and Carol Goldberg and MoMA Junior Associate Lisa Mamounas; a brass-tacks chat about New York real estate with 'artists' superbroker' Jan Hashey, hosted by Heather Cohane - much of it, thankfully, has broader appeal. Max Blagg and Glenn O'Brien have a high old time hosting a gossipy version of their art and literature journal Bald Ego, for example, while in a bizarre numerology spot Clarissa Dalrymple falls under the spell of resident clairvoyant Dezia (apparently we are now in the curator's 'power year').

The MoMA archive material is a rare example of P.S.1 making good use of its status as an affiliate of that august institution. Legendary gallerist Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, speaking at length about his friend Pablo Picasso at the museum in 1957 is effortlessly charming, while a 1952 episode of Walter Cronkite's The 20th Century features guests Janet Flanner (The New Yorker's Genet), Man Ray and Gertrude Stein. A discussion of The Naked Lunch (1959) featuring William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and friends, dating from the mid-1970s, is actually taken from another radio station, WBAI-FM, but was produced by P.S.1's own Charles Ruas. Uncle Bill, as always, is a riot.

The most satisfying music programming on WPS1 - Elliot Sharp's shows aside - is the element devoted to doing more than just pumping out another set of dance-hall, drum 'n' bass, Afrobeat or Latin, however cutting-edge it is deemed to be. Delphine Blue's more mainstream take on John Peel-style Indie eclectica is certainly listenable, but Performance poet Tracie Morris makes a truly imaginative use of the medium. Fully redeeming herself for a grating appearance on the 2002 Whitney Biennial Soundworks CD, Morris stirs up an urgent blend of politics and funk in the mode of Gil Scott-Heron on her show Neon Blue. Francis Sorenson's interview with cross-dressing club kids Justin Trantor and Xavier J., meanwhile, is hilarious, even if her subjects' campy 1980s pop pastiches give new meaning to the word disposable. Trantor's revelation that 'We're more worried about our hair than the sound-check' speaks volumes.

Despite being promoted as 'a live audio museum in cyberspace', there is relatively little on WPS1 so far that qualifies as 'sound art,' as occasionally experienced in gallery or public settings, or on CD. Some of the most intriguing spots on Resonance FM, which was established in 2002 as 'a virtual arts centre', have been those in which ambient sound is recorded, manipulated and relayed through a variety of devices, ranging from mobile phones to palm pilots. William Basinski's soundscape The Slipstream on WPS1 often sounds like a malfunctioning gadget of some sort but remains identifiable as music. The furthest that the New York station has got from conventional radio may be Learn German, a slice of unhinged 'comedy' from Berlin's Christoph Schlingensief, but even this at times punishing mélange won't seem so outré to fans of Blue Jam or even The Goon Show.

Resonance FM and WPS1 may be the most developed examples of radio as art, but they are not without precedent. Daniel Jewesbury's Exchange 2000, presented at that year's 'Manifesta' in Frankfurt, consisted of a broadcast discussion about national identity, in which the interplay of different languages was used to expose the medium's tendency to be, in McLuhanite terms 'cold' - a one-way channel of information and misinformation. At last year's Venice Biennale, Radio Arte Mobile broadcast from a van, a tribute to the countless friendly pirates in perpetual flight from the licensing authorities. And just breaking though the static at time of writing are Artlab's 'Radio Radio' and QSL107.1FM. These and other experiments owe a debt to John Cage, whose Imaginary Landscape #4 (1951), a score for twelve radios played simultaneously, first ex- ploited the beauty and strangeness of the medium's omnipresence - a state that, as the current renaissance demonstrates, seems destined to persist.