I have recently negotiated with Radia Network for them to brodcast on Harrogate Community Radio. But, Radia Network is not normal radio. It’s radio, kind of-but not the kind where someone tells you the time and plays a hit from the ’80s. This is a blog post about radiophonic art, which, depending on who you ask, is either “radio made by artists” or “artists who make radio weird”. Either way, it’s got tape hiss and feedback and voices you can’t place. It’s everything that shouldn’t be on the radio, but somehow is.

This blog post is a bit of a history lesson to shoe-horn in the fact that HCR, the station I helped found, syndicate Radia Network – and, I am pleased as punch with this!

Back in the 1920s, people were reeling from World War One and also figuring out what to do with the new invention ‘broadcasting’. Some of them wrote plays, but the plays got stranger. People like Hans Flesch started throwing in random sounds-like, actual sounds, not instruments. In Germany, in 1924, he aired this comedy called Zauberei auf dem Sender, which is a great title even if you don’t speak German. It means Witchcraft on the Airwaves, or something. Then Walter Ruttmann, a film guy, made a kind of sound postcard of Berlin. That was 1928.

Meanwhile, in Britain, a guy called Lance Sieveking got the BBC to try experiments. Probably a lot of people thought they were wasting time. But it was all part of something bigger. Around the same time, Italian futurists were writing manifestos about how radio could be a new kind of art. Not a stage, not a concert hall, just invisible sounds zipping through the air, into your kitchen or your bedroom or wherever you happened to be. And this one guy, Pierre Schaeffer, a radio engineer in France, started making loops and playing tapes backwards and realising-wait-when you do this stuff, the sound changes your brain a little.

He called it musique concrète. He wrote about how sometimes, when you mess up-like you hit play too fast, or a record skips-it’s not a mistake. It’s music. And that was the beginning of a kind of sonic philosophy, like: what even is a sound? Where does meaning start?

He wrote essays. He made a radio opera with eight monsters. No, seriously. It was called La Coquille à Planètes, which sounds like a perfume but is actually more like a space-horror for one voice and a bunch of strange noises. He talked about how radio sneaks into your home like a ghost. You never see it coming.

Pretty soon, everyone wanted in. National radio stations started opening studios where this kind of weirdness was not only allowed but encouraged. Germany, Italy, Poland. In the US, John Cage made a piece for twelve radios. Max Neuhaus planted transmitters in trees along a New York highway so cars driving past would pick up different sounds, like a forest that was whispering to you in Morse code.

In Britain, the BBC opened their Radiophonic Workshop. It wasn’t just for drama-it made bleeps and boops for programme idents, jingles, stings, you name it. But underneath all that was this idea: what if sound could tell stories in a way language couldn’t? What if the airwaves were a playground?

That’s where Delia Derbyshire comes in. You probably know the Doctor Who theme, right? That eerie, buzzing, swirling thing? She didn’t compose it, exactly-that was Ron Grainer-but she built it, piece by piece, using tape and oscillators and nothing digital because it was 1963. She said radio was her love. Her education. She worked like a mathematician, logging every tweak by hand.

After she left the Workshop, she didn’t chase a big music career. Some of the others did-Daphne Oram, Elizabeth Parker, Beatriz Ferreyra-they kept pushing into electronic music. Delia just… stepped back. Maybe the radio was the real instrument all along.

The story keeps going. In Austria, in 1987, a woman called Heidi Grundmann started Kunstradio. In 1993, the BBC opened Between the Ears, which once broadcast the sounds of a car park in Gateshead. Sweden got in on it. Australia did too.

In the UK, Magz Hall co-founded Radio Arts. She made a project where a tree had a transmitter inside it. You could tune in and hear the sound of the tree from the inside. Not metaphorically. Literally.

Festivals popped up-Radiophrenia in Glasgow, Signals2Noise in Berlin. The original Radiophonic Workshop guys even formed a band, because why not?

But here’s the thing: radiophonic art isn’t just old-school nostalgia or synth nerd stuff. It’s this oddball, lo-fi, brain-bending tradition that’s still alive. It’s not quite music. Not quite theatre. It’s not waiting for applause or selling tickets. It just happens, in your head, in your headphones, in your car, in your bones.

And it’s been happening now for over a hundred years.