The annual Infinite Dial survey from Edison Research was recently released, showing what people in the US are listening to, and where. It even includes social media platforms like TikTok, which Eric observes young people often use like radio, playing in the background as they go about daily activities. We review the stats, and also get into the FCC’s latest count of radio stations. Spoiler alert: there are more than ever.

Jennifer shares her recent visit to the Pyrite Radio art installation, featuring radios using fool’s gold as their crystal.

Show Notes:

• Edison Research Infinite Dial 2022
• FCC Broadcast Stations Totals for Q1 2022
• For comparison, Radio Station Totals for Q1 2012
• Jennifer’s dispatch on Pyrite Radio for Hii Magazine

The post Podcast #326: The State of Listening and Broadcast Radio in 2022 appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Franken FMs are the radio service that refuses to die, even after the FCC ostensibly pulled the plug this past summer. Recall that these are former analog low-power TV stations on channel 6 whose audio could be heard at about 87.7 FM. Analog LPTV shut down on July 13, 2021, but then Venture Technologies Group was granted “Special Temporary Authority” to keep a couple of its stations broadcasting an analog FM audio signal alongside their digital video signals.

Now the number stations has grown to about a “half-dozen,” according to Radio World, in an piece that taps some of the architects of the new generation 3.0 digital television standard to get their take on this experiment. One says to make space for the analog FM signal, “is to actually lower spectral efficiency.” Another is skeptical, as well, saying, “[t]he system may work and be useful, but the information is not available yet to prove it.” A third was more optimistic, noting, “[w]ith the limitations of FM spectrum, they are making use of the FCC rules and channel segmentation philosophy. They’re putting it to good use.”

That said, the experiment still is temporary, and it would seem the initial six month lease is coming due soon. The stations may still petition for an extension, which the FCC would likely grant at least once. But an actual rulemaking will be required if Franken FMs are to become permanent fixtures on the dial.

Radio futurologist James Cridland observes that the BBC has announced plans to make some radio shows available as podcasts exclusive to the BBC Sounds app for 28 days, which also means they’ll be unavailable outside the UK during that period. It also means these programs will not be playable on other podcast apps, like Apple Podcasts, even for UK listeners. Cridland deems it, “another disappointing move from a broadcaster that should be widening its potential audience, not limiting it.”

He also notes additional broadcasters doing the same, while others, like Norway’s NRK, are pulling older archives off open, third-party apps. “In an age where radio consumption is in slow decline in many parts of the world, I’d suggest that anything that removes opportunities for listeners to discover new stuff is regrettable,” he concludes.

If CDs were recently declared dead, they’re sure enjoying the afterlife in 2022, as the format approaches the ripe age of 40. This past week erstwhile online music publication Pitchfork tossed its hat in the ring, but taking the additional step of talking to actual young people who’ve acquired the compact disc habit. A New York University sophomore and WNYU DJ says that she and her friends are, “on the CD wave.” Another college radio DJ at the University of Texas at Arlington reveals, “I have three big cases full of CDs that I play all the time,” while a student who writes for the Lawrence University newspaper reports, CDs are desirable because, “[w]hen all your life is virtual, even looking on Spotify can seem like draining work.”

As I’ve noted before, at least some of the Gen Z interest in CDs is driven by the current price advantage. The co-owner of California chain Amoeba Music says many classic albums can be had for just $4 to $5. I saw that for myself when I visited the Hollywood outlet back in 2019.

Meanwhile, across the pond, NME columnist Mark Beaumont admits,

“When the coroners come to collect my body, with ghoulish press photographers trailing behind to document the horror and depravity, local press will no doubt dub me The Disc Man. Entering my office space will feel like unearthing Spotify’s underground database – thousands upon thousands of CDs, stacked high to the ceiling and piled in mounds across doorways.”

Yet, despite his own passion, he had doubts about a full-fledged revival in 5-inch silver discs. Comparing the physical operation of playback to operating a household appliance, lacking in the romanticism of vinyl and turntables.

Back in April 2020 we talked with author, filmmaker and former DJ Bill Lichtenstein about groundbreaking Boston freeform radio station WBCN, the subject of his documentary “WBCN and the American Revolution.” Lichtenstein has authored a new companion book about the station, and recently guested on Monocle Radio’s “The Stack” to discuss it.

The post Rough Notes: Franken FMs Live On, BBC Geofences, More CD Revival, WBCN Book appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Today on the show we rebroadcast one of our favorite episodes from one year ago, which was described this way:

On August 27, 2020, nomadic online radio station Radioee.net is presenting a live, translingual 24-hour broadcast, Wireless, featuring 24 radio stations from all over the world. Taking place on the 100th anniversary of the first radio broadcast in Argentina and the first mass public entertainment broadcast in the world; Wireless launches at midnight Buenos Aires time on August 27, 2020. This date is significant, as it recognizes the inaugural Argentinian broadcast from Teatro Coliseo in Buenos Aires on the same day back in 1920, which used smuggled Marconi equipment to present a Wagner opera.

Radioee.net founders Stephanie Sherman, Agustina Woodgate and Hernan Woodgate join us on the show to share their plans for this fascinating broadcast featuring radio stations in Buenos Aires, Wuhan, Nigeria, Cuba, Uruguay, New York, and more. On the episode they talk about some of the topics that will be touched upon, from paratelepathy to radio history to acrobatics.

The audio available on this page is roughly the “radio edit” from one year ago. To hear the longer version (also known as the podcast edit) visit the original page: https://www.radiosurvivor.com/2020/08/podcast-259-radioee-net-celebrates-100-year-history-of-wireless-communication/

Show Notes:

• Wireless event page
• Radioee.net
• Wavefarm’s Wireless event page
• Radio Station Visit #145: Wave Farm in Acra, New York
• Podcast #151: The Wave Farm Grows Transmission Arts
• Early History of Radio Broadcasting in Argentina (OldRadio.com)
• Elsewhere museum and artist residency in North Carolina
• Agustina Woodgate to Broadcast from Henry Ford’s Abandoned Brazilian Factory (Miami New Times)
• Podcast #195: Telepathy and Radio Mind

The post Podcast #310 – Radioee.net Celebrates 100 Year History of Wireless Communication (now 101 years) appeared first on Radio Survivor.

It seems like physical media continues to have a hold on humans, even while most of us in the West engage with online, streaming and virtual media for much, if not most, of our time. Audiocassettes are like radio, in that they have been declared dead multiple times in the last three decades, yet continue to be found, employed and enjoyed by new generations who insist on keeping them alive. Eric just completed a weekend-long cassette hacking workshop, joined by a diverse group of musicians and sound-makers of a variety of ages. He shares that experience as we discuss conjoined histories of cassettes and radio.

That leads us into a presentation Jennifer watched at this year’s virtual Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference, where she learned about a pre-VCR underground of people who recorded the audio of television shows onto cassette. It turns out some of these recordings may be the only surviving artifacts of some broadcasts that were not preserved, or have never again been seen or heard in their original form. We show how cassettes are for everyone who cares about sound in its myriad forms.

Also under discussion: the shutdown of internet radio directory service Reciva, and the perilousness of proprietary platforms.

Show Notes:

• Dogbotic’s Cassette Hacking Workshop
• Society for Cinema and Media Studies
• Broadcast Historian Nora Patterson
• Podcast #297 – Radio Studies and Soundwork
• Negativland: Tiny Desk (Home) Concert
• Wobbly (Jon Leidecker)
• Wikipedia: Iannis Xenakis
• Podcast #145 – Hip-Hop Radio Archive
• Radio World: Reciva Internet Radio Platform Shutting Down
• “Electronic project kits: hands on with a vintage 160-in-1“
• Mystery Show Case #6 Kotter
• The Real World Homecoming: New York
• Billboard: ‘Beavis and Butt-head’ to Return With Fewer Music Videos Due to Licensing Constraints
• “The State” FAQ
• Podcast #141 – How Radio Isn’t Done, According To Negativland’s Don Joyce
• An Affectionate & Honest Filmic Portrait of Negativland’s Don Joyce
• Radio Garden
• Exploring Radio Garden on World Radio Day
• Radio Preservation Task Force
• Podcast #133 – Preserving Brooklyn Pirate Radio
• Soundtap’s College Radio Discovery Tool
• 82 Best Freeform College Radio Stations
• RIP: Podcast #125 – Radio Free America Is an Online Hub for Noncomm Radio
• Internet Archive
• Podcast #168 – A Time Machine for All the Radio plus Shortwave

The post Podcast #299 – Cassettes for Art, Radio and Recording TV appeared first on Radio Survivor.

The documentary “WBCN and the American Revolution” chronicles the founding of Boston’s groundbreaking rock station that combined late-1960s countercultural politics and music in way that influenced freeform radio to come. Directed by journalist and former WBCN employee Bill Lichtenstein, the film will premiere on GBH 2 in the Boston area. It will air nationally on PBS stations this coming fall.

We talked with Bill Lichtenstein about the documentary a year ago on episode #241 of our podcast. We discussed how even though it was a commercial station, WBCN operated more like a community station, such New York’s WBAI, which was also blazing a freeform trail of music and politics.

Ahead of the film’s broadcast debut a group of station alumni will participate in a free online panel this coming Monday, April 26: Celebrate WBCN and the American Revolution. Panelists include:

• Tommy Hadges, WBCN program director and announcer
• Charles Laquidara, WBCN announcer
• Bill Lichtenstein, producer and director of WBCN and The American Revolution
• Eric Jackson, host of GBH’s Eric in the Evening and former WBCN host
• Debbie Ullman, WBCN’s first female announcer
• Moderator: GBH midday host Henry Santoro

The post WBCN Documentary Broadcast Premiere on May 6 – Special Online Panel April 26 appeared first on Radio Survivor.

What is radio art? What is transmission art? We discuss the experimental side of radio and artistic uses of radio transmissions on our show this week, looking at historical and contemporary examples. Artist and scholar Anna Friz joins us to chat about these concepts, sharing how her college/community radio past in Canada inspired her to immerse herself in the practice of sound art and radio art. Friz is Assistant Professor, Film and Digital Media at University of California, Santa Cruz and also serves on the board of Wave Farm.

