After dusk, miasmas emerge from the ABC archives to be bottled, mixed and decanted into a mysterious mist. A montage made of the residues of Radio National, The Night Air transmits every Sunday evening, insinuating itself into people’s houses, into bedrooms and lounge rooms and kitchens, and each time with the goading invitation: breathe it in.

The Night Air is a hybrid of diverse origins, with material sourced from radio dramas and documentaries, from interviews, news and talkback, from short stories and poetry, from music and film. While the staple resource is the Radio National back-catalogue, anything with an audio component is ripe for harvest, to be stripped back, opened out and recombined around a given theme. Whether the guiding topic is String or Steam or Limbo, the result is an odd, surprising and pleasurable mix, a ninety-minute journey through familiar and unfamiliar, past and present. The program makers are a core of Radio National producers – Tony Barrell, Brent Clough, Diane Dean and John Jacobs, all of whom have been with the program since its inception in 2002 – as well as an array of guest producers, freelancers and interns. The show’s malleable structure allows it to accommodate different material for different purposes, whether this is a live broadcast from Electrofringe, or content produced entirely by external contributors, like the recent Orpheus Project (abc.net.au/orpheus). New work is occasionally produced for the show, and material is regularly sourced from outside the ABC – from the BBC, commercial recordings and online resources – but it is to Auntie’s archives, and the weird and wonderful material that lurks there, that the production team continually return.

If you haven’t heard The Night Air, the best way to describe it is as an audio collage, made up of a series of layers, of cut up pieces of audio from here and there, different parts that come in and out of the mix over the course of the show. ‘The big metaphor for The Night Air is music,’ says Clough, ‘that we make music out of talk.’ The various layers can thus be thought of as different instruments and effects, each following their own line while being guided by, and contributing to, the logic of the whole composition. Ideas of rhythm, change, beat and surprise all underpin the listening experience of the show, tools the producers use to maintain the show’s momentum and keep people’s interest.

As a specific comparison, the producers liken The Night Air to a dub mix, a form where material is pulled apart, stretched out and placed in a bed of music. Jacobs describes the production process as one of distillation and subtractive synthesis. ‘In dub music, you open the fader, just let a little bit come through, just one line perhaps. What we do is take objects, remove parts of them, see what little fragments we’re left with. Telling less opens out the text.’ This method leaves space for the listener, a thinking space, room for active or passive engagement. What the program is ultimately aiming for is an experience of listening for pleasure, an experience that is inclusive of its audience, rather than a one-way mode of information transfer.

The resulting text of each show is a strange melange of multiple personalities, of dialogue between strangers and narratives moving along unpredictable courses. Each week teases out a different theme, subjects broad enough to capture a range of ideas and interpretations, but not so broad as to be meaningless. Topics can be one-word suggestions that provide the direction for a show, or they can be the glue that binds the elements together. Past themes have included Dust, Time, Borders and Crossroads, Clean and Poles Apart. Once a theme takes hold in the production process, material tends to gravitate toward it, things that don’t always further the concept, but more importantly, things that reverberate with it. The attitude of the program makers is not to explicate the topic, but to present a number of possibilities and ideas, to explore potential meanings and spin off in different directions. The resulting relationship between subject and content varies greatly, from literal interpretations to oblique references, overt connections to tacit implications.

Just as The Night Air mashes up material, Jacobs points out that the show is also very much about mashing up genres, about being a hybrid form. The program blends material from a broad selection of shows – and types of show – without being safely pigeonholed into any particular category. For Clough, the result is a form of radio about radio. ‘We use all the elements of radio that most other programs don’t,’ he says. ‘They could just be a read newspaper or they could be a jukebox, whereas we use the medium as a radiophonic instrument.’ The Night Air is about taking a more playful approach to the same material as these other programs, material that often comes with clearly set boundaries of function and purpose, to see what new meanings can emerge from recombination. Splicing things together might see different pieces resonate in surprising and unexpected ways, and it might also give rise to something new in their intersection, to a third meaning. And it’s this third meaning that’s central to hybrid composition, to what The Night Air is conscious of creating.

The producers see this as being inclusive of the listener, of being firmly on their side. ‘You’re not throwing stuff at people,’ assures Barrell, ‘you’re coaxing them and encouraging them to share the humorous ironies that spring up.’ Meaning is not tied down here, it is fluid, interpretable and constantly changing, so it falls to the listeners to complete the reception for themselves. ‘Often it’s the thing that’s not said or heard that the listener provides, the brain makes the connection and that’s the revelation moment.’

The Night Air is distinct because it’s a creative program, somewhat of a rarity amongst the multitude of jukebox, talkback and current affairs programs. It’s a flux and flow of material, a gentle fog littered with things you might recognise, things you know, and many things that escape identification. But ultimately it’s an entertainment, and one that is immersed in the medium of radio – while it’s not documentary, information, poetry, music or drama, it’s all of these at once. ‘And that’s the kind of cool thing about Radio National,’ says Clough, ‘it’s where all those things can meet.’ The aim is not to alienate listeners of these other programs, to insert itself too heavily, but to engage their imagination and let the sound be with a person in a space, like musicians in a restaurant. ‘It’s about making sure your art has imagination space,’ says Jacobs, ‘and I think a lot of modern media doesn’t do that.’

The Night Air producers are keen to encourage external contributors and remixers, and otherwise broaden the program’s community. Interested individuals can find information and extra downloads at The Night Air blog – thenightair.net – while the podcast downloads and contributor guides can be found on the official page – abc.net.au/rn/nightair

The Night Air is broadcast in full each Sunday night at 8.35 on Radio National, with a repeat split across Friday night at 9.35 and Saturday at 5 past midnight. For your local frequency see: abc.net.au/rn/freq

A sidenote:

While The Night Air continues its mysterious work in the backrooms of Radio National, veteran producer Tony Barrell bids farewell to the ABC. Since beginning at Double J in 1979 with cut up programs such as Sunday Afternoon at the Movies and Watching the Radio with the TV Off, Barrell has dabbled extensively in the dark arts of collage and been a considerable presence on the network. As this goes to print, his swansong – The Last Collage / Planet Collage – goes to air, the podcast of which you can find at both web addresses above.