ABSTRACT Performance Research Book’s book, Absolute Rhythm: Works for minor radio, collects ten of my radiophonic scripts written and broadcast in Australia mainly between 1986 and 1998. This article describes the cultural milieu in which they emerged. It argues that an upsurge of interest in a migrant writing that went ‘beyond the echo’ of Anglo-Australian writing coincided with a proliferation of historical ethnographical publications illuminating Aboriginal/white-settler linguistic transactions in early colonial Australia. It suggests that, common to both the new migrant writing and the old ethnolinguistic documentation was a ‘negative baroque’ style whose elaboration was in inverse proportion to the mutual understanding of the parties. The article illustrates the creative potential of these failed communications, and the constructions placed on them, arguing that the different economy of signification that springs up where there is no language in common articulates an alternative history of colonial relations. Embraced as the basis of a ‘migrant poetics’, it brings into focus performative features of communication that conventional textual analysis (and literary writing) repress. These features not only reside outside language in gesture and context but inside language in the power of echoic mimicry to endow ‘self-sufficient sounds’ with an ironic inflection that subverts the implicit goal of normative communication – the silencing of the other – giving the subaltern a speaking position that is radically different. A short account of a recent studio production of ‘Cooee Song’, one of the scripts printed in Absolute Rhythm, relates the cultural critique to a post-radiophonic studio praxis.