Show Notes:

• Anna Friz’s website
• Jennifer Waits’ article about Anna Friz’s UC Radio Network presentation about the history of radio art and transmission art
• Anna Friz radio art piece “Collecting Clocks and Losing Time” on Wave Farm’s The Radio Art Hour
• University of British Columbia’s campus-community radio station CiTR
• Western Front, an artist-run centre in Vancouver, BC
• Kunstradio in Austria
• Negativland website
• Delia Derbyshire and the History of the BBC
• Daphne Oram, electronic music pioneer
• Tetsuo Kogawa‘s Radio Art works
• Video of Tetsuo Kogawa performaing
• The Joy Channel release by Anna Friz and Emmanuel Madan
• Solar Radio/Embedded Radio Device piece by Absolute Value of Noise and Anna Friz
• CWCH Collective
• NRRF B Radio
• Transmission Art in the Present Tense – article by Anna Friz
• More about the little people in the radio

Related Episodes about sound art, transmission art, women in sound:

• Radio Survivor Podcast #292: The History of Sound Art with Judy Dunaway
• Radio Survivor Podcast #190: Radio Spectrum and Transmission Art with Amanda Dawn Christie
• Radio Survivor Podcast #193: Wavefarm, Reveil and Transmission Arts
• Radio Survivor Podcast #289: Celebrating Women in Sound
• Radio Survivor Podcast #151: The Wave Farm Grows Transmission Arts
• Radio Survivor Podcast #137: Zach Poff Build a Radio Station Inside a Pond
• Radio Survivor Podcast #105: Incoming Wounded – Interview with WEFT late-night DJ Ed Hadley

The podcast began with a discussion of this recent piece of sound collage https://youtu.be/hhirSscNuuc

The post Podcast #293 – Exploring Radio Art and Transmission Art appeared first on Radio Survivor.

What is sound art? And what do we know about its origin story? We explore this question and more with our guest this week, artist and educator Judy Dunaway. An adjunct professor in the History of Art Department at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Dunaway’s recent article, “The Forgotten 1979 MoMA Sound Art Exhibition,” is a fascinating look at the history of sound art and highlights important contributions by female artists. In our wide-ranging discussion, we also hear about Dunaway’s own artistic practice, from her work with latex balloons to transmission art to a “phone improv” show over BlogTalkRadio a decade ago.

Show Notes:

• Judy Dunaway’s website
• Amplified Tenor Balloon work
• The Forgotten 1979 MoMA Sound Art Exhibition appears in Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture
• Maggi Payne’s website
• Connie Beckley’s artwork at MoMA
• Julia Heyward bio on Electronic Arts Intermix
• Judy Dunaway’s Duo for Radio Stations was simultaneously performed over college radio stations WFMU and WKCR
• Phone Improv Show
• Sound artist Nam June Paik created the transmission art piece Good Morning Mr. Orwell using TV stations in Paris and New York City
• Cellist Charlotte Moorman was Paik’s muse and he made the “TV Cello” for her over which he would broadcast live video
• Max Neuhaus, most known for his piece Times Square, did an early work, Drive-In Music, using radio transmissions as well as other transmission works, including Public Supply I (using listener phone calls to WBAI) and Radio Net
• Alvin Lucier‘s oft-cited piece I am Sitting in a Room can be heard on YouTube
• Artist Rie Nakajima‘s piece Wind Touch
• Sound sculpture organization Powland
• Minimalism (art)
• Minimalism (music)

Related Episodes about sound art, transmission art, women in sound:

• Radio Survivor Podcast #190: Radio Spectrum and Transmission Art with Amanda Dawn Christie
• Radio Survivor Podcast #193: Wavefarm, Reveil and Transmission Arts
• Radio Survivor Podcast #289: Celebrating Women in Sound
• Radio Survivor Podcast #151: The Wave Farm Grows Transmission Arts
• Radio Survivor Podcast #137: Zach Poff Build a Radio Station Inside a Pond

The post Podcast #292 – The History of Sound Art appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Non-commercial radio stations will join together to air 24 hours of the circadian rhythm emanating from the ṮEḴTEḴSEN marsh in unceded W̱SÁNEĆ territory on Saturna Island, British Columbia this coming Earth Day, April 22. Produced by artists Brady Marks and Mark Timmings, the “Wetland Project” broadcast features a soundscape of birds, frogs, airplanes and more sounds of the natural and encroaching man-made world, that “engages listeners in real time and promotes a deeper awareness of, and a re-enchanted engagement with, the living environment.”

The project is an exercise in “slow radio” that “creates an immersive sonic space to contemplate what it means to be human in the ‘more-than-human world’ and to reflect upon what it means to listen in contested indigenous lands.”

Nine stations across Canada have signed on to air part or all of this year’s broadcast, and all non-commercial stations are invited to take part. In 2020, Local Public Radio in San Francisco even used the program to anchor a successful on-air fundraiser. Interested stations can learn more by emailing info@wetlandproject.com.

The broadcast is also available online and I tuned in throughout Earth Day last year. I had it on in the background and also took time to sit with focused listening, finding it all quite rewarding. And, really, what other platform besides community or college radio would dedicate more than a minute or so to sounds that invite patient and calm listening rather than demanding attention and action? I’m certainly looking forward to this year’s “Wetland Project.”

Feature image credit: Wetland Project

The post The Wetland Project Returns for Earth Day 2021 appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Radios in the trees, a transmitter in the pond, and a weather-driven synth. These are just some of what you’ll find on The Wave Farm, a 29-acre property in New York’s Hudson Valley dedicated to radio and transmission arts. It’s anchored by community radio station WGXC, accompanied by a cornucopia of additional tiny terrestrial and internet stations.

Jennifer Waits takes us on an auditory tour of the farm, along with a visit to the station’s Hudson, NY studio, where station manager and managing news editor Lynn Sloneker lays out all these audio feeds. Then in the Wave Farm studio, artistic director Tom Roe details the organization’s history, which has its roots in the unlicensed micropower radio movement of the 1990s.

Every year Wave Farm hosts artists in residence, who create unique works and installations exploring the many aspects of electromagnetic transmission. One was the musical artist Quintron, who created the Weather Warlock, a weather-controlled synthesizer. Eric Klein gave him a call to learn more about this project and his work.

Show Notes:

• WGXC
• Jennifer’s tour of WGXC
• Jennifer’s tour of Wave Farm
• Artist-in-residence Dan Tapper at Wave Farm
• Dan Tapper’s website
• Podcast #137 – Zach Poff Built a Radio Station Inside a Pond
• Podcast #148 – Solving the Mystery of Summer Camp Radio
• Wave Farm Celebrates 20 Years of Transmission Art
• Quintron and Miss Pussycat
• Weather for the Blind
• Weather Warlock at Wave Farm

The post Podcast #278 – The Wave Farm Grows Transmission Arts (rebroadcast) appeared first on Radio Survivor.

On August 27, 2020, nomadic online radio station Radioee.net is presenting a live, translingual 24-hour broadcast, Wireless, featuring 24 radio stations from all over the world. Taking place on the 100th anniversary of the first radio broadcast in Argentina and the first mass public entertainment broadcast in the world; Wireless launches at midnight Buenos Aires time on August 27, 2020. This date is significant, as it recognizes the inaugural Argentinian broadcast from Teatro Coliseo in Buenos Aires on the same day back in 1920, which used smuggled Marconi equipment to present a Wagner opera.

Radioee.net founders Stephanie Sherman, Agustina Woodgate and Hernan Woodgate join us on the show to share their plans for this fascinating broadcast featuring radio stations in Buenos Aires, Wuhan, Nigeria, Cuba, Uruguay, New York, and more. On the episode they talk about some of the topics that will be touched upon, from paratelepathy to radio history to acrobatics.

Show Notes:

• Wireless event page
• Radioee.net
• Wavefarm’s Wireless event page
• Radio Station Visit #145: Wave Farm in Acra, New York
• Podcast #151: The Wave Farm Grows Transmission Arts
• Early History of Radio Broadcasting in Argentina (OldRadio.com)
• Elsewhere museum and artist residency in North Carolina
• Agustina Woodgate to Broadcast from Henry Ford’s Abandoned Brazilian Factory (Miami New Times)
• Podcast #195: Telepathy and Radio Mind

The post Podcast #259 – Radioee.net Celebrates 100 Year History of Wireless Communication appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Poet Kenneth Goldsmith created UbuWeb in 1996 as an online repository for obscure avant-garde art that, by virtue of having little commercial potential, was hard to find. Audio was an early component of the archive, owing to Kenneth’s interest in sound poetry, an even more obscure art form.

Since then he’s served as the chief, and only, curator and proprietor of UbuWeb, which has become an invaluable resource for anyone with an interest in underground and unpopular culture. Kenneth chronicled his efforts in the new book “Duchamp Is My Lawyer: The Polemics, Pragmatics, and Poetics of UbuWeb.” He joins this episode to recount some of these tales, telling us what inspired him to build UbuWeb in the first place, and why he maintains it using simple html code of the sort used in the early web, rather than updating to use the latest database and dynamic website platforms.

Because much of the work on UbuWeb is archived without explicit permission from the creators – living or dead – Kenneth explains why he views “cease and desist” orders as an invitation to dialog and how community radio station WFMU was one of his inspirations. We also get into the relationship between piracy and preservation, why he loves “the misuses of UbuWeb” and the value of “folk archiving” and “folk law.”

Show Notes:

• UbuWeb
• UbuWeb Sound
• Kenneth Goldsmith at the University of Pennsylvania Department of English
• Playlists and archives for Kenny G’s Hour of Pain on WFMU
• Duchamp Is My Lawyer at Columbia University Press
• Duchamp Is My Lawyer at Amazon (Radio Survivor will receive a small commission if you purchase from this link)
• What Is an Interlaced GIF?

