At some point the craftsmen burst into the studio. And start dismantling it. Wouldn’t that have time until after the transfer? It was the last radio broadcast in history anyway. The global transmission network will be switched off shortly and the broadcast frequency will be deleted. Be it, in a few minutes, World broadcast deadline. This is what Felix Kubin calls his swansong for radio, just in time for its 100th birthday.
The program will be switched to a new, vertical broadcast pattern: more and more of the same. Ultimately, this is just a constant whining or hissing noise. In World broadcast deadline it already sounds, in different frequency ranges. “Not a wave far or wide. Loneliness reigns in the ether,” this small, clumsy rhyme is apparently the last and no longer spiritual thing that the literary editors can manage in the face of their own end. Next to it: a final sea weather report. The station’s choir cheers once more, speakers and stations say goodbye, angry, jaded, empathetic or eager to serve, depending on their emotional state. “Keep your good taste,” advises Marcus Gammel, head of the radio art department at Deutschlandfunk Kultur, who commissioned this production. But how should we train him in the future?
With Kubin the radio implodes, with Giannotti it explodes
In his sound art piece, Felix Kubin pushes the radio into self-abandonment; this can be heard as satire, but also as a dystopia. “Everyone has run away to the end of the world, which synchronizes and formats itself.” Nevertheless, even if no one is probably listening anymore: without an anthem at the end there is no end to the broadcast. But even the national anthems are subject to centrifugal forces.
A second radio piece, broadcast late on the same evening on DLF Kultur, in which the radio sends the message towards a fatal end: Populist Radio by Stefano Giannotti. “Did you take this seriously?” asks a presenter near the end, after the audience has been told almost an hour of sheer nonsense. This is of course the cheapest and at the same time most dangerous of all excuses: First incite people, create a mood, spread untruths – and then claim: It’s your own fault if you believe that. While Kubin turns the radio down, Giannotti turns it up. Not only when it falls silent, but also when it blares and shouts particularly loudly, at some point you no longer understand anything.
At least no connections. Because they don’t exist anymore. Just allegations – the more exaggerated, dubious and absurd, the better. For example, a political party is denounced because of its financial behavior: the party of the extreme center. If there is an extreme right and an extreme left, then there is also an extreme middle. Says the moderator and continues to eat chips with the microphone open. “Are you having fun?” he wants to know. Because it hasn’t been about anything else for a long time.
World broadcast deadlineDLF Culture, October 5, 2023, 10:03 p.m.
Populist RadioDLF Culture, October 6, 2023, 12:05 a.m.