Interview #172—Jon Tjhia

by nathania gilson

Jon Tjhia is a Melbourne-born radio-maker, writer and musician. He co-founded the podcast Paper Radio, worked as the Wheeler Centre’s senior digital editor from 2010-2020, and co-founded the Australian Audio Guide. He has also been a member of Audiocraft’s programming committee and a Walkley Awards Radio/Audio feature judge.

Jon spoke to Nathania Gilson about radio-making, paying attention, and complicating the act of storytelling.

When did you become interested in sound-making and writing professionally? Did you ever feel external pressure to commit to just one thing?

I began wanting to be a musician full-time when I was in my mid-teens, and I was first paid for writing (about music, for Voiceworks) when I was 15 or so. I was very invested: years in bands and on tours, learning to write press releases and criticism, and working on other sound and writing projects. I love making music. It’s one of my favourite things. Being a musician can be really great: travelling, meeting nice people who are kind to you, hearing tonnes of new things all the time, staying up late, getting paid to make loud noises. It was never going to become my whole life, but it will always be a part of it.

A lot of my time in Melbourne’s music community felt like a habit of apologising for myself, which can happen in the company of too much entitled shittiness, absent self-awareness and dysfunctional whiteness. I think things have moved along a bit (and many of my then-friends have grown up), but I’m still a bit too suss to relax into it again. Seeing myself on the outside of something is nothing new, but discomfort and unwelcome feelings are unfortunately wired into my body. I wish I didn’t carry such a tiring level of shame.

While I was working on music, I fell into radio making by accident—first as a digital producer with the ABC, where we began experimenting with various podcasts early on. Eventually, I was given the chance to produce some small packages and features for Radio Australia. Radio has never been the main part of any job I’ve had, but it’s allowed me to play with ideas born in music and in writing. It has huge potential to be a very free medium and historically it has been. External pressure? Well, it’s taken some time to prove to my parents that I can live a good life doing the work that I do, and I’m not always sure I’ve entirely convinced them.

I’ve always written as part of other work, but it came to the fore during my time at the Wheeler Centre. I love the choices that writing places before you and I love trying to carry a reader. In my head, radio, music and writing (and moving images and drawings, and so on) keep spilling further into each other. As Gemma Mahadeo says, it’s all music, right?

You recently wrapped up on the Manus Recording Project Collective. How did you become involved in the project, and what did you learn from the experience?

As briefly as I can summarise it—the Manus Recording Project Collective emerged sideways from a podcast called The Messenger, which was built around thousands of WhatsApp voice messages from Abdul Aziz Muhamat—a Zaghawa refugee who fled Darfur and was then detained in Australia’s immigration detention centre on Manus Island. I was part of the team that produced it.

Then, in 2018, James Parker (Melbourne Law School) and Joel Stern (Liquid Architecture) invited us to expand it somehow for an exhibition/investigation they were curating, called Eavesdropping. Three of us based in Melbourne (Michael Green, André Dao and I) began working with six detained men (Samad Abdul, Farhad Bandesh, Behrouz Boochani, Kazem Kazemi, Shamindan Kanapathi, Abdul Aziz Muhamat) to produce and publish daily ten-minute recordings from their days in incarceration. This is the Manus Recording Project Collective, named to mirror the acronym given to the Manus Regional Processing Centre where the men had all been imprisoned. The six PNG-based artists were sent Zoom Handy Recorders and the recordings were uploaded quickly and played at Ian Potter Museum of Art, usually the following day. It ran six days a week for fourteen weeks; the archive comprises fourteen hours of material.

That work, ‘how are you today’, worked with attention—turning to, turning away, sitting with—and how it’s modulated through things like expectation (of something happening or not) and your relationship to who and what you’re listening to. In the recordings, you may hear someone showering or trying to sleep, but your listening is contextual: the men’s agency in their acts of documentation and creation; several years of indefinite incarceration; the 23 hours and 50 minutes that don’t exist in the file.