The post Podcast #256 – The Robin Hood of the Avant-Garde appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Soothing environmental sounds may be just the thing to help quell pandemic-induced anxiety. Multimedia artists Mark Timmings and Brady Marks present 24 hours of this kind of “slow radio” on Earth Day, April 22. Though not expressly designed for the times of “shelter in place,” when many public parks, beaches and natural spaces are closed to enforce proper social distancing – this is the fourth year of the program – the “Wetland Project” nevertheless offers a sonic respite in “the circadian rhythm of an endangered Saturna Island marsh” in British Columbia.

Twelve stations will carry part or all of the 24-hour program, including the first two US affiliates, KALW in San Francisco and KPOV in Bend, OR. As the organizers note, “the program is ready-made and easily automated by staff working remotely during station lockdowns,” so there’s still time for new stations to come on board. Contact them for more details.

As they describe it,

The beautiful and complex environmental soundscape, featuring birds, frogs, airplanes and more, engages with people in real time as they go about their daily routines. This year, many listeners will likely be confined at home by COVID-19. The immersive quality of the slow radio broadcast promotes heightened awareness of the natural environment, which turns the simple act of listening to the radio into a powerful act of collective protest for climate action.

Tune in on one of the affiliate stations or online.

The post The Wetland Project Is Slow Radio for Earth Day appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Walter Benjamin broadcast his third “Youth Hour” radio talk with a lament on the state of puppet show entertainment in that famous city.

“Children who want to go to puppet theater don’t have an easy time of it in Berlin,” Benjamin explained. They’ve got better deals in Munich, Paris, and Rome. But one production company still remained, he noted: Kasper Theater, which had its roots in the 18th century puppet character of that name. Kasper was a priggish smartass and the star of a puppet entertainment genre called Kaspertheater, which audiences regarded as synonymous with puppetry in general.

Before newspapers began publishing comic strips, puppet shows may have been the first entertainment to try to reach both children and adults at the same time. Benjamin reminisced on the Kasper character of the early nineteenth century, who appeared

“not only in plays that were written for him; he also sticks his saucy little nose into all sorts of big, proper theater pieces for adults. He knows he can risk it. In the most terrible tragedies nothing ever happens to him. And when the devil catches up with Faust, he has to let Kasper live, even though he’s no better behaved than his master. He’s just a peculiar chap. Or in his own words: ‘I’ve always been a peculiar fellow. Even as a youngster I always saved my pocket money. And when I had enough, you know what I did with it? I had a tooth pulled’.”

Before going any further with Benjamin’s observations on this subject, I note that KBOO-FM in Portland, Oregon broadcast a fun little puppet theater show for a spell. A 2014 episode featured an interview with a Kasper-like character named “Turner D Century,” candidate for mayor in that city.

“You have some interesting positions that I would like to talk about, ” the host began.

“What are they letting a woman into the radio studio for”? Mr. Century demanded. “This modernization has gone too far.”

Unintimidated, the host pressed on. “Well, Mr. Century, let’s just get into it then. You have a very strong position on the bridges of Portland.”

“We’re going to tear down the bridges once and for all. It was a terrible idea to build them. We’ve wound up connecting the beautiful city with the riff raff, who are free to wander the bridges any time they want and pollute the general environment . . . It’s disgusting, quite frankly.”

“Are you going to ask taxpayer- “

“No, we’re just going to blow them up with dynamite!”

Interestingly, Benjamin managed to sneak some observations about the subject of democracy into his puppet show talk. “A proper puppeteer is a despot,” he explained, “one that makes the Tsar seem like a petty gendarme.” The puppet master writes the shows, does all the art work, dresses up the puppets, and plays all the roles via their own voice. But at the same time, the puppeteer must remain wary of the powers beyond puppet land. “First from the church and [second] the authorities,” Benjamin’s radio essay warned, “because puppets can so easily mock everything without being malicious.”

Benjamin wrapped up his broadcast with summaries of various puppet routines that he found amusing. The last of these was titled “The Discovery of America,” and featured a conversation between Columbus and a “New Worlder.”

“Who goes there?” asks the New Worlder puppet. “What do you want?”

To which the Columbus puppet replies, “I call myself Columbus” and “Simply to discover.”

“And that is how America was discovered,” Benjamin’s description of the exchange summarily ended, “which is now a republic that for a number of reasons I cannot recommend. As soon as this republic gets a king, it will become a monarchy; that’s just the way it is.”

That is how Benjamin concluded his third talk, broadcast on December 7, 1929 in Berlin, less than a year before Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party won a stunning electoral victory in Germany’s Reichstag (Parliament). And this is how I am ending my latest Walter Benjamin diary entry, just days after United States President Donald Trump went on Twitter to declare that all US companies were “hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China . . . ”

This is the third entry in my Walter Benjamin Radio Diary series.

Feature image credit: Wikimedia Commons

The post Walter Benjamin Radio Diary #3: on puppets and dictators appeared first on Radio Survivor.

I have composed just two entries for my Walter Benjamin radio diary, and already I am getting lots of mail.

First came a friendly missive from Nick During, publicist at the New York Review of Books classics department. “We actually have a Walter Benjamin book coming up,” Nick wrote, “that is a collection of his writings that show how he got to the ideas found in his famous essay ‘The Storyteller’ and includes one radio piece, ‘The Lisbon Earthquake’. Would you like to see our book?”

Well, yes, I replied. So the publisher sent it to me.

The little tome in question is called The Storyteller Essays, edited and introduced by Samuel Titan and translated from German by Tess Lewis. It assembles various Benjamin texts that provide context for his famous thought piece “The Storyteller.” I do not want to say much about this essay right now, but “The Storyteller” provocatively contends that a story is best told without an explanation for its events.

Benjamin wrote:

“Every morning, news reaches us from around the globe. And yet we lack remarkable stories. This is due to the fact that no incidents any longer reach us not already permeated with explanations. In other words: almost nothing occurs to the story’s benefit anymore; instead, it all serves information. In fact, at least half of the art of storytelling consists in keeping one’s tale free of explanations.”

Titan, The Storyteller, p. 54.

What purpose does this omission of explanations serve? It allows story tellers and listeners to own the tale, to see it as organic to their very specific and individual lives. “The storyteller,” Benjamin concluded, “is the figure in which the righteous man encounters himself.” When I discuss his Lisbon earthquake radio talk in an upcoming post, I will try to show how these arguments come to life.

Then I received some correspondence from radio producer Toby Kaufmann-Buhler.

“I just found your blog posts on the Radio Survivor site about Walter Benjamin and his radio work,” Kaufmann-Buhler wrote.

“Over the past 8 months or so I’ve produced one of Benjamin’s radio plays, ‘Lichtenberg: A Cross-Section’. This is from the translation in the Radio Benjamin book; this play was never originally broadcast as he finished writing the commission just as broadcasting was taken over by the Nazi regime.

We produced this originally for an exhibition this past May at a sound art gallery in Indianapolis, Listen Hear, which also houses the LPFM station WQRT 99.1. The play aired on WQRT several times; as far as I know this was the first radio broadcast of the play in English, and possibly in any language (could be wrong, but this is based on my research). The play has also been broadcast more recently in New York’s Hudson Valley on Wave Farm’s experimental station.”

Here is my favorite moment from the play, which focuses on a committee of Moon beings’ efforts to engage in “Earth research”:

“The samples taken over the last millennia have not yielded a single case in which a human has amounted to anything. Taking this established scientific fact as a basis for our investigations, our meetings from now on will deal solely with proving that this is a result of the unhappy human condition.”

To help with this task, the committee gloms onto to the research of the German writer/humorist/scientist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, with whom Benjamin was apparently quite taken. But that is as far as I will go with this script. You will have to listen to the radio play to learn more.

Finally, Patricia Flanagan brought this BBC Wireless Nights sound essay to my attention. Pulp stalwart Jarvis Cocker takes us on a sultry tour of contemporary Berlin, laced with tales of the Cold War era. Not exactly a Walter Benjamin piece, but quite beautiful. I recommend a listen.

That’s my Walter Benjamin mail so far. Drop me a line at hybridhighbrow<AT>radiosurvivor.com and your Benjamin related work may wind up in my next mailbag dispatch. Thanks in advance!

The post Walter Benjamin radio diary: mailbag #1 appeared first on Radio Survivor.

It is not clear exactly when Walter Benjamin gave his second radio talk, titled “Street Trade and Markets in the Old and New Berlin.” The editor of a volume of his broadcasts that I consult, Lecia Rosenthal, thinks that it aired in late 1929 or early 1930 on Radio Berlin. But whenever it streamed, he served up a wonderful portrait of the Magdeburger Platz and Lindenstraße indoor market halls of the period.

” . . . above all, ” Benjamin noted, “there is the smell, a mix of fish, cheese, flowers, raw meat, and fruit all under one roof, which is completely different than the open air markets and creates a dim and woozy aroma that fits perfectly with the light seeping through the murky panes of lead framed glass.”

It is a great passage. But in this diary entry, I just want to focus on one comment that Benjamin made. He was reflecting on his return to these halls, which he had not visited since his childhood. “And if I really want a special treat, I go for a walk in the Lindenstraße market in the afternoons between four and five,” he told his listeners. “Maybe someday I’ll meet one of you there. But we won’t recognize each other. That’s the downside of radio.”

Perhaps. Of course it was true that Benjamin’s listeners might not visually recognize him. But apparently it did not occur to the storyteller at that early point in his radio career that they might recognize him by his voice, such as when he spoke to a market stall merchant.

In my years writing about radio, many community radio station hosts have told me that they became truly hooked on broadcasting when, by accident, someone in their signal area recognized them as they spoke on the street or in a restaurant. Years ago I interviewed Don Foster, news/public affairs host at Pacifica stations WPFW-FM in Washington D.C. and KPFA-FM in Berkeley, California, for my second book on the Pacifica radio network. Foster described how he would sometimes hail D.C. taxis and the driver would identify him by his voice:

“One time I got in a cab in D.C. and I was going to do an interview with Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the president of Haiti, who I had met in Haiti once, and I got in the cab telling the guy I was going to the Haitian embassy, and the cab driver was a Haitian, and he says, “Are you Don Foster?”  And I said, “Yeah.”  And he says, “Oh, man, I listened to the report and the thing you did on Aristide!”  And then when I got to the Haitian embassy he wouldn’t take my money.  Wouldn’t take it [laughing].  I tried to throw it at him; so for me it was like the Academy Award, right?”

