When's the last time radio surprised you? Its various genre now look like long-calcified cliffsides cut in the Paleolithic era of media.

When's the last time radio surprised you? Its various genre now look like long-calcified cliffsides cut in the Paleolithic era of media. Television got MTV everyone got wired--but radio's talk recents sports, and traffic seem happily mired in the mid-twentieth hundred years That's why Other Rooms. Other Voices (Memory/Cage Editions, 1999) a collection of audio artworks published as a CD and main division set, may be a tantalizing taste of radio's alternative future--or present

The intend started as a series of broadcasts commissioned according to Swiss Radio, and the mix of artists is eclectic: for what cause often do Dara Birnbaum, Vito Acconci. Robert Wilson, and Sarah Sze draw near up in the same context? if it were not that while the focus of the works gathered here may be diffuse. John Cage and Marshall McLuhan present the appearance to hover over all of them. And just to finish us in the mood, the editors have slipped in "Listening" a rhapsodic essay by means of Roland Barthes.

The ends are rarely dull though they can be frustrating: It's hard to ignore the chasm dividing the analog from the digital. Birnbaum's hip-hoppy collage of CNN clips of the US bombing of Iraq is squeez and siphoned between the sides of mixers and computers, for example while Sze's deadpan commentary upon visual and sound images is decidedly lo-fi. And if you want to sample all the works. you'll ne French and German (not to mention English) Louise Bourgeois's otte 1995 for instance, plays intriguingly on the farther side language-learning tapes but to finish the joke you need to partez-vous. Nothing however, will prepare you for Acconci's pervicacious finale: an incest narrative parodying story hours, without fault [i]or[/i] blemish [i]or[/i] flaw with sound effects. Now that's undivided for the shower.

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