You might be listening to someone listening (many detainees would pass time in their recordings by listening to songs) or listening back. Tuning into a news report about Australian politics, discussing the government with each other. Who would listen for a whole ten minutes to whatever the men wanted to record? And—why or why not?

In mid-2020, with many of the refugees and asylum seekers now housed in hotel rooms, serviced apartments and ‘immigration transit accommodation’ around Australia, we initiated a second work: ‘where are you today’.

Half of the detainee artists were from the earlier project, and half were new to the collective. For 30 days, we’d send subscribers a daily SMS with a short description of a new 10-minute recording and a link to listen to it. It would tell you how long ago the recording was made, and how many kilometres from your location. By the time the recordings were being published, most subscribers were stuck at home during Melbourne’s infamous COVID-19 lockdown. That created an odd tension at the time, as some people became accustomed to describing their situation using throwaway references to imprisonment. When a listener of our project clicked on a recording, they may have found themselves five kilometres from a person who’s essentially been in some form of lockdown for seven years, and counting.

Attention is a very physical thing, a bodily thing, and our experience of it changes in a gallery, or at home in isolation. At its best, it can hold open a window between one experience or place and another. Though always obscured through our own experiences and relations, a connection can be made. And recordings can render a place portable. Behrouz said: ‘Sometimes we exist in Australia, through these artworks … that part is very surreal.'

These projects offered me an opportunity to think about physical demands of listening, and the expectations we create around how our time is populated. It’s also been a way for me to consider the potential personal and social value of art, and how it’s able to draw a lot of energy to context.

‘how are you today’ and ‘where are you today’ have been spun into essays and scholarship about indefinite incarceration in art criticism and law contexts. I’m happy our detained collaborators’ experiences have been witnessed and considered in these ways. For years, they have spent enormous energy on political campaigns for their freedom. They have exhausted the persuasive power of personal storytelling and felt the limits of the supposedly redemptive potential of confession or empathy. In these recordings, we hear them as creative people whose expression isn’t solely organised around a political calibration, though one is present. Their lives and personalities are complex beyond representation—serious but also silly and supportive and sentimental—yet all our listening to them occurs under the spectre of their imprisonment. What happens when you transport recordings of incarcerated people into the centre of the state that mandates it?

There’s art and there’s direct, material political work to be done. Are they really so separate? Art lends complication, confrontation and possibility to our understandings of each other; it offers both critical and imaginative potential. We often neglect the things that exist beyond language. Care, solidarity and freedom are also fundamentally about imagination. I know it can feel impossible sometimes. In a way, that’s my point.

That feeling of attention as 'a very physical thing, a bodily thing', I think I know it—it makes me think of how the purpose of distraction is sometimes to make us feel like we don't exist. And paying attention is a way of willing ourselves to exist; to be really present and sit with the vulnerability of being seen, as we see, too.

Distraction is powerful. Most of our defence mechanisms, social and innate, recruit distraction in some way. I think distraction often seduces us with the promise that we will be seen to exist, which is even better than just existing. We’re never that far from delegating responsibility for our sense of self!

So if paying attention compels us to sit with the vulnerability of being seen, it’s confronting in its nakedness: evincing a confrontation between our stated values and our capacity to demonstrate them. How much attention are we actually willing to give something, beyond publicly demanding that ‘we’ should be paying attention to them? (Susan Sontag: ‘To be a moral human being is to pay, be obliged to pay, certain kinds of attention.’)

Awareness and attention are not the same. I say I care about something, but can I actually give myself over to it privately without recognition, acknowledgment, knowledge or understanding? Why is it generally so uncomfortable? This suggests a process of being accountable for decisions about your time.

I love the choices that writing places before you and I love trying to carry a reader.

In your audio doc for BBC Short Cuts, as part of the 'Oulipo' series, you asked people to tell an important story about themselves without using the word 'I'. I especially loved the line someone said aloud: 'The sensation of something ringing true ... feels like a sense of ownership. It's yours. You can claim it. You can change it.'