Oral History interview with Don Foster, 2002

As for me, it has been a while since I regularly spoke on any radio station. But at the University of California at Santa Cruz, where I teach, I now run an online class in which students participate in streaming video discussion sections. The other day I was working out at a gym near the campus, when I noticed several students practicing somersaults. I told them how impressed I was with their acrobatics.

“Are you Professor Matthew Lasar?” one of them exclaimed. “I’m one of your online class students!” She identified herself by name and I remembered her from one of our email exchanges. What I found most interesting was that she said that she recognized me not because of my appearance, but via the sound of my voice. I would like to think that my voice is distinctive. But it is just as likely that rather than watch the pre-recorded videos for our class, she just listened.

I do hope that at some point in Walter Benjamin’s radio career, someone heard him ordering some cheese or beer from a market vendor and cried out: “Omigod! You are Walter Benjamin! The guy who does those great talks on Radio Berlin. I loved your talk on the Berlin Schnauze. You are so awesome! We love your show!” It is one of the most satisfying moments for any radio host.

This is an ongoing diary that reacts to and reflects on Walter Benjamin’s radio talks.

The post Walter Benjamin radio diary entry #2: “the downside of radio.” appeared first on Radio Survivor.

We wanted to find a special way to thank the readers and listeners who support us every month via our Patreon campaign. Something unique, hand-made and in the spirit of great college and community radio.

Why not make a ‘zine?

If you’ve never heard of a ‘zine, it’s an independently produced publication, often photocopied and hand-assembled. The history goes back to mimeographed science fiction fanzines published as far back as the 1930s. Adopted by punk and underground music fans in the 70s and 80s, the name was shortened to ‘zine to reflect a broadening in subject matter beyond just fandom. For more history, see this brief timeline.

For Radio Survivor ‘Zine #1 we’re writing and assembling pieces that we feel are fit for a more tactile format, breaking free of the strict layouts forced upon us by blog software. You won’t find these pieces on our website or anywhere else online. Here are more details:

• Radio Survivor Zine #1 will go to everyone who contributes $5 a month or more to our Patreon campaign.
  • You need to have completed at least one payment in order to get the ‘zine, but if you’ve signed up by Aug. 1 we’ll send the zine as soon as that first payment is made.
• The deadline to sign up is August 1, 2019
• We’ll send out the ‘zines in August 2019

Here is a sampling of the features in Radio Survivor Zine #1:

• “Wild Flowers and Radio Towers”
• “Radios I Have Known and Loved”
• Hand-drawn illustrations and cartoons
• more more more!

If you sign on as a Patron of Radio Survivor you’ll also be helping us reach our goal of the 100 supporters we need to do the work of documenting the 20th anniversaries of Indymedia and low-power FM.

Sign up now to reserve your copy of Radio Survivor ‘Zine #1!

The post We’re Making a ‘Zine for Our Supporters appeared first on Radio Survivor.

The other day I visited a new bookstore/eatery in Santa Cruz, California and discovered Lecia Rosenthal’s edited collection of Walter Benjamin radio broadcasts. Benjamin delivered these wonderful radio talks over Radio Berlin and Radio Frankfurt from 1927 to 1933. They resemble broadcasts for children, but of course adults can enjoy them, too.

Entranced by these audio essays, I am going to visit all of them, one by one, here at Radio Survivor. I will quote a little from each, then add my own commentary and personal observations.

Before I do any of that, though, a bit about Walter Benjamin, one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. Benjamin was born in Berlin in 1892. He died in 1940 in Spain, taking his own life to avoid being captured by the brutal Nazi Gestapo. Between those years he established himself as an influential communist philosopher and cultural critic. I am not much of a theory person, but of course I have read his all-important 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of the Mechanical Reproduction.”

This meditation offers a simple yet profound observation: the rise of lithography, photography, recorded sound, and film (in the author’s time) have systematically extracted all artworks from what Benjamin called their “aura,” their cultish connection to some specific, hallowed time and place. Suddenly they find themselves in all kinds of unanticipated contexts, put to a variety of unexpected uses. As the platforms for creation expand, the lines blur between creators and their audiences. This famous paragraph from the essay long predates our observations and anxieties about social media today.

“For centuries a small number of writers were confronted by many thousands of readers. This changed toward the end of the last century. With the increasing extension of the press, which kept placing new political, religious, scientific, professional, and local organs before the readers, an increasing number of readers became writers – at first, occasional ones. It began with the daily press opening to its readers space for “letters to the editor.” And today there is hardly a gainfully employed European who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or other comments on his work, grievances, documentary reports, or that sort of thing. Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character.”

The big question for Benjamin was always ‘where was this going’? Would it lead to a more egalitarian society? Or would it wind up serving much more dangerous forces, they skilled in the dark art of claiming and mutating images? “Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate,” Benjamin warned. “Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property.”

Re-reading this essay for the umpteenth time, I get a very clear sense from Benjamin about what he thought that fascism was all about, with its appropriation of ancient symbols, such as swastikas. But despite his references to the Soviet Union, I do not come away with an equally clear take on how he thought “the masses” would effectively transform property relations in this new world.

And so this Walter Benjamin radio diary has two purposes. First, to learn more about his philosophy as it came to him and his radio listeners. Second, just to enjoy his talks. Here is a list of my published entries.

Walter Benjamin radio diary entry list

Entry #1: “Selective Snouting”

Entry #2: “The Downside of Radio”

Mailbag #1

Entry #3: “On Puppets and Dictators”

Entry #4: On earthquakes and radio time

Entry #5: Walter Benjamin’s impossible radio visit to a brass factory

Last entry: What did Walter Benjamin think that radio was for?

The post My Walter Benjamin radio diary appeared first on Radio Survivor.

For Janice Windborne, 1950-2019

1

The great radio goddess lives on.
I know that this is true,
even if others no longer remember her.
I know that she flies
with her gorgeous cat black wings
over cities that wait for justice:
over Flint, New Orleans, and Ramallah
astride Tegucigalpa and Charlottesville;
above Staten Island and Damascus.
I know that she dwells
in all of these places.
And I know that you are with her.

You are there
riding her long, modulated torso
alongside Ishtar,
as she contemplates
revenge on Gilgamesh.
You are there
besides Sanjaya
as he telepathically broadcasts
the frozen battle of Kuru
to his blind king.
You are there
helping Potiphar’s wife
pick a name for herself
at last.
You are there with Mary Magdalene,
sharing tips on
how to get it on with Jesus.

You and I
walked the streets of
Telegraph Avenue in Oakland
back when Too Short
posted hip hop updates on phone booths,
when adult videos had plots,
when record stores were not quaint,
when street Maoists told us to study Albania,
and when Huey Newton was still a doctor.

And from
two pacific rim FM signals
you spoke to us.
You spoke from Moscow
just before Chernobyl.
You spoke from Ghana,
in the language of Twi.
You spoke
after an interview with Betty Friedan,
she screaming where’s my taxi
where’s my taxi
where’s my taxi

2

The great radio goddess lives on.
She monitors the heartbeats of children receiving
hourly instructions from Instagram.
She follows the Twitter wars
over which nation really owns Lake Malawi.
She whispers into the homeless vans
and tents and sleeping bags
on West 12th Street in Little Rock
and Water Street in Santa Cruz
and Divisadero Street in San Francisco.
And I know that you are there with her.

You are there, now
shielded by
her great mane of magnetic tape feathers,
and all hearing digital ears.
You are there
asking Khadijah inappropriate questions
about Mohammed;
telling the Pandava brothers
to stop putting their wives
up for wager at dice;
advising Yaśodharā to forget about the Buddha;
and begging Sarah to stop whining
about the baby thing
and go to community college
and get her degree.

You and I
walked the humid
beach streets of San Diego
and you shape shifted
before me
into the young Margaret Sanger,
and then into Emma Goldman,
and then into Lucy Parsons.
No gods, no masters, you declared.
And I, of course, dutifully agreed.

But now I believe in the radio goddess.
Because when I die
perhaps someone will imagine me
carried to the heavens by her as well.
Then we will have coffee somewhere,
you and I.
And you will show up late,
give me a hug,
say you’ve got to go,
then run off to interview
a famous porn star
from Mars.

San Francisco
June, 2019

Janice Windborne was a programmer at KPFA-FM in Berkeley in the 1980s, News Director for KPBS-FM in San Diego in the 1990s, and a Professor of Communications at Otterbein University in Columbus, Ohio. She died of cancer in May. A gofundme campaign is accepting contributions for her memorial.

The post You are there appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Chances are that no United States government agency has been as media conscious as J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation. Hoover probably spent more time obsessing over his operation’s public image than he did in solving crimes. During the Depression era, as his agents won fame in shootouts with gangsters like John Dillinger, Hoover become ever more preoccupied with a simple public relations problem. What should his law enforcement organization be called?

Through the 1920s and early 1930s, letterhead for the outfit used a variety of names: the Division of Investigation, the Bureau of Investigation, and the U.S. Bureau of Investigation. It was called “Division” for most of these years because the agency operated (and still operates) under the jurisdiction of the Department of Justice. In his terrific book, J. Edgar Hoover: the Man and the Secrets, Curt Gentry attributes the transition to its present name to a radio show sponsored by the American Tobacco Company. The bureau had approved a character in the program named special agent “K-5.” But then the Hearst newspaper chain syndicated a cartoon strip with a figure named “Secret Agent X-9.”* That aroused Hoover’s ire.

