A quick run up and down the AM and FM spectrums of your radio dial reveals only relentless predictability, a little horizontal map of thoroughly familiar places you are expected to visit because they are familiar. The talk stations are all talking about all the same things in the same way they always do. The public stations are replaying their time-shifted rural character anecdotes and news sidelights adhering to social trend sensitivity. The corporate rock stations are pumping out this week's handed-down playlist of formularized hits, the country stations are pumping out this week's handed-down playlist of formularized hits, the soft rock stations are pumping out this week's handed-down playlist of formularized hits, the Muzak stations are pumping out this week's handed-down playlist of formularized background (nobody buys Muzak so let's not call them hits), the oldies stations are pumping out history's handed-down playlist of proven pop icons, the classical stations (two at the most) are pumping out this week's handed-down bouquet of mood pieces and war horses from the whole history of "serious" music (avoiding the 20th Century as if it didn't make sense). A hoard of Bible stations are thumping out this week's handed-down interpretation of the one and only Christianity. The jazz station (there's only one of these) is pumping out this week's handed-down playlist of sophisticated mainstream cocktail music, tamely meandering improvisations, and historical root geniuses (usually Louis Armstrong). The news stations are pumping out this week's handed-down headline bites guaranteed to keep the talk stations talking about the same things in the same way, and almost everyone is constantly interrupting all this with the same set after endless set of commercials. (It is never clear whether we are supposed to ignore these or pay attention, thus noticing that they are constantly interrupting programming). And don't forget all these stations' universally shared obsession with our society's most pressing concern - traffic! If all this doesn't annoy you enough, try sports as if they mattered and weather as if no day is complete without it.

This depressing malaise of rote radio formats, with every tedious redundancy determined by the empirically unproven yet unchallenged God of demographic ratings, is just another result of the thorough colonization of our whole cultural life by corporate commerce and its' unstoppable "logic": transform everything under its' control into a non-offensive, tastefully neutral, totally predictable, attractively packaged commodity, or die. There is one semantic transformation that drips from the consciousless lips of the media consultants who guide this whole communications laundromat of mediocrity which says it all. What was once an audience is now a "market". Broadcasting stations are not located in geographical places, they are located in "markets". Programming is not directed at the organic uncertainties known as people, it is directed at the numerical common denominators of a "market". Such terminology reveals all we need to know about all that matters on our radio dial, as well as all we need to know about any of today's other forms of mass-distributed "culture".

The supremacy of corporate culture's pursuit of profit at any cost has become so enmeshed in the creation and distribution of mass culture that any other imperative which may have once informed cultural needs is now the dead frog in the pan of water that was gradually brought to a boil a long time ago. The primary blame for radio's situation is not with the individuals in charge of programming. If left to their own devices, they would undoubtedly attempt all kinds of escapes from the boredoms, predictabilities, and redundancies they are now cooking in. However, everything media managers come up with must be sold to advertisers before it is sold to an audience. It is advertisers who demand "suitable contexts" for their products, which they have deemed to be the kind of unchallenging, undisturbing, non-disruptive, and familiar media formats we receive today. The advertisers' prerogative to accept or reject programming for sponsorship are the guiding lights of every creative department.

When the general population is not exposed to a truly wide range of possible alternatives, and are never educated by schools or experience to demand such alternatives, it tends to accept what it is given as the best of all possible worlds. After all, it's a "free" country, isn't it? Choice is a relative term, best illustrated in our society by the soap display in the supermarket - there must be 30 or 40 different competing brands which are indistinguishable in their ability to remove dirt. This pointless plethora is a sign of "the good life" we are all acclimated to appreciate, so "popular" is popular, even though too many choices in too few categories is no choice at all. So we all buy into the commodity mainstream to some degree, solving our "problems" by purchasing something "popular" to do the trick (what do you see in your house, your garage, your mirror?).

