THE CONTROL PANEL IS INSIDE ME

Willem de Ridder
Media personality, radio artist, ex-Fluxus organiser for Northern Europe, publisher, pornographer and master storyteller. Willem de Ridder talks
with Lance Dann about his radio exploits and how to achieve that special transmission.

Lance Dann: What drew you into radio? When did your relationship with it begin?
Willem de Ridder: I was involved in Fluxus. At a certain moment I decided to step outside of art altogether because it was too incestuous. I
started publishing a magazine which became a very intensive movement in Holland, created a whole new generation of artists, illustrators and
journalists. But at a certain moment I thought even magazine making was a little outdated. So I bought a Uher cassette tape recorder and moved
to Hollywood. I started lived in a villa where the very first talking movie star lived, Al Jolson. I realised that with Jolson the old form of story
telling had come to an end. Before him you had story tellers in front of cinema pictures called the explanationists or the explicateurs or
something like that. I got a tape from a friend in Dutch radio, a personal tape, very sad, his friends were dying etc. I wanted to cheer him up, so I
took my cassette recorder and I borrowed a stereo radio and started to make a kind of spoken letter for him, as a kind of spoken radio show. But
it was very personal, complete with fake commercials and things I'd taped directly from the radio. So what happened was, I sent this thing to
him and I didn't hear anything for a long time. Then I got a letter back with some money, saying that he was so excited about it that he had put it
on national radio. I was excited but I said 'I am shocked because it was very personal.' He said, 'This was so good Willem could you make
another one?' So I was sitting again in front of my little microphone but this time I wasn't speaking to him I was speaking to the entire country!
This totally inhibited me. It was OK - they played it, liked it and wanted more - but I realised why radio was so stiff because everybody had this
professional feel about how it should be. And I realised that to restore that personal feeling meant never again to talk to the listeners but to talk
to one listener.
I realised that the most personal thing was when I sat down in my little studio there. I wasn't very well, I was in a kind of state of shock because
I got this incredible idea. I sat down and started talking and spoke to one listener. Very intensely. I said: 'Listen. You are listening right now, I
know, but I am talking into this cassette recorder. But you're listening right now. So time and space don't really exist. It doesn't really matter if
you listen five years later to this because I'm right now talking and you're right now listening. And I want to come close to you. And I want to
come so close to you that we both feel this and the only way is if we both join forces. Now listen, it's gonna be personal, very personal, perhaps
shocking for you, so you don't have to listen, you can turn off this station right now; and because there's so much more to do, you don't have to
be bored, there's many stations, but in my case it's gonna be very personal. I'm in Hollywood looking out over the Hollywood hills, there's palm
trees and I'm in cushions, pillows here and I'm going to undress myself and you're going to undress with me. Let's get close.'
So I started with socks, pants, we were nude and we started masturbating and we tried to come at the same time. You know what I mean? It was
really intense. I did it in one take and it was very intense and I was shocked that I did it. So I thought this was great really but I'm never gonna
send this one! Then after a month or two I didn't even dare listen to it because I felt that if I played it I was gonna be in the same state of shock.
But at a certain moment I thought, well, what am I going to send to him? And I remember very well I put it in the letter box and I tried for half
an hour to get it out of there! (laughs) What will I do if my father hears this? (laughs) They liked it so much that they played it twice. (laughs)
This was great stuff.
LD: How did that piece get out on national radio?
WR: My friend was a producer at national radio. In Holland we have a law that if you get enough members together, you get radio time - no
matter what except when it's fascism, I guess. We have stations which are connected to Catholicism or Protestantism or Socialism or Liberalism.
Our station is called VPRO. We have production units and so on. It's one of the more progressive ones.