Written by Dashiell Hammett and drawn by Alex Raymond, Secret Agent X-9 worked for some vaguely referred to government agency, fighting baddies wherever they raised their ugly heads. Hoover was certain that if the Bureau or Division or whatever it was had a more recognizable name, pop culture producers would defer to that moniker in their creations. It was in that context that one of his staff came up with the simple addition of the word “Federal” to “Bureau of Investigation.” Hoover remained skeptical until he was told that the initials also stood for “Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity.” (Conspiracy theorists take notice: Masons frequently use these terms in their rituals). This sold him on the choice.

But Hoover still remained suspicious of Secret Agent X-9, not surprising, since writer Hammett was long associated anti-fascist movements and joined the Communist Party in 1937. He ordered an extensive probe of the strip. “The investigative agent reported back to Hoover that in his opinion, the comic strip was ‘not subversive’,” Gentry concludes. The Division of Investigation officially became the FBI in 1936. X-9 soon morphed into a radio show and then a movie series. It posted its last strip episode in 1996.

*Gentry’s book misidentifies the show as “Special Agent X-9.”

The post How a radio show and comic book inspired the FBI’s name appeared first on Radio Survivor.

I am at the point when recalling events from my childhood feels like digging up another historical epoch. Nonetheless, if I do not attempt the memory excavation now, when will I get around to it? So here I ponder a question that has poked at me for many years: what was that strange music that I heard on some radio station out of Manhattan some sixty years ago?

My family lived in Fort Lee, New Jersey in 1959, a little bedroom suburb just off the George Washington Bridge. Fort Lee was supposed to become Hollywood around the turn of the twentieth century, but for various reasons did not. Its next, more dubious claim to fame would arrive in 2013 when some of then Governor Chris Christie’s apparatchiks punished the city’s mayor for his lack of Christie support by blocking Fort Lee’s entrances to the bridge. By the time of this scandal I was long gone, comfortably ensconced in my present digs in San Francisco.

Returning to the last year of the 1950s, we resided in a nice little apartment complex on Edwin Avenue. It was walking distance, even for five year old me, to the local shopping/parking area, which included a Food Fair supermarket and a theater at which I saw my first movie (The Road to Bali, with Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Dorothy Lamour). At night I could see the complex from the window to my room, and over that the upper Manhattan skyline. Very late when I could not sleep I would watch that vista while listening to a small portable radio. Tuning up and down the various bands, it felt as if I might find a channel through which the sights before me might speak.

I am pretty sure that I listened to some historically famous broadcasting back in those years. This included “Milkman’s Matinee,” the late night record show that made WNEW the world’s first 24 hour radio station. Although I enjoyed the tunes, I was already very focused on classical music. My mother had also purchased a small portable turntable for me with some records, which included Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, and Tchaikovsky’s Third Symphony. Obsessively listening to these tonal masterpieces, I was unprepared for what I heard one night as I held the radio close to my body under my bed covers.

Here is the problem. I remember that moment now with too much hindsight. The challenge for me here is to describe what I heard as I experienced it then. There was some kind of music for sure, but it was being played, I felt, by an orchestra in which most of the instruments had gone away. For reasons unknown the horns and the drums and the windy sounding music gadgets were not there – just a very small group of the stringed devices. I remember trying to count them, maybe there were three? five? I could not be certain. But they were definitely working with each other to play something that I could not readily understand.

It, the music, just did not make sense. The titles that I played on my records sounded like songs, except longer and with more instruments. Also, those pieces had beginning and end parts that clearly told you your point in the music. You just knew that from the way that the music worked. It somehow told you when these things were happening.

But this music kept starting and stopping very quickly. And there were no songs or beginning or end parts. Instead, the instruments kept making what seemed like statements to each other. That’s the way it felt. Statements. Sometimes the statements played high into the air; sometimes they plucked; sometimes they growled in low places. I distinctly remember laying there in the New Jersey night and thinking, “What is this? What am I listening to? It doesn’t make sense.”

Then the music stopped and a group of men came on, and they began talking about what I had just heard. I don’t remember what they said. But I remember being struck and impressed by the tone of their voices. “This,” I finally concluded, “must be very serious music.”

And with that, I fell fast asleep.

What was the composition that I heard that night? Over the years I have convinced myself that it was Anton Webern’s 1938 String Quartet, Opus 38.

If it was not Webern, it was something else from the Vienna School; maybe Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 4. Then there is the problem of what radio station I heard it on. It might have been WBAI in New York, just before the station’s owner Louis Schweitzer gave it to the Pacifica Foundation. Then again, it could have been WQXR, then owned by The New York Times. Or, perhaps it was WKCR, run by Columbia University.

I will never really know. Such are the mysteries of me listening to me listening to something broadcast well over half a century ago. At least we are both still here, listening; that is, listening still.

The post What was that “very serious” music I heard on the radio in 1959? appeared first on Radio Survivor.

What if I told you there’s an online archive of hundreds of avant-garde media works that exists with little regard for copyright, though it respects the wishes of artists and their estates? Would you believe it’s been there for 22 years, without fail?

That archive is UbuWeb. I’m pretty sure I first learned about it a dozen years ago from the dearly departed (but still available) WFMU Beware of the Blog. The project was actually funded by a former ‘FMU DJ, Kenny G, a/k/a Kenneth Goldsmith, a poet and uncreative writing teacher at the University of Pennsylvania.

For the 15-year anniversary of UbuWeb Goldsmith wrote,

UbuWeb began in 1996 as a site focusing on visual and concrete poetry. With the advent of the graphical web browser, we began scanning old concrete poems, astonished by how fresh they looked backlit by the computer screen. Shortly thereafter, when streaming audio became available, it made sense to extend our scope to sound poetry, and as bandwidth increased we later added MP3s as well as video. Sound poetry opened up a whole new terrain: certain of John Cage’s readings of his mesostic texts could be termed “sound poetry,” hence we included them.

Focusing more on the sound archive, he continues,

In 2005, we acquired a collection called The 365 Days Project, a year’s worth of outrageous MP3s that can be best described as celebrity gaffs, recordings of children screeching, how-to records, song-poems, propagandistic religious ditties, spoken word pieces, even ventriloquist acts. However, buried deep within The 365 Days Project were rare tracks by the legendary avant-gardist Nicolas Slominsky, an early-to-mid-twentieth century conductor, performer, and composer belting out advertisements and children’s ditties on the piano in an off-key voice. UbuWeb had already been hosting historical recordings from the 1920s he conducted of Charles Ives, Carl Ruggles, and Edgard Varèse in our Sound section, yet nestled in amongst oddballs like Louis Farrakhan singing calypso or high school choir’s renditions of “Fox On The Run,” Slominsky fit into both categories—high and low—equally well.

Radio Survivor, of course, is all about sound and radio, and there is plenty of the latter. In fact, many titles come from broadcasts on the country’s first community radio station, KPFA. This includes recordings of the aforementioned Slominsky, John Cage and avant-garde musician Charlotte Moorman.

UbuWeb came back into my consciousness by way of a late night internet garden path walk. After attending a screening of Sonic Youth-related documentary pieces and filmed live performances, I went looking for a way to see the entirety of the Charles Atlas documentary “Put Blood in the Music,” a portion of which was part of the screening.

Coming up empty, it occurred to me that it might be on Ubu. Turns out, it’s not. However, as I got to clicking around, watching and listening I became fully entranced (again).

Over the last weekend I’ve enjoyed John Oswald‘s pioneering copyright-jamming “Plunderphonics,” the works of Argentinian new music composer Alan Courtis and a playlist of “History of Electronic / Electroacoustic Music (1937-2001).” When I have trouble deciding amongst the vast catalog of artists, I just turn on UbuWeb Radio, hosted by WFMU:

For those concerned about Ubu’s laissez-faire attitude about copyright, I’ll refer you to an interview that radio scholar Brian Fauteux conducted with Goldsmith in 2014 for Radio Survivor. Therein he explains the site’s value founded on the contemporary reality that, “[i]f it doesn’t exist on the internet, it doesn’t exist.”

Then there is the note at the bottom of the sounds page that reads, in part:

we don’t wish to take whatever small profits might be made from those taking the efforts to gather, manufacture and properly distribute such recordings. Instead, we hope that by streaming these works, it will serve as an enticement for UbuWeb visitors to support the small labels making this work available.

All MP3s served on UbuWeb are either out-of-print, incredibly difficult to find, or, in our opinion, absurdly overpriced.

Moveover, the site’s volunteer curators and administrators have often worked with artists and their estates to take down works or add other ones upon request. Again, the idea is not to pirate or help would-be consumers circumvent buying recordings. Rather, in most cases these recordings are not commercially available, may never have been, or are utterly out-of-print and not released in any contemporary digital formats.

There is always a balance between retaining an accessible cultural history and absolute obedience to the letter of the law. Somewhere in that fuzzy middle lies an approach where one might ask forgiveness, if necessary, rather than putting on your own handcuffs and lacing up your straightjacket.

As Goldsmith told Brian Fauteux, “An archive activist is someone who does what they do without asking permission or securing funds. They simple do it — and then let the world deal with the fact that it is done. If we had to ask for permission, we wouldn’t exist.”

I think that’s quite compatible with the ethos freeform community and college radio, where DJs are allowed or even encouraged to play works from far outside the mainstream and collage them together, whether or not the disc, tape, file or found sound was expressly sent to the station for broadcast. I have no doubts that dozens or hundreds of DJs are violating the letter of copyright law right now, and yet nothing will come of it. That’s because whatever violation is happening is victimless.

Central to this ethos is that these platforms are truly non-profit and non-commercial. No money is lost and no artist loses a sale (or the .0001 cents they get from a play on Spotify).

And if some artist calls the station and says, “please don’t play my work,” my advice is to respect their wishes. But how many calls like that have you received? Right.

The post UbuWeb’s Treasure Trove of Avant-Garde Radio and Sound appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Radios in the woods, a pond station, and a Theremin are just a few of the goodies to be seen and heard at Wave Farm in Acra, New York. A non-profit arts organization, Wave Farm runs community radio station WGXC-FM and offers grants and residencies in transmission arts. For a radio nerd like me, a summer afternoon spent at Wave Farm was a dream come true. The day prior, I got a preview, as I toured WGXC’s studio in Hudson, New York (the subject of my next station visit post) – one of two full-time studios for the station.

