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Voici l’enregistrement de l’émission Drifting in the Resonance FM Archives du 9 septembre 2026.
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I am drifting in…because Radio has made me.
Like so many listeners and producers, radio has shaped my way of listening, talking and thinking.
For the past decade, the stories I have been living have taken root in community radio stations, their archives, and the communities that keep them alive day and night.
It is because radio has made me… that I am drifting in the Archives
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Each two weeks, than, I’ll present a dérive though the Resonance FM archives : a travelogue, a report on the experience of archives and the city, a mashup of archival fragments on the history of Resonance – a project by the London Musicians’ Collective launched in 1998 and which went on the air in 2002.
This series will explore transnational relations between the London Musicians’ Collective and and Québec musique actuelle community, and the wider radio and sound art community in continental Europe and around the world.
Drifting in is also a way of connecting with the people who sustain Resonance – producers, listeners, and artists who support the station, and reciprocally, the station that supports them back.
So… before drifting in the archives… let’s drift into the city
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Here I am, just drifting in London, where I just arrived a few weeks ago.
And yeah, after weeks and weeks of an historic dry summer, the rain is falling now.
Here I am, discovering a city where so many people have walks here before me.
I am here… thinking about the layers of the streets, layers of history that I can merely grasp… in the architecture, in the form of buildings.
And I know that the light of the archives will return and allow me to make sense of the palimpsest of this magnificent city.
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Being in London…is quiet extatic. Une ville-fables, une autres ville-fables.
I like to stop, sometime, on a streetcorner, to take the time to observe, to listen. […]
To observe the movement, the paths taken by individuals, the scenes, the sequences, and the transitions.
This morning, for example, it was raining. And now, at the end of the day, the sun has come out again, and the city is coming alive once again.
The city of London… with, yeah, the classic taxis, the buses, the bridges over the Thames…
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There’s something about the psychogeography that has an effect on me.
There’s something about the rhythm, the tempo, and the intensity of the interactions on the city streets that energizes me.
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All of the people walking in the streets,
With their own preoccupation, their own deadlines, their own stories,
This is what I like in cities
You get a bunch of people together
With so many stories…
How can I capture the effervescence of this city, its density, and its vitality – and then… communicate it?
The answer is… it probably has something to do with radio and soundwork… and maybe the answer can also be found in the radio archives….
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Once I arrived at the place where I live now, I did what I usually do – a little radio browsing…
And yes I could pass the whole night…. strolling on airwaves…
There is something about a city, about an era, that can be captured by recording these kinds of radio strolls.
I remember, a few years ago, that someone shared a radio recording on a blog of a drive along the West Coast from the 1980s. I never found the recording again…I lost the link… but It gave a good sense of the time and took me… far away.. with the folk and western music from a radio of a bygone era.
And then came the time, when I first arrived in London, that I finally tuned in to Resonance FM.
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I didn’t came to London as a tourist… to stroll in between pubs and pubs…
I ended up here, because of archives, radio archives. It seems to be the vehicles that I use to travel with, for the last years…
And the quest I have in this city is to go through the archives of Resonance Fm, to find a way, my way, in a maze of documents.
There’s a whole world to discover on the radio, all on just one frequency in the FM band.
Resonance Fm is turning 25 years old… in few months, and it’s mean that it is a moment to reflect about his past.
I’ll open boxes in the coming weeks, meet former producers, radio artists, that have dedicated hours and hours to this radio station.
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I honestly don’t know what I’ll be able to do: what’s certain is that I’m going to try to unearth some archives, share them with others – here and there – , and find a way to tell a story about the London Musician’s Collective and Resonance FM with the help of the main characters in this story.
I would like this place – the studio, the city, this dérive – to be a potential space to explore Resonance Fm archives, to experiment with the challenging articulation of words, sentence, archives… which is also the ordinary challenge of putting thoughts into words…
That said,
Like so many listeners and producers, radio has made me, radio is making me… and I want to keep doing it, again and again.