One of the possibilities I started to use (which I think is a great use of radio) is to imagine that you're listening to the radio and the man says:
'Good evening you're listening right now, it's of course interesting to listen to an interesting programme, but normally you're very passive and
you're going to change that tonight because you're gonna listen to an active radio programme. You don't have to listen actively, you can listen
passively; but if you decide to take part in this programme you're gonna have an experience that you're never gonna forget in your life. So now
see if you have a portable radio, I'll keep talking until you've found a portable radio, turn it on and listen to my voice. OK you have a portable
radio, now please listen very carefully, get up...'
Then I will tell them to visit their neighbour. 'Ring the bell and let the radio do the talking.' So you can imagine, the neighbour answers the door
and there's this neighbour with the radio which says, this man has been listening to the radio and I just told him to visit you and you don't have
to let him in... And thousands of people did this. You can imagine what happened! Or both people had been listening and they'd both be moving
to the next one!
LD: It's a lovely idea. It wouldn't work in England. People would be too shy.
WR: It could be, but the nice thing about it is if you are too shy and you are still listening, you still feel yourself doing it: 'What would have
happened if I would have done this?' You identify yourself so tremendously with it that you see yourself actually standing there because you
know your neighbour. It addresses you so strongly that the effect is just as strong if you don't do it.
I started doing all kinds of experiments with this. I did one project in the Royal Theatre in Amsterdam where you could only come inside for
free if you came with a portable radio. So the whole theatre was full, we had a huge audience all with portable radios blaring and I was talking to
them. And the whole radio play in which they played the main role was about this audience being attacked from under the floor and being
gassed and things like that. There was really nothing on the stage except for a little light changing, so in a certain moment they had to get out of
their chair, walk around the theatre - all kinds of things were happening.
I decided to go further and announced that I would do a special radio programme which would start at 1 o'clock at night and you needed a car
radio: it would be an incredible adventure but I didn't say what. So for half an hour or longer I was persuading you to take a plant and a pillow
and a camera and go to your car and put a piece of paper on the front window and listen to the instructions. And about 30,000 people did this. So
at 3 o'clock in the morning there was this incredible traffic jam and people had the adventure of their life.
My slogan was always "The goal is the journey." It was not so much what you did as the fact that you did it. You can imagine the effect of being
in a huge traffic jam and all the other cars are listening to the same programme. You can imagine that if you are on this long road and you see
lights from horizon to horizon to horizon and the voice says, 'Now we're going to do something very exciting that we've never done before:
when I count one, two, three, we all turn off our lights' - and after one, two, three it's pitch black on the roads - like, wow! It's powerful stuff.
LD: Was it real participation or were you using your audience as puppets in a way? How free was your audience?
WR: You can do it or you don't, it's like a book, if you don't read it then you do something else. If you read it then you get involved.
LD: But they had a choice either to be active or passive.
WR: Well no, at a certain time you get of your car and you see the people behind you and then I lose control and you have to take over. So these
things involve initiative.
But at a certain moment I couldn't do that because too many people were taking part. One of the last ones I did, in all the major cities I put
touring cars. If you were dressed up completely like an idiot you could get into the touring car and then this would go to a secret location. At the
same time a friend of mine, Alvin Curran, an American composer, was having all the fog horns along the European coast having a concert
which was also transmitted by radio. So while people were driving in these touring cars towards the secret location all dressed up weirdly, fog
horns from all over Europe were serenading them. People are still talking about it. In fact last year a local regional radio station invited me to do
it. We did practically no publicity and about a thousand people took part. It was wonderful.
Another thing I discovered was the power of story-telling. With radio there is something dramatic going on. There is the transmission which
goes through the airwaves but there's another transmission which is the transmission that is happening between you and me now. For example, if
I am fearful you feel that, even if I try to cover it up - you feel it, so actually you're nude in front of radio. If you start using that it means that
actually we are one, so if I really let myself go and let myself go into a place that I've never been before, you have to follow me or you have to
switch off: you have no choice. I did a series of radio plays which are totally improvised, called the Deathly Fear Therapy, where we confronted
ourselves with our worst fears. We would sit down and one of us would start with the first line and something would come out of it. The only
important part was that we would enter with sweat on our hands and freak out totally and then it would be a good play. The effect was so
powerful that after the transmission the telephone was red hot for hours with totally hysterical people.