Entrance to Wave Farm in Acra, New York. Photo: J. Waits

When I arrived at Wave Farm, artist-in-residence Dan Tapper was outside of Wave Farm’s Study Center setting up for a live performance, the culmination of his week-long stay in Acra. His project, Seven Songs for Seven Planets and a Black Hole at the Heart of the Universe, was comprised of a series of “interdisciplinary works,” including installations, broadcasts, and performance. An accompanying flyer explains that, “The material for the works has been developed by Dan during the residency period and focuses on using data from space and physics – specifically our solar system – as a creative tool and as a catalyst for exploration of a subject from many angles.”

Dan Tapper performs at Wave Farm. Photo: J. Waits

As Wave Farm’s Executive Director Galen Joseph-Hunter toured me through the property, we passed by several pieces by Tapper, including his VLF (very low frequency) Listening Post. Built with materials found on-site, the “installation allows the listener to experience natural radio produced by the earth’s ionosphere as well as the pervasive hum of digital technology and the electric grid.”

Dan Tapper’s VLF Listening Post at Wave Farm. Photo: J. Waits

Further into the woods, more of Tapper’s work was broadcast via low power AM from a camp radio station (installed by Dan Braverman – our guest on Radio Survivor Podcast #148) inside a truck (Max Goldfarb’s Mobile 49) and broadcast even further afield into Japanther’s Remote Audio Outpost (which is also where visitors can record confessions using an old telephone).

AM transmitter inside Max Goldfarb’s Mobile 49 at Wave Farm. Photo: J. Waits

Over the years, numerous artists have spent time at Wave Farm, creating pieces, doing research, and producing radio shows (from radio theater to experimental sound art to spinning records). In addition to Tapper’s new works, the 29-acre site is home to a range of projects, dispersed along trails through the woods and in one case, in the radio studio. That piece, Quintron’s Weather Warlock (hear an interview with the creator on Radio Survivor Podcast #151), sits majestically next to the station’s mixing board, ready to be used by DJs and hosts as an “interactive instrument.”

Weather Warlock in Wave Farm’s WGXC Acra studio. Photo: J. Waits

An analog synthesizer that is controlled by the weather, the Weather Warlock is also a stand-alone Wave Farm online stream. “Outdoor sensors detect changes in sunlight, wind, precipitation, and temperature, with output becoming particularly dynamic during periods of rapid meteorological change, such as sunrise and sunset.”

Sign for Quintron’s Weather Warlock at Wave Farm. Photo: J. Waits

A short walk from the studio, Zach Poff’s Pond Station (the focus of Radio Survivor Podcast #137) is afloat atop a pond, capturing underwater sounds through hydrophones and serving as one of Wave Farm’s streaming stations from dawn until sundown. It’s a mesmerizing listen, as the transmission changes based on weather, creatures, outside sounds (we yelled at the pond and heard it on the station), and even vibrations from far away airplanes and nearby lawn mowers. WGXC hosts often use the Pond Station feed as a sound bed during their programs.

Zach Poff’s Pond Station at Wave Farm. Photo: J. Waits

Walking away from the Pond Station, audio transmissions from hidden radios in the woods (which my daughter described as “creepy”) guided us along paths leading to additional pieces. First up is Max Goldfarb’s Mobile 49, the mobile 1620 AM radio station (Standing Wave Radio) housed in a vintage red truck.

Max Goldfarb’s Mobile 49 at Wave Farm. Photo: J. Waits

Patrick Quinn’s Survant USB Dead Drop is a nod to spy culture, with a USB drive embedded into a tree. Visitors can leave or retrieve messages, as it serves as “both an archive and a remixological tool.” Finally, Japanther’s Remote Audio Outpost is a combination confessional and recording booth.

Remote Audio Outpost at Wave Farm. Photo: J. Waits

Closer to Wave Farm’s Study Center and radio studio is Heidi Neilson’s Outernet Library Branch. A bench with a satellite dish overhead, the Wave Farm branch of the Outernet is part of “an expanding library collection of data files broadcast from satellites in space.” The Acra outpost “serves as a data transmission receiving station where collected files are stored and can be accessed by library patrons through wireless devices.” Nearby is Dan Tapper’s Ontology of Stones, a work inspired by Pauline Oliveros’ Rock Piece and featuring the sound of a pair of stones, plus an interactive element, where visitors can pick up stones from a pile and play along.

Heidi Neilson’s Outernet Library Branch at Wave Farm. Photo: J. Waits

While the outside attractions (including an inviting pond-side hammock) are alluring, the scene inside Wave Farm’s WGXC Acra Studio above the Wave Farm Study Center is equally compelling. On the second floor, the studio is tricked out with many musical instruments and sound sources, including a Theremin, a mini wind-up music box that plays the Simpsons theme song, chimes from Fluxus artist Dick Higgins, an air organ, a vintage Rap Man keyboard with a built-in vocoder, Foley-type tools (including an avocado shaker and a toy xylophone), and numerous Walkman-sized novelty-themed Sound Machines that emit a range of sound effects, from claps to laughs to stringed instruments.

Sound Machines in Wave Farm’s WGXC studio. Photo: J. Waits

For transmission artists, there are also shortwave radios, the Weather Warlock, and a channel on the sound board for the Pond Station. Wave Farm’s Artistic Director Tom Roe demonstrated the various sonic elements in the studio. When I noted that one could literally “play the studio,” he replied that it was “exactly the idea.”

Theremin in Wave Farm’s WGXC Acra studio. Photo: J. Waits

Wave Farm’s WGXC Acra studio also contains some more typical tools, including turntables, CD players, tape decks, an a radio tuner. An adjacent production studio is available to producers, artists and hosts. Downstairs, in the Study Center, is a collection of radio and transmission arts-themed materials. Walls are lined with books, with vintage radios and boxed radio-making kits adorning the shelf tops. Records and CDs are available for use, with an archive of past performances awaiting digitization, some dating back to pre-Wave Farm projects in the late 1990s/early 2000s.

Radios and books in the Wave Farm Study Center. Photo: J. Waits

Speaking of the early days of Wave Farm, the non-profit began in Brooklyn in 1997 as the microcasting collective and performance space free103point9. As stated on the Wave Farm website, “free103point9 was an active participant in the U.S. microradio movement, an activist and advocacy effort that helped create this country’s low-power FM radio service, which provides a licensing opportunity for small broadcasters operating transmitters of 100 watts or less.” Through the affiliated venue, even more connections were made with a broader community of artists who, “…started to think conceptually about the transmission spectrum as a creative medium, becoming invested in a ‘hands-on’ relationship with the airwaves.”

Artwork on wall at Wave Farm. Photo: J. Waits

By 2001, free103point9 had launched a streaming radio station in Brooklyn, which is now known as Standing Wave Radio. In 2009, WGXC online radio launched and by 2011, licensed full power station WGXC debuted over 90.7 FM in the Hudson Valley. In June, 2012, Wave Farm’s Study Center opened to the public. The very low power Wave Farm 1620-AM station began in 2014 from Wave Farm’s Acra location. 1620-AM airs the same programming as Standing Wave Radio, which also broadcasts over WGXC 90.7 FM on Saturdays and overnight.

Inside Mobile 49, which houses Standing Wave Radio 1620-AM. Photo: J. Waits

Joseph-Hunter added the caveat that sometimes “resident artists take over the AM transmitter in conjunction with their work on-site,” and that was the case during my visit. During other times, “Standing Wave Radio is a combination of current Transmission Arts and Experimental Sound programming (which also airs on WGXC Saturdays and overnights) as well as from the Wave Farm (and earlier free103point9) archives,” Joseph-Hunter explained.

Radio hanging in tree in the woods at Wave Farm. Photo: J. Waits

It’s a dizzying variety of content that is being produced at Wave Farm by artists and show hosts, at both the Acra property and within Wave Farm’s WGXC studios in Acra, Hudson, and beyond. I’ll explore the radio programming emanating from outside of Acra in my forthcoming tour report about WGXC’s Hudson studio.

WGXC stickers on shelf at Wave Farm’s Study Center. Photo: J. Waits

It was difficult to leave Wave Farm, as there was still much to explore, including artist-designed mobile apps with even more sonic surprises and interactive elements to several installations throughout the property. With an ever-changing list of resident artists, Wave Farm is never the same place twice; so it would be impossible to see and hear it all.

Tom Roe and Galen Joseph-Hunter at Wave Farm. Photo: J. Waits

Thanks to Galen and Tom for the lovely afternoon and warm welcome. You can hear more from my visit and also catch my colleague Eric Klein’s interview with Weather Warlock creator Quintron on Radio Survivor Podcast #151. Stay tuned for my companion tour report from my visit to WGXC’s Hudson, New York studio.

The post Radio Station Visit #145: Wave Farm in Acra, New York appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Radios in the trees, a transmitter in the pond, and a weather-driven synth. These are just some of what you’ll find on The Wave Farm, a 29-acre property in New York’s Hudson Valley dedicated to radio and transmission arts. It’s anchored by community radio station WGXC, accompanied by a cornucopia of additional tiny terrestrial and internet stations.

Jennifer Waits takes us on an auditory tour of the farm, along with a visit to the station’s Hudson, NY studio, where station manager and managing news editor Lynn Sloneker lays out all these audio feeds. Then in the Wave Farm studio, artistic director Tom Roe details the organization’s history, which has its roots in the unlicensed micropower radio movement of the 1990s.

Every year Wave Farm hosts artists in residence, who create unique works and installations exploring the many aspects of electromagnetic transmission. One was the musical artist Quintron, who created the Weather Warlock, a weather-controlled synthesizer. Eric Klein gave him a call to learn more about this project and his work.