For those of us presuming to be "artists" who occasionally take flight above all this, our aerial view may see this culture widely occupied by conglomerate vultures and their copycat creative teams. But it is also sufficiently vast, wasteful, and disposable that the media artist can still spot places in the channels of mass communication to nest unusual work in, out of the way niches not yet or no longer commanded by the corporate dictates of popularization. I remain interested in screwing up the stultifying radio status-quo with programming designed to probe the airwaves with surprise, curiosity, confusion, controversy, or anything else which might push listening into unfamiliar territory.

In 1981, I began an all-night show called Over the Edge at KPFA FM, Berkeley, the non-commercial, almost totally listener sponsored, 59,000 watt flagship station in the Pacifica Network. Although KPFA presented no particular obstruction to any kind of format I might want to try, the most effective barriers to innovation were within my own mind. The radio environment around me at that time, and to this day, was entirely devoted to being about things, and it is all too easy to go along with familiar format formulas when you actually get behind the controls. With the the mass exodus from radio of big budgets and performing talent to television, radio rapidly evolved away from any sense of being an originating medium. Filled with everything but itself, it is, as McLuhan noted, one of those originally original mediums now using other mediums as its content. Today radio is primarily about the record industry, and this general reliance on musical "products" produced and prerecorded completely outside the realm of radio is typical of radio's retreat to a status of reference medium.

My earliest attempts at programming fell into the usual disc jockey track, although I always did hate to back-announce titles, realizing that that was the clearest manifestation of radio-as-pimp for the record business. While I would also play very long sets with song subject themes and related spoken word and comedy thrown in, the vague dissatisfaction with being ambivalently tied to DJ conventions remained. It was all too linear, too orderly, and too unoriginal to produce the kind of creative jolt I suspected was possible.

My breakthrough came some months later when I became acquainted with Negativland, a group who were making records at home and performing occasionally. Their works were odd collages of all kinds of music and sounds, both found and original, strung together in non-traditional sound structures. When we began to do Over The Edge together I suddenly learned how to stop a record before it was over, to play two records at the same time at the wrong speed, to turn the turntable backwards, and to nudge the needle gently across the whole disc with a lot of echo to make an interesting noise. This irreverent and unconventional attack on radio's sacred foundation -- the record -- extended to the whole broadcast studio. All the studio's equipment came into simultaneous play, finally leaving one-at-a-time sound sources to the rest of the broadcast day. Beyond this revision in the use of prerecorded sources, we also brought in guitars, synthesizers, percussion, effects gear, noisemakers, and sometimes even scripts. Over The Edge became live-mix radio and there was nothing to back-announce anymore.

If Over the Edge has succeeded in this live-mix approach in the broadcast studio, it is because of the particular sensibilities involved and our developed ability to organize chaos and cultivate coincidence. Anarchy is not a goal of intelligence, but forging sense out of randomness is. It is the idea of cultivating coincidence that has come to light in our process, yet it remains mostly a mystery to me. The amount of times coincidences occur -- a random tape responds cogently to a live caller's comment, two or three unconsidered music recordings mesh in perfect synchronicity, separate source tapes on divergent subjects converse meaningfully with each other for periods of time -- is actually startling. There is some form of increased intuition in play here which optimizes such coincidences, but it seems to be beyond analysis.

Our approach to the broadcast studio is a logical extrapolation from modern radio's main source of content, the recording studio. As Brian Eno has pointed out, the record industry has, since the 50's, moved away from its original goal of faithfully capturing and transmitting the "naturalness" of whatever sounds its microphones pick up. The modern recording studio has become a manipulator of raw sounds, a sonic instrument in itself, a place of audio experimentation. Multi-track recording has occasioned the deconstruction of music in time and space, and many of the sounds and quality of sounds found on records are created by studio engineers and their devices, not by musicians and microphones. It was a small leap of the imagination to see the broadcast studio, containing much of the same equipment, as having the same potential. All one had to do was use it that way, and there the similarity ends.