What do you have against the word 'I' in storytelling? Or: what kind of creative choices do you end up making, to be able to make a doc like this?

The piece you’re referring to was commissioned on the understanding that there’d be some caveat or limitation—a homage to the constrained writing techniques and structural experiments of the Oulipo group. Talking to people about pretty much anything with no end goal in mind is one of my favourite things, and radio is often my excuse for having those conversations. The ‘interview’, as a genre of speech, contains so many rules or assumptions to play against. And freeing speech—not just what is said, but how it is allowed to be said and heard; who is a ‘good talker’; how playful can we be (who is allowed to play)—has implications for all the ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ stuff too.

Thankfully, Short Cuts series producer Eleanor McDowall (one of the very best radio makers out there) was open-minded about how this commission would play out, as long as it carried emotional resonance. I finally chose my structural conceit: as soon as the interviewee said ‘I’, I’d abruptly cut to the next person.

I recorded fourteen conversations. Each revealed a different thought or experience, ultimately pointing to a fuzzy boundary between presence and absence—how we can be sensed in ways we can’t sense ourselves, and how removing ourselves can be harder than it seems. Perhaps because I had no clearly defined agenda, the recordings have people searching for their thoughts as they speak. It’s a silly, shit-stirring concept born from a chaotic process; yet their voices sound beautifully tentative, halting and melodic. My favourite parts of the piece are where their non-verbal sounds collapse into each other.

Ultimately, these stories refuse to satisfy you with an ending; some of them, a beginning. In the process of these interviews, I’m wondering not only who we’re speaking to, or what we’re speaking of, but especially who we’re speaking as, and why. I have nothing against the ‘I’ in storytelling; I’m just asking how it’s produced or reduced. But just like the people who do it, storytelling is a cascading set of complications.

You recently worked on a multimedia essay, Separation Studies, for LIMINAL's Glitch series. Where did the idea come from?

Separation Studies started as a thought about mistakes and corrections. What separates problems from not-problems? How do we categorise, distinguish or make decisions about things—what tips the balance one way or another? (At what moment in the hot water is an egg instead a boiled egg?) What warrants correction? How do we decide when something can be fixed, or when it’s beyond repair? How about people? I was reading about utopianism and ideas of perfection—Bernadette Mayer’s Utopia being the main text that stayed with me—as well as a handful of psychology, self-help and trauma textbooks. (Researching is a loose and tangential process for me, but I have no doubts about how important its influence is.)

Partly because it needed sharper focus and partly because of where the writing led, the essay became about the lines we draw within ourselves and between each other. It’s made up of sixteen sections. I often like to work with shorter exercises that allow a writer to find the size of an idea, and the right form for it, rather than immediately worrying about how the idea can sustain a longer work.

Narrative work should involve an element of play; fuller sense doesn’t blossom in a death-grip. Exercises and experiments are my way of letting ideas breathe and finding a manageable way to plot a rhythm. You end up with a kind of list (or, if you prefer, a map in parts): a structured and sequenced set of separate elements, drawn together for a common purpose. If it turns out to be good, to convey something, then so what if Lauren Oyler mocks you for it?

To return to the idea itself, I’m aware how much it can seem like I’m preoccupied with things that seem superfluous. To me, our ways of grasping these apparently little things—the ideas, oppositions or categorisations created and sold by language—heavily underpin our construction of the world, and therefore have significant material effects down the line. Most technologies, for example, make a huge number of assumptions and decisions before a consumer’s agency enters the room. At a recent talk launching the Incendium Radical Library in Newport, Tilly Glascodine pointed to one of the definitions of ‘radical’ (see also ‘radicle’)—pertaining to the root or the fundamental nature of something. I’m trying to figure out what’s going on at the source of the stream.