Show Notes:

• WGXC
• Jennifer’s tour of WGXC
• Jennifer’s tour of Wave Farm
• Artist-in-residence Dan Tapper at Wave Farm
• Dan Tapper’s website
• Podcast #137 – Zach Poff Built a Radio Station Inside a Pond
• Podcast #148 – Solving the Mystery of Summer Camp Radio
• Wave Farm Celebrates 20 Years of Transmission Art
• Quintron and Miss Pussycat
• Weather for the Blind
• Weather Warlock at Wave Farm
• Radio Survivor Podcast #133 – Preserving Brooklyn Pirate Radio
• The Brooklyn Pirate Radio Sound Map is Now Online
• Brooklyn Pirate Radio Sound Map
• Radio Survivor Podcast #150 – Sympathy for Kenny G
• Every Community Radio Programmer Must be a Publicist

The post Podcast #151 – The Wave Farm Grows Transmission Arts appeared first on Radio Survivor.

On this week’s episode we venture to prison and to a very unusual high school radio station. Members of the artist collective Provisional Island (Heidi Ratanavanich, Eileen Shumate, and Michael McCanne) speak with us about their prison-radio-themed exhibit, An Electric Kite, which is on view at the historic site/museum Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia through at least fall, 2018. The installation incorporates a low power radio transmission as well as a visual components.

Additionally, Jennifer shares her tour of VCS Radio at Vacaville Christian Schools in Vacaville, California. The high school radio station is part of the school’s music program and has many unusual elements. Not only is it a low power FM (LPFM) station, but it also broadcasts in HD and is housed in the band room. It also has secret Morse Code and carrier current broadcasts.

Show Notes

• Radio Survivor Inaugurates Podcast (Radio World)
• Behind the Scenes of the Radio Survivor Podcast (YouTube)
• Provisional Island
• Eastern State Penitentiary
• Eastern State’s An Electric Kite exhibit page
• Provisional Island’s An Electric Kite page
• The iPod of Prison (The New Yorker)
• Whatever Happened to the Phone Phreaks? (The Atlantic)
• Early Hackers’ Supersecret Spyware: Toy Whistles (Slate)
• Maurice Chammah’s “Guerrilla Radio” article (The Marshall Project)
• Radio Survivor Podcast #94: The High School Radio Station That Went HD
• Radio Station Visit #144: KVCB-LP at Vacaville Christian Schools
• KVCB-LP/VCS Radio
• VCS Radio Conservatory
• VCS Radio Symphony performance of Modern Times (YouTube)
• National High School Radio Network

The post Podcast #147 – Prison Radio Exhibit and a High School Station in a Band Room appeared first on Radio Survivor.

“The radio industry… is an example of an industry that was doing pretty well, and they gutted it.”

The “they” is the private equity industry, which provided the financing to companies like Clear Channel (iHeartRadio) and Cumulus to go on the epic buying sprees that resulted in today’s enormously consolidated commercial radio landscape. Investigative reporter Josh Korman explains how this happened in the documentary “Corporate.FM.”

The film debuted six years ago at the Kansas City Film Festival, when Jennifer Waits also interviewed director Kevin McKinney for Radio Survivor. The film had been in the back of my mind when I noticed that it was available for streaming on Amazon Prime. So, of course, I sat down to watch it.

Kinney told Jennifer that, “The film is about the downfall of commercial FM. I believe that community radio, college radio and even NPR do not fill the void that was left when we lost commercial radio as a medium to support the community, because these stations do not have the same audience.”

It the opening sequence, “Commercial.FM” lays out its raison d’être: “The power of radio is that our neighbors are listening to it at the same time, and together we create a critical mass of support at the local level.”

The film vividly illustrates this point, and how its promise has been mortgaged, through the voices and experience of people who work, or have worked, in the industry. Kinney spotlights talent from Kansas City, Lawrence, Kansas, and San Diego, all of whom have been affected by industry consolidation. Their stories are further illuminated by experts like journalist Eric Boehlert and Prof. Robert McChesney, who have researched and documented media consolidation.

Though I think it’s a perspective that deserves airing, I have to admit that going in I was expecting “Corporate.FM” to focus primarily on the cultural aspects of commercial radio’s decline, of how local DJs who would play local bands got replaced by nationalized playlists and voice tracking. It’s important to recognize this effect, but it’s also very well tread ground.

Instead, I was impressed at how effectively the film tells the political economic story that’s at the root of these changes. In very clear terms it lays out how ownership deregulation – in the form of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 – legalized and incentivized massive corporate buyouts leveraged with debt. These deals generated windfall profits in the short term, and enriched bankers and executives in the long term, at the expense of hundreds of jobs, the death of localism and the 20-year blood-letting of an entire industry. It does this without getting lost in jargon, or just boring the viewer to death.

As one commentator says in the first three minutes of the documentary, “The internet didn’t kill radio. The commercial radio industry is killing itself.”

“Corporate.FM” makes that case solidly.

If you have Amazon Prime it’s a must-see. If you don’t, it’s also available for rent or purchase, and I’d say it’s well worth the $1.99 rental, even if you think you know the story. Seriously, it’s a story I’ve been following for 22 years (and I’m kind of a cynical old bastard, too), and I found a lot to like and learn in “Corporate.FM.”

Watch the trailer:

The post Now Streaming: ‘Corporate.FM’ Clearly Explains the Decline of Commercial Radio appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Musician, DJ and radio artist Don Joyce passed away nearly three years ago, leaving behind a voluminous archive of his unparalelled collage radio program “Over the Edge.” The documentary “How Radio Isn’t Done” sheds light on this member of Negativland, his life and his work in recontextualizing the never-ending flow of media messages that flood everyday life.

Director Ryan Worsley joins to talk about Joyce, his hyper-focused artistic process and what she learned creating this affectionate and honest portrait of an iconoclastic figure and broadcasting legend.

Show Notes:

• “How Radio Isn’t Done” on Vimeo
• “How Radio Isn’t Done” on Amazon
• Paul’s review of the film, “An Affectionate & Honest Filmic Portrait of Negativland’s Don Joyce“
• Negativland – “The Chopping Channel”
• RIP Don Joyce: Negativland Member, Artist, KPFA DJ
• Negativland’s ‘Over The Edge’ Catalog Now Available at Internet Archive
• Radio Survivor Podcast #9: Remembering Negativland’s Don Joyce
• ABC (Australia) documentary about a long-running cassette radio show: “Cassette famous“
• Radio on Tape: from ‘Second Side Up’ to ‘The Hour of Slack’
• The Grassroots Radio Conference is happening Oct. 5 – 7 in Portland, OR. The call for proposals is now open.

The post Podcast #141 – How Radio Isn’t Done, According To Negativland’s Don Joyce appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Musician, DJ and radio artist Don Joyce passed away nearly three years ago, on July 22, 2015. He left behind a voluminous archive of his KPFA radio program “Over the Edge,” which took off in new, chaotic and creative directions when he welcomed the participation of the experimental band Negativland in 1981, then joining the group.

The documentary “How Radio Isn’t Done” sheds light on Joyce and his life, work and his process for recontextualizing the never-ending flow of media messages that flood everyday life. Director Ryan Worsley paints an affectionate, but honest portrait of a man who poured tremendous quantities of inspiration, energy and effort into his community radio program, leaving the impression that it was something he just had to do.

How Radio Isn't Done from Ryan Worsley on Vimeo.

In the film Joyce walks through his workflow of recording audio, from sources like broadcast television, onto audiocassettes, then isolating segments and dubbing those onto a second cassette. To make these snippets ready for on-air manipulation, he then dubs them onto broadcast carts, tape loop cartridges, similar to 8-track tapes, that were used in radio broadcasting from the 1960s through to the 1990s. Of course, Joyce continued to employ this analog technology to the very end, because: why mess with success?

Yet, we also see that towards the end of his life, Joyce began retreating inward, no longer wanting to tour or perform live with Negativland, to the obvious concern of his bandmates, who could see his decline. They reflect on Joyce’s quirks, brilliance and fallible humanity like the old, loving friends that they are.

After Joyce’s passing his bandmates take on the responsibility of digitizing his massive store of sound fragments, as well as the thirty-four year archives of “Over the Edge.” We look on as they package baggies of his ashes in with copies of the last album he worked on, “The Chopping Channel,” all to be shipped to fans.

Radio broadcasting can be a paradoxically lonely pursuit. While DJs transmit their voice and other sounds to hundreds, thousands or millions of listeners, they’re often alone in the studio, or surrounded by just a few colleagues and collaborators. While the phone may ring–and Joyce eagerly mixed callers into the broadcast feed–the communication with the audience is rarely a true conversation.

That an esoteric artist like Joyce could find a small community of collaborators and an audience for his work is a testimony to the power of radio, especially non-commercial college and community radio where boundaries may be pushed and heterodoxy disposed. The price is that your art may go barely noticed.

Though far from famous, Joyce’s work was noticed by people who could appreciate it. And while at times he does come across as a slightly tragic figure, watching “How Radio Isn’t Done,” I wonder what else he would have done that would have made him happier or more satisfied.

Having spent thousands of hours in community and college radio stations, this is a familiar archetype: the person whose radio show provides the necessary meaning for their life, whether one or a million people are tuned in.

I believe that most human beings have a desire to create, to be productive. I place no qualification on what that means, whether it’s building models, cooking meals, perfecting a golf swing or coloring pictures. “How Radio Isn’t Done” is a portrait of someone who had to create a radical form of radio, and in so doing left behind an artistic legacy of collage, recontextualization and culture jamming (the latter a term he coined as his on-air character “Crosley Bendix”) that has had inestimable impact on our media culture at large.

“How Radio Isn’t Done” is available on for viewing on demand on Amazon and Vimeo.

The post An Affectionate & Honest Filmic Portrait of Negativland’s Don Joyce appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Radio fans have a major reason to visit San Francisco this year: the SFO Museum just debuted the massive “On the Radio” exhibit in Terminal 3 of the San Francisco International Airport (SFO). Until September 30, 2018, travelers can feast their eyes on 27 cases full of historical items related to radio’s past, ranging from 1920s crystal radios to 1970s novelty radios.