Unlike the recording studio, on live broadcast, it's all at once, one time only, and then it's gone forever. But it is this aspect which makes live on air mixing so exhilarating. The mysteries of non-commercial scheduling finds our show alternating between 3 and 5 hour time slots weekly. With this much time involved on a weekly basis for over 13 years, we have become relatively proficient at a rather risky business. Although the unrehearsed character of our live mixes is arranged and improvised from moment to moment, proficiency is in the preparation. Much of our esthetic is couched in various familiar and esoteric examples of our recorded culture at large - sort of like a cultural sampling service. I have been collecting audio material for all of those 13 years and have built up a large archive of widely divergent source material labeled by subject. Most shows are organized around some sort of theme, for which I select and correlate related material during the week before each broadcast. This archive material has been either acquired as commercial products or recorded off all the media forms available to everyone in their own homes.

Starting with this foundation of pre-existing media, we create "direct-reference" collages, manipulating and mixing both found and original sounds to produce a new kind of audio animal. Over The Edge is always concerned with recycling existing cultural elements to some new, unintended effect. Although Negativland has run into serious legal problems using such copyrighted material in our marketed studio recorded works, we have never run into any such problems in our live radio mixes. Even though every type of recording one can find continues to harbor a ridiculous statement prohibiting reproduction or broadcast of any kind, radio, with its' here and gone nature (and commercial ability to sell what it plays) appears to be completely ignored by media copyright holders of all kinds, which makes it a kind of heaven for unrepentant appropriation artists.

One of the joys in having our own show is the ability to actually inject our edits, reuses, and revisions of mass media back into the mass media itself. All mass media is one-way, designed to be absorbed, capable of being rejected, but impossible to affect by all those who are subjected to it. Whether malevolent or benign, these are the rules of propaganda, so we like to focus on mass media as both a source and subject we can rearrange, redirect, or mutilate, and spit back into the media stream for alternative consideration. This kind of culture jamming is a surprisingly satisfying form of self-defense against the unmovable status-quo.

In this regard Over The Edge makes an unusual use of phone access practically unknown in the rest of radio. As uninspired as call-in radio is, it remains the closest thing we have to public access into mass media channels. For this reason, I usually find it preferable to the bulk of "professional" media personalities occupying the channels with programming based on promotion (books, appearances, events) as entertainment. It's as if no one has anything to say until they have something to sell. But call-in radio is far from the democratic principles it likes to imply. Here too, the iron hand of centralized, top-down formatting maintains control, ensuring that nothing unusual can happen. Listening to call-in shows, you will notice that when the host and caller talk at the same time (when they are arguing for instance) the caller's end of the conversation is automatically suppressed to become hardly audible. This insidious technological innovation of the 70's squelches the phone input whenever the host speaks to give him or her the ultimate upper hand in any discourse. Raw, unsquelched input was soon found to be too raucous and interruptive for commercial tastes. To further guide the input into desired directions, callers are screened before they reach the air to decide if they are "worthy" of air time, and on the subject beam. In addition the whole proceeding is on a seven second delay system in order to allow the host to censor any verbal aberration before it can hit the air. All these forms of channeling, intimidating, and straightjacketing citizens free expression because they are appearing on mass media has just about smothered any perverse spark of "reality" which call-in radio might be capable of.

From the beginning, Over The Edge had a different idea about using phones. We call it "receptacle programming" and it is there to deposit ideas and sounds from the real, live, simultaneous world outside into our broadcast studio, and back out onto the air. Rather than revering the principle of public access while saturating the presentation of it with a palpable fear of what might happen, we assume no respect but take whatever happens in stride. We are simply interested in whatever real people actually decide to do on the air when they are not coached, channeled, or intimidated. We use no screening, no delay, and no audio squelching technology. Callers to Over The Edge are able to punch their way directly onto the air. This also requires a punch from us, but we most often do that as their blinking call light appears. When their phone stops ringing, they're on the air. Our motto is, "Don't say hello" (a very difficult phone habit to break, but a useless one in our case, as we usually neither respond to nor converse with callers at all.) .

