Artist Research: Gregory Whitehead

Before working on Best Partners, I spent a while digging into radio art as a field, and that’s how I came across Gregory Whitehead. He’s one of those figures you just can’t skip. He’s American, based in Massachusetts, and his practice sprawls across writing, radio production, sound art, text‑sound poetry, playwriting, and media philosophy. Allen S. Weiss has called him an important voice in sound art and radio art, and Wave Farm places him squarely as a key figure in the revival of radio art since the 1980s.

The first piece of his that really got under my skin was On the Shore Dimly Seen (2015). I’ll admit I got the subject wrong early on in my research—I had it mixed up with something about the Titanic. Actually, the piece is built directly from the interrogation logs of Guantánamo Bay detainee #063, which Time magazine first published in 2005. Those logs document, in excruciating detail, month after month of sensory assault using loud music. Whitehead himself explained what pushed him to make the work: “In reading this complete log of documented abuse over many months, I was shocked by the sustained use of loud music to assault the detainee’s senses; in particular the use of the national anthem ‘The Star‑Spangled Banner’—during which the detainee was ordered to stand at attention, with his hand over his heart.” He went on to say that the texts “provided me with both a title, and a commitment—to break the appalling silence around the no‑touch torture regime imposed at the Guantánamo camp.” In the piece, Whitehead reads the interrogation logs, actress Anne Androne reads an approved list of torture techniques and a brief history of no‑touch torture, and vocalist Gelsey Bell’s improvisations “both embody and exorcise the brutal logic behind the texts.” The piece was shortlisted for the 2015 Prix Italia.

The more I looked into his work, the clearer it became that Whitehead and the 1940s radio drama series Quiet, Please (which I was also researching at the time) are basically opposites in one fundamental way. Cooper’s silences in Quiet, Please come from a place of narrative technique—he deliberately pulls sound away and lets the listener’s imagination fill the gap. It’s a carefully controlled dramatic tool, and the creator always knows exactly what he’s doing. Whitehead is different. His handling of silence isn’t a technique choice; it’s a judgement, a position. In On the Shore Dimly Seen, he’s not just telling a story about torture. He’s using sound to place you directly inside that interrogation room, turning you into a witness, maybe even an accomplice, with absolutely nowhere to escape.

This way of working connects to a wider aesthetic that runs through his practice. An academic study of his early works from the 1980s points to interference and entropy as key aesthetic and structural elements. His approach has been described as showing a “deep philosophical commitment to radio as a medium of poetic navigation and free association,” and his pieces often “interweave documentary and fictional materials into playfully unresolved narratives.” Across his sound and text‑sound works, he explores “the tension between continuous pulse and sudden bursts of rupture, and the entropy and decay of language.” In an interview, he once said that his starting point for radio was to treat it as “an adventure,” not as a delivery system for information. Another line of his that I’ve never forgotten: “A good radio programme invites the listener to navigate.”

Whitehead has been making sound work since the 1980s. He was active early on in the cassette culture scene, with pieces like Disorder Speech (1985), Display Wounds (1986), Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1987), and The Pleasure of Ruins (1988). His 1985 piece Dead Letters runs 56 minutes and starts from New York City’s “Dead Letter Office”—the department that handles undeliverable mail—then follows a team of decipherers as they attempt “longed‑for yet perhaps doomed communications,” spinning out an associative narrative about sound, language, and breakdown. Among his best‑known works are Pressures of the Unspeakable (1992, which won the Prix Italia), Shake, Rattle, Roll (1993), and The Thing About Bugs (1995, made with Christof Migone). From around 2000 onward, he’s produced a lot of features and documentary essays for BBC Radio, including The Marilyn Room (2000), American Heavy (2001), The Loneliest Road (2003), and No Background Music (2005). The Loneliest Road won a Sony Gold Academy Award, with the jury calling it “a masterclass in sound.”

In 1992, together with Douglas Kahn, he edited an important collection of essays called Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant‑garde, published by MIT Press. The book directly addresses what they saw as the “most conspicuous silence” in contemporary theory and art criticism around the history of sound and radio art. It brings together original essays and translated texts on figures and movements like Raymond Roussel, Marcel Duchamp, the Russian avant‑garde, French Surrealism, the German Neues Hörspiel, and William S. Burroughs’ cut‑up ventriloquism. The title itself—“Wireless Imagination”—feels like it contains the whole core of Whitehead’s creative life.

After really spending time with his work, I got a much sharper sense of what I was trying to do myself. For me, Whitehead’s work and Quiet, Please represent two very different kinds of force. Quiet, Please showed me technical precision—when to pull sound away, for how long, in what way. These things can be precisely controlled as narrative tools. Whitehead showed me something else: on top of technique, a person who works with sound can have a stance, a set of judgements. Sound can respond to what’s actually happening in the world right now. Both of these things stayed with me. Later, when I wrote the script for Best Partners, I took from Cooper the ability to use silence as a narrative device. From Whitehead I took a different lesson: if you make work with sound, you can’t just care about sound itself. What you choose to let people hear, and what you choose to keep silent—those choices reveal where you stand. Our little 12‑minute‑32‑second piece doesn’t carry anything like the political weight of Whitehead’s work, but in those two seconds of silence after the grandmother tells the truth, in that empty space I insisted on leaving open, I used something he taught me.

Sources

Gregory Whitehead, artist statement for On the Shore Dimly Seen, gregorywhitehead.net.
Wave Farm, “Gregory Whitehead,” wavefarm.org.
Allen S. Weiss, Phantasmic Radio, Duke University Press, 1995.
Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead, eds., Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant‑garde, MIT Press, 1992.
Prix Italia 2015 shortlist, prixitalia.rai.it.
Sony Gold Academy Award citation for The Loneliest Road, radioacademy.org.
· Various academic analyses of Whitehead’s early tape works, including discussions of interference and entropy in his radiophonic practice.