Podcast: Radio Atlas

Seasons shift, as the songs of distant whales are swallowed by the fog. Henriette Rasmussen explores the brittle and tender edges of masculinity in her community.

By Henriette Rasmussen for RANA / Radiophonic Narration (2009)

Born in 1950, Henriette Rasmussen lived in Nuuk, Greenland. She worked at KNR (Greenlandic Broadcasting Corporation) in the 1970’s before entering politics where she served as cultural minister between 1991 and 2005. From 1993 she was involved with the UN, where she was a key figure in promoting the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, an agreement which was adopted in Greenland in 1992. As well as one of the central forces behind the creation of a permanent UN group for indigenous peoples. A member of the Earth Charter Commission, she also helped to create a global plan for the environment. She returned to KNR in 2008 where she was a familiar voice on the air until her death in 2017.

A Circle of Men was produced by Henriette Rasmussen with Rikke Houd and mixed by Rikke Houd. It was featured at the Prix Europa in 2009.

Created as part of RANA/Radiophonic Narration, an 18 month-long practice based education in sound narrative and radio feature making, aimed at professionals working from remote and small societies in the north. The course ran from 2007-9, taught in Iceland, Greenland, Sweden and Denmark by a range of international feature-makers, sound artists, journalists, composers and anthropologists. The project was run by the Icelandic Filmschool and managed by Rikke Houd.

In October 1998, Henriette wrote about sound, storytelling and her culture for Le Cercle Polaire – a think tank working to encourage the preservation of the polar environments.

“As an 8 year old in 1958, I remember my hometown hosted the visit of a delegation from Canadian Inuit. Since the migrations over several thousand years, this was the first time in modern times we Greenlanders saw and met Canadian Inuit. Their parkas became fashionable later, and we could understand their dialect. We also learned that they enjoyed listening to our radio. Old villages have been recovered in Disco Bay, my native area. Stories are told about events in these villages, passed on orally to ears eager to listen on the long and lonely winter nights, through the last 4,000 years. Many of these stories were collected and written down when we Greenlanders got our first writing system in the mid-19th century. Our culture was sustainable, we used the entire product of whatever catch, leaving only the broken bones since the marrow was valuable oil for food or fuel. So when we say archaeological evidence we mean materials in stones, bones and old ivory. Recently I heard a radio documentary in which it is said that in our culture a great hunter who arrived to the community with a catch would, at the end of the day, have the same amount of food in his house as those who did not catch anything that day. That is also what we remember life was like. No one became rich, but nothing was wasted. Wealth was measured as in terms of your generosity, and respect was due to your skills as a hunter, and what it means to be a kayaker, to your physical strength or your talent as a seamstress for making clothes and boats for survival in the Arctic lands and seas. Or as a shaman with great knowledge, a storyteller, or a poet who could amuse others at our gatherings, women and men alike. We, the Inuit, still have one leg in our old culture and the other in the fast lane. Our language will survive climate change but the customary laws and skills related to our envi­ronment are being forgotten. For the world community, our culture, based on sharing not wasting, storytelling and poetry is important for the survival of human cultural diversity and is to be viewed as a good practice of sus­tainable development.”

Documentary recordings of laughter musically interweave in this imagined scene

By Stéphane Borrel (2024)

Les Anciens (The Elders) is part of a larger electroacoustic (acousmatic) work by Stéphane Borrel called Laughing Tonalities. The work uses as its essential sound material the laughter from recordings of three hundred invited participants.

Stéphane writes, “The musical writing – based on very precise sound selection, manipulation and editing – brings into focus the timbres, the rhythms and the pitches of this material. In addition, it takes into account a more evocative side which consists of recreating “plausible” scenes or portraits that highlight the different laughter types.

Les Anciens (The Elders) brings together two people who, in reality, have never met. Behind the touching scene, the couple’s good humour, their half-hearted understanding, we must also feel the laughter at the pain, almost a nasty cough; at the end, his breathing stops, then her breathing – insects and birds remain. This is one of the pieces from the Laughing Tonalities cycle which deals with the theme of ‘ages of life’.

I probably won’t choose… but if I could choose, I would like to end up like them: sitting outside on a beautiful evening, ‘comforted by the insensibility of nature’, as Milan Kundera writes, ‘because insensibility is consoling; the world of insensibility is the world outside human life; it is eternity; it is the sea gone with the sun [« c’est la mer allée avec le soleil » Arthur Rimbaud]. […] the gently inhuman beauty of the world before or after the passage of men.'”

Stéphane Borrel lives and works in Lyon, France. He writes for different ensembles and diverse electronics, ranging from chamber music to the symphony orchestra, from mixed music to sound installations or acousmatic pieces. He teaches composition at Conservatoire de Lyon. Learn more about Laughing Tonalities on Instagram.

Dreams calm down our worries. We overcome extreme experiences with the flood of feelings that our mind reworks each night. During the first months of the full-scale Russian invasion, water flowed through Ukrainian dreams. Recurring rains, floods and images of the seaside from the audio archive at the Center for Urban History inspired Yevhenii Poliakov to make a collage.

“We learned to live against the current. Now, when we, the survivors, our relatives and friends, are reaching the other shore, the premonitions from our dreams become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The word ‘victory’ sounds too noisy. The silence that falls after is deafening since we are afraid of what comes next.”

Yevhenii Poliakov is an independent artist and researcher from Lviv, Ukraine

Interviews from video and audio recordings of students from the Ukrainian Catholic University, their parents and teachers. The talks took place between March and August 2022. They are part of the thirty hour audio archives ‘Diaries and Dreams of War’ at the Center for Urban History in Lviv

The project was supported by a scholarship from the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna as a part of the “Documenting Ukraine” initiative.

A conversation grows from a chance encounter on a train

By Mattias Wallenius (2024)

“I met Lisa on a train in the summer of 2023. She sat down next to me and introduced herself (which is very uncommon on a public train in Sweden (and probably many places in the world)). I was going to my friends wedding. And when I asked her where she was heading, she simply replied: “I’m going to see the love of my life”. We talked the whole three hour trip and exchanged numbers. I called her six months later, in mid-December. And the second line she said after hello was ”it ended today”.

Mattias Wallenius is a radio producer and journalist based in Stockholm, Sweden. He also created the music for this piece. “He called me his typhoon” was nominated in Tempo Documentary Festival’s Short Dox Radio award in 2024.

On a cold January day, Tirza conjures a snow ghost.

Joyce de Badts is a teacher and radio producer based in Antwerp, Belgium