XENTOS FREY BENTOS (UK)

For years Xentos fray Bentoz worked as an uninspired body double for particularly clueless people. Then, in a moment of panic, he gave it all up to become a radio artiste. He eventually tracked down the device he needed to succeed in his new career. It lay beneath a bound set of TV repair magazines in a charity shop window in Windsor, home town of the British Queen. That device was an old transistor radio with a broken aerial. Although Xentos could not repair the radio in his imagination he could hear nothing but used-music shows, period dramas and sports programmes. To compensate, he decided to make some radio programmes of his own and, after he’d finished, he made some more.

He has left tracks has a programme maker and producer for Resonance 104.4 FM – ongoing. Since 2001, Xentos has scripted and produced almost two hundred episodes of the picaresque comedy programme Harmon e. Phraisyar Show. He recently realised, a continuous 16 hour special composed entirely of a series of artificial ‘parallel world’ one hour radio shows. Also done a month residency as radio artist for Toronto, Canada’s CKLN Deep Wireless radio festival – May/June 2007 and a original radio drama for national radio Netherlands– 2006. He was commissioned by Austrian radio ORF’s Kunstradio to produce series of five programmes – 2004 and is a contributor, sound artist and programme producer for Resonance and the LMC’s South Bank Month of Radio June 1998.

Xentos also teaches radio to youthful aspirants in Lewisham, South London and produces sound designs for interactive museum displays. Recent work has included pieces for The Science Museum, National Maritime Museum and Tate Modern.

In his own words:

The most peculiar thing about radio – a medium that professes to invent itself from moment to moment – is its predictability. We’re all aware that the sometimes real but often imagined pressures of commercialism dictate the form and content. There’s a belief out there among the movers and shakers of the industry that radio must be listenable. I believe the opposite – that radio should be almost unlistenable. Potentially, no medium can adhere so closely to the unconscious state of the mind, that realm of unordered thoughts and floating images which lies just beneath our cultured conditioned exteriors, like a hungry ghost attending a banquet.

It can be argued that there was once an element of truth in radio’s claim to be have a duty to provide information, education and entertainment in medicinal doses. But this arrogant provision has been long eroded by the primacy of tv and internet. Yet, liberated from this wearisome agenda, radio has not flown or trickled easily into a creative ocean. Quite the opposite, instead finding itself bullied into being little more than a porn shop of regurgitated musical trends or, at worst, a mere speaking clock!
OK. Radio does the simple things well – traffic, news, chat, muzak. But what about the deeper human desires?
My idea is to develop a radio that, besides showcasing all the great benefits that human language and noise have bestowed upon the world, also represents the screams of its numberless victims.