Ten Years of Radio Atlas (Video Podcast Collection)

What remains when we start to disappear?Produced by Luc Haekens and Edwin Brys for VRT (1993)Resounding with music, humour and humanity this feature blends the story of a pianist documenting his own decline and the residents of a care home near the Dutch border of Essen. Musically interweaving reality and fiction we dive into the internal world of people who feel that they are beginning to lose themselves.This feature won the Prix Italia, Premios Ondas and a Special Commendation at the Prix Futura in 1993.The pianist’s diary extracts are taken from the novel ‘Out of Mind’ by J. Bernlef.

A young woman walks out onto the ice, under a full moon, and disappears.Produced by Rikke Houd for Third Ear (11th March 2014)“In 1932 a young, Danish woman went as the first Danish nurse to the sparsely populated Greenlandic east coast. She trained as a nurse with the sole purpose of going to Greenland, but she didn’t get to live there for a year. One night she went out into the frozen landscape. She walked out on towards the sea, to the edge of the ice. Here the story ends with her footprints…”Deep beneath the Greenlandic ice, lies a hidden history. The Danish feature-maker Rikke Houd travels in the footsteps of Karen Roos, who disappeared on the ice outside the small East Greenlandic town of Tasiilaq in 1933.Winner of the 2015 In The Dark award for audio documentary presented at Sheffield Doc/fest. Produced with support from the Danish Arts Council. thirdear.dk 

An erotic radio work exploring the mechanics of lust.By Bert Kommerij for NPO Radio 5 (1998)Anonymous voices on a telephone sex line interweave with an audio letter addressed to an ever-changing ‘you’. In a work of intimate audio art from the pre-internet era, Kommerij builds a feature around a text he wrote about a contact ad.First broadcast in the series Radiostories: Human on NPO Radio 5.Bert Kommerij (1964) writer, radiomaker, voice-over, host.

On a dark night, in a small Danish town, Thomas Andersen has a violent encounter with his double.Produced by Thomas Arent Andersen for Third Ear x Politiken (9th November 2015)The story of two young men who lived in Viborg, a small town in Denmark, both with the same name – Thomas Andersen.  They had never met until one night in October, thirteen years ago, when one Thomas Andersen ended up trying to run over the other one in his car. One Thomas ended up in a coma, with no memory of the night. In this documentary he returns to Viborg to shed light on the darkness of the past – and to find Thomas Andersen again.The Double is among the winners of the 2016 Third Coast/Richard H. Driehaus CompetitionThomas Arent Andersen was born on December 22, 1983, in Viborg, Denmark. He is a graduate of The National Film School of Denmark and has worked professionally with audio and sound design on documentaries and feature films since 2008. In November 2015 Thomas debuted as a podcast producer with his own personal story, The Double.In 2016 Thomas produced another podcast for Third Ear about a former Danish police officer gone rogue and is currently working on several new documentaries.You can hear more from Third Ear on Radio Atlas here.This podcast was made in collaboration with the Danish newspaper Politiken.

Original Radio Atlas credits:“What I do is writing with a microphone. Our lexicon is the sound material we shape. We use speech, not language. All these terms: documentary radio drama, radio feature, acoustic film—are not quite appropriate. It is, in fact, radio itself… Documentary radio drama uses the means of the medium itself.” (Zvonimir Bajsić in an interview)Created in collaboration with dramaturg Čedo Prica and sound engineer Maksim Jurjević, ‘Old Lika Pathetic Symphony’ represents the culmination of Zvonimir Bajsić’s exploration of the possibilities of documentary sound on the radio. The piece was recorded in the Plitvice Lakes National Park during the winter of 1974/75 using a Nagra tape recorder, which at the time weighed 8-10 kilograms.The programme was first presented at the 19th Radio Week in Ohrid (Macedonia) in 1975, where twenty-seven representatives from countries including Turkey, Syria, Tunisia, France and Germany had gathered. It was awarded best radio feature, with a jury statement that read, “The delegates found themselves simultaneously in front of a truly acoustic and dramatic composition, in front of something that must be called a RADIOPHONIC ART WORK. Old Lika Pathetic Symphony is about life and death, and it confirms that radiophonic expression is not based solely on the word, but also belongs to the world of sounds.”The work was broadcast worldwide, on Sender Freies Berlin (German adaptation by Klaus Lindemann, 1992), as well as on Swedish radio, Danish radio (adaptation by Viggo Klausen), Dutch, Belgian and Swiss radio. The German adaptation of Old Lika Pathetic Symphony was nominated for the Karl Sczuka Prize (a festival organised by SWR Baden-Baden). The piece was also honoured at the 30th anniversary of the International Features Conference in Sydney in 2004.Translation: Pavlica Bajsić and Marta MedvešekThanks to Croatian Radio for providing the recording.Zvonimir Bajsić (1925–1987) was a writer and director for radio, theatre, and television from Zagreb, Croatia. He spent his entire professional career in the Drama Department of Radio Zagreb, but his radio dramas and documentary radio features were translated worldwide into an extraordinary number of languages, and he himself collaborated, as both author and director, with numerous foreign radio stations. In addition to being one of most internationally awarded radio authors from the countries of the former Yugoslavia, his name is closely associated with the concept of the documentary radio feature, or—as he himself put it—“writing with a microphone.” This includes his insistence on the sound engineer as an equal member of the authorial team, and in his beautiful reflections on silence as a material of radio (The synopsis for the sound essay Silence (1978), Images from the Life of a Radio Dramaturg (1987)).More about his work can be found in the book Silence and Other Works (Tišina i ostala djela, 2017), a collection of his works and accompanying texts edited by his daughter Pavlica Bajsić. German translations of his works can be found in the audio archive of Bauhaus University (Department of Experimental Radio), and in the rbb audio archive. A documentary film on his work, ‘Tko je taj Zvonimir Bajsić?’ can be found on YouTube.