À l’occasion d’une journée portes ouvertes organisée un jour de la semaine, je rencontre un auditeur de Resonance FM qui me raconte un de ses bons souvenirs de la station : une émission consacrée aux chauffeurs de taxi londoniens, intitulée Taxi Opera. Il m’indique qu’il en a conservé une coupure de journal, et situe l’épisode autour de 2007. Je recueille son témoignage à la volée et, quelques heures plus tard, je commence à fouiller les archives numériques de la station pour retrouver des traces de cet événement radiophonique.
During a weekday open house day, I meet a Resonance FM listener who tells me about one of his fond memories of the station: a programme devoted to London taxi drivers, entitled Taxi Opera. He told me that he kept a press clipping about it, and places the episode around 2007. I gather his account on the fly and, a few hours later, I start digging through the station’s digital archives to find traces of this radio event.
Voici l’enregistrement de l’émission Drifting in the Resonance FM Archives du 23 septembre 2026.
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You’re listening to Drifting In The Resonance Fm Archives
Today, I am drifting in… and I realise that one always need someone else’s knowledge to go further – whether it is to navigate the city, an archive, or oneself.
What does it mean to orient oneself in thinking ? in the city ? in an archive ?
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I cannot find my way through thought without the guidance of another’s knowledge.
My colleagues Solen, Peter, Milo, and Iñaki; the Resonance FM listener, Richard; the taxi cab driver who works behind the station, Jason… – all of them give me information to orient myself.
They somehow give me the knowledge I need to drift through the archive, the city, and oneself.
If there’s tacit knowledge of walking and finding your way in a city, there’s a persistente incompletness of the knowledge. It is made up of gaps, wholes, and absences – of everything I do not know in my daily life.
I’m getting to know the objects and subjects that people talk to me about, the things they point to and name.
And in the Resonnce FM archives, I cannot make sens of a document without someone else’s knowledge.
Last week, the radio took part to the Open-House Festival. What a good way to learn the knowledge of London. So much was learned during that week, in so many encounters – each one a small transfer…of information.
Let’s go back to last week: here’s my colleague Solen, who introduces the visitor to the station
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At one point, the conversation turned to the archives and an upcoming grant application, and someone asked if it might be better to start archiving sooner rather than later.
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My coworker Inaki said that the archiving process could take five to ten years…and a woman replied : “Done is better than perfect”… because perfect is never done.
and I continued to talk about the archives.
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And there is the first show of London Underground originally broadcast on WFMU, a series that introduced so many London artists.
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The Open House festival was a surprise to me because, despite my limited knowledge of the station, I found myself telling its story – over and over again – for a full week.
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So the fifteen or so of us managed to make our way to the place where I currently run the archives – namely, the project space.
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And what else… Yeah,
By engaging conversations with people about the history of Resonance FM, people talk,
gave me information to orient myself. Here’s Richard, a longtime listener of Resonance FM.
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Richard told me that, during the Open-House festival. People give me hints and insight into what’s in the archive.
And than, I started looking in the archive to see if I could find some traces about this event.
An hour later, Richard sent me a link about this performance. It is call : “If the route: The Great Learning of London”, A Taxi Opera.
After reading Richard’s message, I saw that the event took place at Studio Voltaire.
The website states that the radio program was first broadcast on 14 March 2007 at 9 p.m.
I quietly log onto the server, look in the “Resonance FM” folders, find the year 2007 and the month of March, and open the folder for the 14th. And the recording begins like this.
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The play begins right away with the voices of aspiring taxi drivers reciting a route they take to get from point A to point B.
Imagined in collaboration with two artist, the live performance has been developed collaboratively with 10 students from the school Knowledge Point and four improvising string players.
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I haven’t yet been able to recover all of the records. Obviously – and this is yet another example – there is an inherent incompleteness to any archive.
The second radio work was broadcasted on the 21st of March and it featured the architect Celine Condorelli.
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And after the introduction, when we get to the second radio piece, we have a sort of unintentional sonic mishmash – what Glenn Gould could have called “contrapuntal” radio in another context.
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That is part of what archives are all about – their incompleteness, the difficulty of navigating the audible past.
If it weren’t for the story told by Richard, a listener of Resonance FM who came to the open house, I would never have found myself transported back to 2007 through this piece by Beatrice Gibson and Jamie McCarthy, broadcast on Resonance FM and inspired by the artist Cornelius Cardew.
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Thanks to my colleagues, the Resonance FM community, and especially to Richard, one of our listeners, and Jason, the taxi driver.
Every day, thanks to your knowledge, there’s a way to go – in the city, in the archive, and within oneself.
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And the story doesn’t end there; it could go on for a long time, starting with finding out why the auditor Richard framed this article. Perhaps I will see this quest through to the end one day.
And a few minutes after the broadcast, Richard shared this message with me.
Hi
That was tremendous!! Thank you for making such extensive use of my chance anecdote. The theme of unearthing forgotten cultural and social memory put me in mind of this passage from José Saramago’s novel, The Double.
All the best
Richard