The idea of keeping work and play entangled is something I've also been thinking a lot about lately. In the past, we've spoken about how when we're immersed in our work, the thought of stopping and going outside for some sun or a stroll in nature means we might never actually come back to the task at hand, or resume the optimal productivity levels that need to be maintained. Where do you look or listen, when you're in need a sense of hope or optimism instilled in you?

Just to be clear, I’m not trying to merge work and play—only to encourage a lightness of touch and a sense of possibility into the creative process. ‘Generative’ over ‘productive’ if you like. Capitalism can (and will) eat it! And I get that I’m disturbingly privileged for things like ‘creative possibility’ to be part of how I’m able to make labour function in my life.

Hope and optimism are interesting ideas, relational to the world you’re in and how you factor into it. I think we like views because they make the world feel vast and human problems feel smaller. I’m drawn to things that offer time to figure things out properly, and to understand concepts like possibility and liberation better. But you know what else is good? Being silly.

This past year, though? I think being ‘resilient’—some persistent sense of optimism—can be a coping mechanism that might not allow you to access the full gamut of an emotional experience. For me, the debts of a stubborn resilience mindset are finally arriving with interest. On bad days, everything familiar hums with a haunting. I live next to some beautiful parks and I’m completely sick of them. I was once deeply comforted by walking the suburban bush tracks by the Yarra and the Merri Creek; now, it’s six-hour walks through paved suburbs, searching for the messy sounds of human life, and those are getting old too.

What still kind of works? Translucent friendship. Hearing other people’s thoughts, listening to people talk, almost any conversation, crap jokes, children and animals and their accidental humour, the mutual raising of an eyebrow. Floating around on a bike. The human pulse of a good book, essay, short story or poem. And the sort of kindness that makes me want to cry, still unsure of how and whether to accept it. The other day, I went ice skating. My friend told me it’s hard to feel miserable when you’re gliding around on metal blades. I agreed until I slipped, slapped my head and coccyx on the ice. But I would still recommend ice skating.

I’m sure many of us relate strongly to the intermingling of beauty, sadness, transcendence and despair. There can be a tendency (especially online) to industrialise emotions and process them through infrastructural language. Mostly, I think that’s awful. Feeling bereft or hopeless is of course hard, but avoiding difficult feelings or delegating them to systems just makes them harder to see and to live with (and through). Grief is a long-term project. Panda said it: I love life and life is the fucking worst. Don’t make me choose!

I’m drawn to things that offer time to figure things out properly, and to understand concepts like possibility and liberation better. But you know what else is good? Being silly.

I was thinking about Avery Trufelman's recent tweet about what's more embarrassing these days: being a professional podcaster when it was a brand new thing versus living in an era where basically anyone can have one. What's one thing you'd like to see change in the podcasting world? Is it something you'd like to tackle yourself or see someone else drive forward?

R.I.P. the tweet! There are many, many things I would love to shift in podcasting, and I’m proud to be a part of a community of people driving those shifts already, in different ways. Lately, there’s been a lot of talk about workplace culture in North America, orbiting the Caliphate/Daily/Andy Mills garbage, Reply All’s mothballed series on Bon Appétit, and various unionisation campaigns. I’m grateful for not only the loudest voices and most visible campaigners but also the people I see carefully but deliberately working to untangle knots in the background, people building simple tools like POC Audio Directory, rate guides, many free tutorials, and so on.

If implosions and scandals reveal anything, it’s that the work, its cultural and material contexts, its purpose and its impact are all organs in the same body. So, in podcasting (and any) organisations that purport to address the world with honesty, I want First Nations people given control, money, support and space, I want access taken seriously and I will never stop being obsessed with critical engagement. Marginalised people should be offered a chance to play around with no expectation of mining and disclosing their traumas; I would like to see care taken with listeners, makers, interviewees and communities. I want to see collaboration, genuine conversation and shared resources.