It's amazing if you improvise and play a role. We know that even the slightest change in your behaviour changes your whole life. If I was to
come to my office tomorrow morning and talk with a little higher voice my whole life would change. We keep to our roles tremendously and
think it's us. But in a radio play you have a possibility to change it. And if you change it without knowing what's coming - which we call an
improvisation - it's like your whole body falls off. It's amazing what happens. Because if you walk into this corridor and you open the door and
you're terrified, you have no idea what you're gonna see, you're in the same position as the listener and you're not even aware of the listener, you
become that person. It's amazing how automatically that happens.
Now on Talk Radio last Friday I started teaching the entire country how to do radio plays as a kind of community game - and I'm gonna have a
lot of radio plays soon, let me tell you! It's very exciting because it leads you to a part of yourself that you have never confronted. Things come
out that you would never dream you had in you. If you confront your worst fears it's like heavy shit! Don't underestimate it. When you listen
back to it that intensity is there again. Even after many years people can barely listen to it. We played sixteen plays like that and so many letters
came in that they had to hire a special secretary to answer them all. People were phoning asking, "Do you have the address of this Mr de Ridder
because I used to have a man in my concentration camp who tortured me with exactly the same voice?" Totally hysterical calls.
LD: You really felt you'd unlocked something?
WR: We're all one. You know what I mean? I cannot manipulate others, I can only manipulate myself. If I go completely, you go too, you have
no choice. Of course radio has an incredible power. A power we are terrified of.
LD: Well, Germany was the greatest example of someone translating emotions this century, wasn't it? If it wasn't for messages being
disseminated through the '30s, carrying those emotions out, then the war wouldn't have happened. I regard that as the symbol of the intimate
power of radio being used to a nightmarish extent.
WR: Yes. And with storytelling itself, if you don't believe the story yourself then nobody's going to believe it.
The last thing I did on Dutch radio was a programme where anybody could send in tapes. I did it for six years. So you heard me on the radio
opening envelopes, taking out the tapes and playing them.
LD: What were you getting?
WR: Amazing stuff. I played everything. If I didn't like it then I'd play only one minute - and if it was really good I'd listen to the whole thing.
Some people were fooling me. The interesting thing was, yes, they could fool me, but their friends would say, 'Is that everything you can do?' If
you do something completely at random and it's taken seriously then the next time you're gonna do your best. So you saw people develop
tremendously. A whole generation of sound makers came out of it just by giving them air. We had radio plays, sound, noise, you name it. You
saw developments going very fast. There was an absolute guarantee that they were gonna be played. The other radio makers hated me for that
because they sell their taste. What was I doing? I was doing something automatic which wasn't worthwhile. But I told them that if I only
exercise my taste then I'm stuck in the past.
LD: Don Joyce found the same thing with his uncensored phone access. He found it took the audience a long time to learn what to do.
WR: I have the same experience. For about 12 years I have been doing something similar on an Amsterdam station called Radio Hundreds. I
have trained my audience now so well that it's an incredible show. And now the same thing is happening with Talk Radio so it becomes a
national event.
LD: How did you manage to set Talk Radio up?
WR: I have become this sort of media personality here, everybody here knows me and since I've never been connected to any company and have
always been pioneering, I am a 'legendary' figure. There's a lot of respect for what I do and I give speeches nowadays for companies and
managers and so on. So I was invited by this young company and they said, 'Listen Willem we want to do things with you.' And I said yes of
course, great, but only the way I want to do it. No concessions.
LD: What else do they broadcast?
WR: They have jazz radio. It used to be on FM but now it's back on cable here.
