Dan Lander is mischievous with his tools; you can hear him grin at several points throughout these recordings. His writing has a sense of play and naturalness that one rarely hears. These are works ‘sans woosh’, bare, sometimes painful and always passionate, as in works with intelligence, precision and guts.

The calling of ‘Mister Speaker,’ the variations on broadcast quality and the snicker at our phobia with dead air, are classical moments in the freshly inaugurated pantheon of radio art classics. With a keen ear for the incision, Lander takes your radio, sets it on its back and takes its components apart. When you get it back in one piece, you end up not sure if you want it to work anymore.

1. Talking to a Loudspeaker

2. Destroy: Information Only

3. Failed Suicide

4. City Zoo / Zoo City