Another thing: industry politics and aesthetics are intimately connected and have deep implications for each other. We should not expect inclusion to materialise by simply aligning outsiders with the western state media inspired tastes that have become a dominant aesthetic/psychology. This is why I believe the sound of the thing matters a lot. This is why I want to hear more bass, more nonsense, more bad talkers, more awkward silence, more accents, less editing, more editing, more people fucking around with RSS feeds. (If the podcast industry could defund the police, that’d be great too. Anybody?)

Audio is memory and dreaming. It offers up incredible opportunities to help us communicate and remember in unique, important and indirect ways. It’s always musical. Listening and thinking—let ‘em be wide, sometimes weird.

You've regularly given lectures, held workshops, and taught classes over nearly a decade. What surprises you about your students? What do you learn from them?

Although I’ve been at it for some time, intermittent classes and workshops can be a challenge for me, and I rarely consider myself to be someone with much experience working with students. I have bad habits—overemphasising open-endedness, sometimes overcomplicating things and apologising for myself. So take anything I say with a flake of salt.

I’m more comfortable forming sustained relationships and responding to people with very specific support. A running conversation about where people are coming from, what they’re trying to do and what’s motivating them can be a captivating one. Ideally, people who’re actively ‘doing learning’ in the arts are in a process of disentangling self-concept from self-knowledge—or things that are narrative from things that are true on some basic level. I think this is a process we can help each other with through generous attention or provocation.

One on one, in teaching but especially in mentorships, I’ve learned that ideas and opinions are much less important than how we’re able to talk about, listen to and unpack them. It’s not going to work if it’s not reciprocal.

Last year, Beth Atkinson-Quinton and I ran Signal Boost, a programme offering people a chance to develop critical and creative audio skills, unconnected to a particular output (especially an extractive one centred on their minoritised identities). Beth and I often talked about how it was the best part of our week, reopening our own ears to the potential of sound to communicate something special. (When it’s your job, you can get pretty tired of it.) To me, it’s always refreshing to hear people figuring it out from scratch. Don’t ignore the possibility of the beginner; they have access to something you lose over time.

Do you have a dream project (or collaboration) shaping up / in mind?

There’s a vague list of them in my head. I prefer to work up from a kernel than to work down from an idea, and I think what I’d really like is to be able to learn from people more regularly, whether they’re teachers, mentors or collaborators.

I’m really interested in publishing, and what it can do or be. I love what small print presses like Rosa, Glom and Incendium are doing. But I’d also like to work on a purer sensory level for once—something loud and obvious—so it would be nice to be in a band again. In recent months I’ve started writing fiction, which I’d like to do more of. I’m still hoping to find the right way to bring radio and journalism closer to the realm of song craft and music. These things just kind of bubble away in the background and trickle into whatever I stumble into.

Ultimately, though, I’m thinking much less about specific creative projects than I am about what’s going on around/inside/beyond me. I was born on Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung country. If I can come with purpose—wominjeka—I’ll have more to offer as a part of my communities, a collaborator and a friend. The other stuff tends to just flow from there.

What's something you recommend everyone should listen to?

‘Between Empathy and Sympathy is Time (Apartheid)’, from Terre Thaemlitz’s Lovebomb project, has barely left my head since I first heard it a million years ago. (You can listen to an excerpt here; sadly I can’t find the whole thing.) The tension between language and tonality is very profound: it’s saccharine, terrifying, rousing, tender, a dozen other things.

Otherwise, off the top of my head, this episode of the Paris Review podcast stayed with me, especially the Mary Terrier short story, ‘Guests’. George the Poet’s podcast is amazing, and so is the storycraft of the fiction podcast Forest 404 (the process of making it, too, was so interesting). I sometimes listen to The Writer’s Voice’s short stories on long walks. I may never stop recommending the archives of the erstwhile ABC RN show Soundproof, which opened my ears to so many amazing, magical things, like this.