With the Alchemix Radio series in America I demonstrated that what mesmerises you and gives you a powerful experience is not the content,
composition or sound but that special transmission. I would talk for 45 minutes about absolutely nothing but they would be absolutely
mesmerised. I sent tapes to college radio stations where I tried things out. Even National Public Radio bought some things from me and I was
broadcast on 150 stations.
LD: Was the material you made for American broadcast as openly challenging?
WR: Yeah, I never make any concessions. I lived there long enough to know that everything works as along as you find the right tone.
LD: That's true with the BBC too. If you put it in their language and put it in a little package that they can understand you can get away with
murder. But you have to know how to do that. Do you feel that radio has managed to achieve a status as an independent art form with its own
sense of identity? If not, why not?
WR: I did a series of Radio Art programmes and a Radio Art Guide. The problem is that unlike video which is available for everybody, it is
difficult for artists to have access to radio if not impossible. And if they have access to it the conditions are very severe. Many European stations
are like extensions of government. A lot of the things I hear are mostly sound-based. like a mix between new music and soundscape.
LD: Could you define the difference between broadcast art and sound art?
WR: What I like with radio is the point where you have to decide in the now whether you're going to listen to it or whether you're going to
participate in it. If I ask people to do something, even if you don't do it, you feel it. You become aware of yourself.
LD: Have you taken a lot of the principles that came from Fluxus and applied them to radio? How do the two relate?
WR: The reason I got involved in Fluxus was because I did these things all along. The point is actually very simple. For most 'primitive'
societies, their dance, song, sculpture and pictures were essential to their lives. If you took them away their whole life crumbled. We call that
culture but it's not, it's essential. Whereas if we closed all the museums, life would go on, people wouldn't blink an eye. If we took away all the
cars then there would be chaos. Or close all the television stations... But if you stopped all painting nobody would blink an eye. There would be
some articles in the papers but that would be it. Society would go on. Our whole culture has shifted to something completely different. The main
thing is our total fear of what people think of us. Hence the projection of ourselves into something outside of us. If we start working with these
things we'll become very close to each other again. And I think that's essential. I think we're all becoming aware now that God is not some man
with a beard in heaven, it's us. We have much more power than we allow ourselves. And these things are essential for the power of what you do.
So I'm not interested in a discussion about form, content or professionalism, those things are not important at all. They are the result of
something, not the cause. It's how far you're prepared to go. If I don't feel it, if it's not powerful for me, it's not powerful for you. So I have to go
all the way. I cannot stay out of it. The more intensity I allow in myself, the more you will feel. The control panel is inside me.
LD: Do you think radio is in decline or still has tremendous possibilities?
WR: I think it has tremendous possibilities. I'm talking now with Andrew McKenzie of the Hafler Trio about starting an Internet radio. One
thing I am going to do again is lip-synched soap-opera, where you turn off the sound of the television, turn on the radio and get an alternative
soundtrack which changes the movie completely. So you get big fights in every living room where the parents want to look at the real soap and
the kids with headphones on... We did it with Dynasty. I had one of the most famous episodes. I did this at a big art festival in Rome where I
was guest of honour one year so I could do what I wanted. The whole country was in uproar. It was wonderful.
LD: Do you archive your work?
WR: No. For years I have refused to talk about the past. Several people have written theses about me and are doing research on me, but I don't
read those either. I keep some stuff but I rarely look at it. It's so much work and for what? For posterity? What I like about radio is that I do
things in real time as much as possible: this is your chance. A lot of people tape it and then it starts to lead its own life.
LD: But once it's taped off the radio, especially if it's somehow very live, then isn't it already dead?
WR: Sure. Who cares? Same as Fluxus. Looking at a Fluxus exhibition is like looking at the leftovers of a party - you look at the ash trays and
say, "There was Fluxus..."
LD: In a more poetic sense your programmes will never die because they're still out there disseminating through space. Those radio waves will
be out there longer than any record because they'll just be going further and further away from the planet.
WR: Exactly. So we don't have to worry. Especially with medium waves - they go very far.