Dr. Klangendum

The Wire, artikel over geluidskunst, juni 2024;
Strange Transmissions: The World Of Experimental Radio: Fabulism.
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Take Klangendum, the sonic art collective of Henk Bakker and Lukas Simonis based in Rotterdam’s WORM Studio, who started making and curating radio plays in 2005. Their website declares “Klangendum likes history as much as it looks ahead. To give a new twist to an old but not yet wornout genre like the radioplay”; this is not merely ironic re-appropriation, but sincere re-investigation. Their Day Of The Great Tit (2019) spins a haunted web of schizophonic voices over a science fiction noisescape of synthesised plips and plops. It’s a vision of the future, apparently: where war, and art, have both been eradicated. Klangendum stage the implications of this double disappearance in suitably conflicted fashion.

As well as making radio plays, Klangendum and WORM provide facilities, residencies and a radio station for others to make and present their own. Two recent pieces by young artists demonstrate the breadth of responses this has invited. Vagina Loquens (2018) by Eothen Stearn, Kari Robertson and Gill Partington investigates the historical relationship between speech and the vagina, adopting a playful while critical register equally informed by radical politics as experimental music. On the other hand Alexander Iezzi’s The Horse (2019) is an introspective monologue dwelling on the narrator’s experiences in psychotherapy; an unrelentingly nervous ego dissection punctuated by synth interjections of insectoid precision. These works lie worlds apart, yet illustrate the form’s endurance as it is reimagined by a new generation in wildly divergent ways.