Real-time participation allows a direct interaction with our mix as it is happening. Thus, musicians can join in with an over-the phone instrument and follow our live beat or provide a responsive bed for our elements. This is best accomplished by listening to the show on stereo headphones tuned to KPFA when you call, using the telephone like a microphone. Then the caller is "in" the mix, hearing his or her own real-time sounds being broadcast right along with our mix in headphone stereo. Some callers have their own mixers which they connect to their phones and send in their own rather elaborate mixes of music and tapes with their own effects added. Real-time perceptions are crucial to this kind of true interaction. We also make extreme use of STEREO, often putting opposing callers in the left and right channels, panning other sources around, etc. It is strange to me that, with a dial full of "stereo" broadcasters, this function is virtually unnoticeable in broadcasting.

It is only necessary to censor caller input for two reasons. The first is voluntary and is used to spontaneously edit for purely esthetic reasons. The second is involuntary and is occasioned by current FCC prohibitions against any broadcast of the seven deadly words. These are simply clipped at the first recognition of what they are, even though they are firmly planted in everyone's mind by the time they are gone (a chilling, continuing danger to any non-delayed system, of which we must be one of the last). Whether brilliant or juvenile, enlightening or obscene, our phone access is always a true and instructive little window on what is actually out there (at least among that part of the population inclined to call radio shows - estimated to be approximately 1% of the listening audience). There is little to be learned from someone who is given a subject to respond to (the trouble with polls) but much to be learned in the unsuggested subjects people initiate out of their own psyches. Not always pleasant, but somebody's got to do it. Not always interesting, either, but that too is a sample of our inability to entertain ourselves in this one-way, "professional" culture promoting only vicarious stimulations and universal spectatorship.

If callers are not interesting, we ditch 'em quick. This can happen in mid-sentence after just a few words. Sometimes we cut them off when they are interesting because what we want are those few words right there, right then. They can call back as many times as they choose, but the mix is what we're all making from moment to moment. Callers are treated as just another element in this mix, as ruthlessly cut and replaced as any other sound source involved. Our intent is to impress the caller with the unusual idea that they are not the point of the show or the subject of our undivided attention, but are active participants in a creative stew of sounds and subjects which is being edited on the run. The caller's job is to find his or her own part to play with no blame for failure and no praise for success. We call this "conversational composition."

There are many sources in play simultaneously and no one in the studio or at home knows when someone else will push a button, make a sound, or speak - just as in a spontaneous conversation. We advise a pause policy, in which one should not attempt to unilaterally plow over everything else in a continuous fashion, but wait for a hole in the "conversation" to act, and then pause to let others through. Attempts to deposit continuous material without pause indicates someone oblivious to the rest of the mix and that remains the quickest path to a disconnect. Anonymity is the rule and extends to both ends of the broadcast signal. We often enjoy "no host broadcasting", in which mike usage is reduced to the minimum hourly ID's required by the FCC, creating a continuous, evolving sound mix which occupies enough undissected time to become a thing unto itself, rather than the subdivided realm of a host's personality. Callers are then able to inject themselves anonymously into this ongoing evolving form that's more like a place, rather than confront the specific and distinct phenomenon of personality, especially one in charge.

The Over The Edge "place" might best be described as dream-like. Being on all night, I have heard from many listeners who have fallen asleep while listening and woke up later with the show still going and realized they were having show-filled dreams. Our audio collage approach seems to melt into subconscious processes much more easily than "normal" radio which, if left on while you sleep, rarely finds its way into your dreams. I consider Over The Edge to be a uniquely "after dark" form of creation, suited to, if not resulting from all the subtle, uncharted ways our brain patterns shift after the sun goes down. It would not play well in the office, and it's hard to imagine it as a commuter's companion, but alone on an interstate at night, it's probably perfect. But it's not for everyone, and usually not immediately. I have also heard from many listeners who, upon first hearing the show, didn't like it, didn't get it, or thought they had two or three stations overlapping. Just noise. Then, somehow, it apparently becomes more interesting over time. I think this has to do with actually learning how to listen to this type of no-boundaries sound collage -- discovering how one can actually hear two things at the same time, realizing how interesting and evocative noises can be, or getting in tune with the ragged spark of live unpredictability.