If you like being ushered toward new music, I’m currently listening to Smerz, SOPHIE, Divide and Dissolve, Lost Girls, Mere Women, SLANT, Barker, Kelly Lee Owens, Negative Gemini, Vivian Girls, BEA1991, Millie & Andrea, Japanese Breakfast, Men I Trust, Container and Low. Perhaps you might enjoy them too.

What tabs do you have open on your computer at the moment?

For the first time in forever, I’m reading more books than browser tabs. Otherwise, I’m one of those chaotic people with enough open tabs to choke a small river/economy. Here’s a statistically insignificant sampling. It includes quite a few re-reads, because I think it’s often really helpful to revisit, reinforce or reassess.

* DIA: Introduction to Claude Cosky’s “Do you want love or lust?”
* Meanjin: ‘So White. So What.’ by Alison Whittaker
* The White Review: ‘Girls Like Us’ by McKenzie Wark
* Vogue: ‘On Self-Respect’ by Joan Didion
* Barbican 'Soundhouse: Intimacy and Distance' transcripts
* Griffith Review: ‘This Narrated Life’ by Maria Tumarkin
* The Design Files: Taking The Opera House Online With Digital Programming Associate, Sophie Penkethman-Young
* The Sydney Opera House and its racism
* Runway Journal: 'For me, for you’ by Natalia Newling
* The Cultural Interface: Interface Theory
* Arts Access Victoria: Ether exhibition
* Portside Review: ‘Lingua Franca’ by Cher Tan
* Broken Machines (Bridget Flack)
* covalences: works from black hole collective film lab
* Scum Mag: ‘How to love like a horse’ by Shastra Deo
* IMA: ‘What can “what can writing do?” essays do?’ by Sally Olds
* FACT Magazine: 'Barker takes his family on a cosmic adventure in ‘Utility’’
* All the Best: ‘Trust’
* Boot Boyz Biz: Remember to Remember
* WePresent: Alexey Shahov: ‘I always preferred imperfect artwork’
* Wikipedia: Hanukkah

Do you have any advice for emerging audio makers?

Figure out what’s important to you! Resist the urge to start every sentence of narration with ‘so’. Get to know your strengths and weaknesses – we all have both. People will press you for this, but don’t feel you have to share anything about yourself in your work until you fully understand what that could mean for you, good or bad; sometimes it can be a lazy option or a trap. Listen in as many ways as you can: it’s never just about the electricity your ears make. There’s a rhythm and a tone to all listening, and once you become more attuned to that, your work will come more easily. Sound is a time-based medium; time is the heart. Be awake to time.

The more you’re able to be generous, patient and grounded, the more your work can be whatever it needs to be. Play long. And from dancer Trisha Brown: ‘keep it simple, act on instinct, stay on the edge, work with visibility and invisibility, and get in line’.

How do you practice self-care?

We often know what will help, but some of us are born fighting with ourselves. I should leave my smartphone outside the bedroom at night (I bought a basic feature phone to keep by my bedside for emergency calls and alarm clocking only); I should sleep and wake early. I should cook, take baths, listen to music and read books, things which remind me of the complex private beauty of people. Go for bike rides, take myself out for a drink or a meal, and phone or visit people I love.

But how do I really care for myself when I most need it—when responsible habits feel alienating and painful? Deactivate my Twitter account, walk for long solitary hours, avoid my house or refuse to leave it, watch films.

See if I can start to notice things, write them down, let them ripple through my flesh. Eventually, come to accept the tasks my head and heart have laid out for me and try to focus on what helps me feel like a part of people: donate to mutual aid, write letters, offer time, be a body, make better choices, see people as they are. Try to play a part in a system of care where subtle and unseen things matter too.

I don’t care for self-care because the idea masks a profoundly healthy need for reciprocal care and love of others. To look after myself is to first look after people before, after and alongside me, and to intervene in bad inheritance. Again, it can feel impossible. Again, that’s the point.

What does being Asian-Australian mean to you?

Being mistaken for some other cunt.