Hearing voices.

On the face of it Hearing Voices is an informative and evocative BBC commissioned radio documentary, based on endangered click languages from the Kalahari Desert in Botswana. It juxtaposes recordings of some of the languages in question (both spoken and sung), followed up with translation into English, environmental field recordings that help place the listener into the location, not forgetting the mandatory insertion of the voice of academic authority imputing the kind of information that convention demands on such an enterprise. But this work presents much more in form and content, and their interrelation, than the current received rules of radio documentary normally allow. From the outset the listener is presented with a capricious sound world where aural objects shift and surprise, and conventions are undermined or mutated. From a northerner's post colonial point-of-audition, where issues of representing the subaltern are riddled with dangers, many artists would grasp extant, albeit exhausted and ill-considered practices, or back out of the undertaking altogether. John Wynne, acutely sensitive to the hazards of the task in hand, and passionate about the subject matter, has found an approach that both informs, but also questions. And it is within that implicit questioning that is built into the structure and treatment of the materials that a running critique is revealed.