Listeners who are confused by what they hear on Over The Edge are usually those whom I call "information people", people bred to the sanctity of distinctly delineated, carefully categorized, discretely analyzed information so catered to by modern mass media. This is fine as far as information goes, but it's foolishness when it comes to art. Because information is God, information people usually assume a need to resist art-directed media experiments which cannot specifically define their own social "usefulness," especially "out of control" ones like Over The Edge. Ironically there are more of these information people in-house than out. They occupy almost all the power positions in public media, and probably most of those positions in commercial media as well.

In general, the greatest fear information people have is confusion. They are unable to see the value in it. However, we quite enjoy flirting with confusion, which is often a healthy and productive state of perception in which conventions are being overturned, evaluations are remote, and the senses go primitive. Confronting something unfamiliar and unexplained, one must think and perceive very acutely, drawing up meaning from within oneself. Information people, who depend on precedent, corroboration, and mutual confirmation to establish the "meaning" of something, are quite immune to art's most evocative ally -- confusion.

I am constantly amused at the degree to which all media strives to eliminate any possibility of confusion and, in the process, inhibits the thinking process, not to mention filtering the art out of everything. Obsessed with instant interpretation, mass media interposes its own evaluators, commentators, and pundits between the subject and the public. This reaches a zenith of absurdity when someone like the President gives a broadcast speech which is immediately followed by a panel of interpreters who tell us what was just said, as well as what we should think about what was just said. Just exactly how "useful" is this when the President was supposedly talking to us, not the networks, and we all heard it for ourselves? How intellectually muted do we want our out-of-the-loop population to be?

This mediumistic "necessity" to couch all content in a bed of explanations extends even more to whatever forms of art mass media dares present. The confusion level, particularly in experimental art, is so great that mass media virtually never allows us to experience it "raw", as the artist intended. Although few art concepts include announcers doing biographical intros, summary outros, or analysis of any kind, when these concepts appear in mass media such mollifying comforts are apparently indispensable. Again, our mass mediums are not interested in being something, they only want to be about something. The most unusual thing about our show is that it's on every week.

Media artists interested in creating alternatives to the present format paradigms will find that the actual accomplishment of any such alternative requires much more than theory or "guest" appearances. These simply remain a "subject" of the current paradigm, safely enclosed in the showcases of information people. One needs to get some training, some experience, an FCC license, and GET YOUR OWN SHOW! As remote as this sounds, in radio it can all be accomplished surprisingly quickly, given the number of non-commercial and college stations out there eager for volunteers and interns. Anything is possible when the goal justifies the exertion.

Long after a simple acceptance of well established civilization made it unnecessary, American pioneers went off and learned how to build their own houses out of trees! As in any art form, the trek after new definitions requires no-excuses dedication and a lot of practice in the actual arena. It is not only crucial to be in charge of your own presentation (the format), but it is also crucial to be able to develop your esthetic over time, in the context of practicing it regularly. This is the one factor that virtually all media art works lack, aside from the fact that such works are almost never live, being pre-produced outside of radio, just as records are. These experiments in mass media remain singular, rare, or occasional. We have the distinct impression that such events are "special", esoteric, and really too weird to appear on a regular basis. Such efforts always register as "outsiders" within mass media. It is impossible to even begin to think about all the uniquely radioistic potentials of the medium, all the possible paths in "radio land", unless one settles in to work at length. When artists get their own shows, it changes everything.

Over the Edge would never have achieved its present level of adeptness if it had not had years to develop and evolve subtle themes which would never occur as anyone's first choice, returning casts of characters, regular "features", a whole fictional network called The Universal Media Netweb, and countless interrelated "plots" and fantasies which develop over time. And just when all that becomes too familiar, we can pull a complete hoax and pretend to replace Over The Edge with some other show entirely. All this depends on the ability to play with regularity, the key to understanding the effects of all transmission media. Being somewhat interactive in unfamiliar ways, Over The Edge, in particular, requires a regularly scheduled slot which listeners can become acquainted with and, over time, explore their own ways to develop an interactive relationship with it. Such potentials are not always fulfilled, but are important potentials to hold out, and there is always next week... Thus I repeat: GET YOUR OWN SHOW.