A peek at the “On the Radio” exhibit at SFO Museum. Photo: J. Waits

Of particular interest to radio historians, “On the Radio,” features around 120 radios in addition to photographs, artwork from vintage radio magazine covers, advertisements, popular culture artifacts, microphones, vacuum tubes, and more. Accompanied by SFO Museum’s Assistant Curator of Exhibitions Daniel Calderon, I spent more than 90 minutes touring through the extensive exhibit; while most of the other Monday morning passersby zipped through on their way to and from flights. During my visit, a number of passengers perused the main part of the installation, reading accompanying text and chatting with friends and family members about the objects on display. Others pointed out the radio photographs and magazine covers while riding on one of the two moving walkways that bookend “On the Radio.”

Photos in the “On the Radio” exhibit alongside the people mover at SFO. Photo: J. Waits

My tour of “On the Radio” amazed me on several levels. It’s one of the most extensive radio exhibits that I’ve ever witnessed and certainly the largest that I’ve seen in a non-radio environment. With thematic display cases, “On the Radio” also provides an incredible overview of not only radio history, but also at the wide range of radios that have been created over the years.

Sentinel radio in the “On the Radio” exhibit at SFO Museum. Photo: J. Waits

Beyond that, the exhibit contextualizes radio in American popular culture in particular, with accompanying photographs portraying how real people have used radio in their everyday lives. Additionally, for design and technology fans, the exhibit draws connections between notable designers (including Charles Eames and Alexander Girard) and technical pioneers/inventors (such as Reginald Fessenden, Lee de Forest, Charles Herrold and Edwin Armstrong) and the radio landscape.

New York World’s Fair Radio in “On the Radio” exhibit at SFO Museum. Photo: J. Waits

While many travelers may only have a few minutes to devote to “On the Radio,” I would encourage radio fans and historians to build in extra time during their trips through SFO in order to spend quality time with the exhibit. For departing passengers or those approaching from other terminals, I’d recommend starting near the entrance to the people movers, where you can pick up a copy of the “On the Radio” booklet (which opens up into a beautiful poster) and read an introductory panel about the exhibit.

Entrance to “On the Radio” exhibit at SFO Museum. Photo: J. Waits

From there, I would begin with the “Early Broadcasting” display, proceeding ahead to see the exhibits on the right side of the gallery, including “Crystal Sets.” This is where you can spy one of the star pieces of the show, the “Mystic” radio bug crystal radio from 1927. Part of Steve Kushman’s collection, this crystal radio is encased inside a fantastical glazed green ceramic bug.

The “Mystic” Radio Bug and Headset in “On the Radio” exhibit. Photo Courtesy SFO Museum.

I enjoyed beginning at this side of the show in order to get a look at some of the older items. One could also take a detour on the people mover heading towards Terminal 3 gates in order to see John Schneider‘s collection of colorized historic radio studio photos on the wall to one’s right, returning on the people mover heading towards the airport exit to view illustrated Radio magazine covers from the 1920s to one’s left (displayed on the back of exhibit cases). Take a second trip on the people mover towards Terminal 3, looking to your left, to see additional magazine covers.

Radio magazine cover on display at “On the Radio” exhibit at SFO Museum. Photo: J. Waits

Other displays focus on types of radios (battery sets, cathedral radios, 1930s tabletop radios, 1930s luxury radios, mid-century plywood radios, portable radios, molded plastic radios, bakelite radios, mirrored radios, transistor radios, Remler radios, Catalin radios, coin-operated radios), programming (music on the radio, postwar radio and rock ‘n roll, radio shows, radio’s dramatic voice), technology (FM radio, tube technology, patent licensing), the radio audience, novelty radios (including a radio housed in sunglasses and an early lamp-shaped radio), and the 1939 New York World’s Fair and Golden Gate International Exposition.

Coin-operated hotel radio in “On the Radio” exhibit at SFO Museum. Photo: J. Waits

As one would expect from this type of exhibition in San Francisco, there are a number of references to San Francisco Bay Area inventors, radio manufacturers, radio networks, radio stations, and pioneering broadcasters. The “On the Radio” exhibit points out San Jose’s important role in radio history, stating, “Electrical engineering professor Charles Herrold (1875–1948) made the first scheduled radio broadcasts, transmitted from 1912 to 1917 at KQW in San Jose, California, to wireless operators and students listening in on crystal sets.” Those stopping by the exhibit can take a look at historic photos from Herrold’s station, which one could argue was the first college radio station in the San Francisco Bay Area. I was also intrigued to see a photo from the grand NBC “Radio City” studio in San Francisco (circa 1942). Now the home to tech company Reddit, the building’s original mosaic mural can still be seen today.

1942 Image of NBC “Radio City” Building in San Francisco from the “On the Radio” exhibit. Photo: J. Waits

Established in 1980, Museum SFO encompasses 25 galleries at the airport and is unique in that it “…was accredited by the American Alliance of Museums in 1999, becoming the first and only accredited museum to be located in an airport.” Although I’ve admired many of the museum’s exhibits over the years (from vintage typewriters to airplane-themed album cover art), I wasn’t fully aware of the extent of the SFO Museum, likely due to the rushed nature of my usual airport visits. Several galleries, including the Aviation Museum and Library (in the international terminal) are located in pre-security areas and are open to the public. At the time of my visit, there were around 18 different exhibits throughout the airport and that is in addition to more than 80 pieces of public art that is also on display.

Promotional pieces for SFO Museum in the international terminal at San Francisco Airport. Photo: J. Waits

Although SFO Museum displays some of its own collections in the Aviation Museum and Library, the majority of the items on view in airport galleries are on loan from collectors and other museums. “On the Radio” includes materials from numerous private collectors as well as from the California Historical Radio Society, History San Jose, and the Museum of American Heritage (which is going to have a series of workshops on how to build a crystal radio, by the way!).

Novelty radios in the “On the Radio” exhibit at SFO Museum. Photo: J. Waits

With around 50 million travelers coming through SFO every year, it’s staggering to think about the potential audience for the museum’s exhibits and it delights me to imagine the vast number of people who will catch at least a glimpse of radio history during the run of “On the Radio.”

The post ‘On the Radio’ Exhibit at San Francisco Airport Celebrates Radio History appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Good grief is there ever a lot of crossover classical stuff going on, much of it in the United Kingdom. Let’s see . . .

The Classic FM online service is teaming up with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and PlayStation to present a show titled PlayStation in Concert, billboarding “the very best in video game music.”

The RPO and the City of London Choir will serve up renditions of the soundtracks to: The Last of Us, The Last Guardian, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves and Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, LittleBigPlanet, and Horizon Zero Dawn

It all happens at the Royal Albert Hall on May 30. Speaking personally, I’ve tried for years to get into video games, but every time I play one I think, “gee, I could be practicing Bartok or Chopin on the piano right now,” and that’s the end of that. Still, I almost always love the scores to these things. How grand it would be to attend this concert. If you go, send a review to @hybridhighbrow.

Meanwhile I am following the Nonclassical music label out of London, which endeavors to get contemporary classical music performed in clubs on selected evenings. From the group’s About page:

“The success of the night partly stems from the fact that it presents classical as if it were rock or electronic music. Bands play through the pub’s PA, everyone has a pint in their hand and perhaps most importantly there are DJs playing throughout the night. Even the most sceptical visitors to the club can’t help but be stimulated by being so close to the high-quality musicianship presented at Nonclassical. Classical music can be part of everyone’s lives and this night is part of rediscovering its relevance.”

The outfit has a sample playlist on Spotify. I am particularly enjoying “Mohave Desert” by Floating Points.

Back here in the USA radiomilwaukee.org is promoting Between Two Worlds, a merger of folk and new American classical. That’s happening at the Helen Zelazo Center for the Performing Arts in Milwaukee on March 24. Here’s a sample of one of the artists’ songs:

So much great stuff. I want to get it all on one radio station! Someday . . .

The post If I could crossover the world . . . appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Mr. Okra, the famous singing veggie vendor of New Orleans has died. A celebration of his singing life ensued, as so:

Celebrating Mr. Okra in the 9th Ward this afternoon pic.twitter.com/DMbQTp3NiZ

— WWOZ 90.7 FM (@wwoz_neworleans) February 25, 2018

But surely you want to hear his daily opus. Here it is, thanks to National Public Radio.

I have nothing further to say about this man, other than to note that he possessed a great voice, shared it generously, and lived a great life.

Meanwhile here is KALW in San Francisco radio host Sarah Cahill playing the heck out of Henry Cowell’s not-for-the-faint of heart piano piece “Tiger.”

Just announced! @bardmusicwest celebrates Bay Area visionary #HenryCowell for its 2018 festival, featuring Sarah on Program One, Apr 6 @NVMinSF. Check out Cowell’s “Tiger” from Sarah’s performance at the @OtherMindsSF New Music Seance: https://t.co/8ofZDp8ebI

— Sarah Cahill (@cahill_piano) February 26, 2018

And I close with George Clinton’s comments on cultural appropriation and UFO aliens, as quoted in Rolling Stone:

How do you feel about white artists doing black music?
I’d bite off the Beatles, or anybody else. It’s all one world, one planet and one groove. You’re supposed to learn from each other, blend from each other, and it moves around like that. You see that rocket ship leave yesterday? We can maybe leave this planet. We gonna be dealing with aliens. You think black and white gonna be a problem? Wait till you start running into motherfuckers with three or four dicks! Bug-eyed motherfuckers! They could be ready to party, or they could be ready to eat us. We don’t know, but we’ve got to get over this shit of not getting along with each other.

Thanks for that. When I get it together, my next Hybrid Highbrow podcast is going to be about classical renditions of Georgia on My Mind. But given the state of my life, this could take a while. Meanwhile I’ve started a Hybrid Highbrow Twitter list just to keep track of all of you.

The post Mr. Okra has died, Henry Cowell’s “Tiger,” George Clinton on aliens appeared first on Radio Survivor.

I’m delighted to keep stumbling upon video artifacts of pirate radio, like the 1970s Portland public access footage and 1990 shortwave pirate documentary I recently shared. Next up I’ve found a more contemporary documentary from 2014 looking at London’s pirate radio scene.

The city has long been a hotbed of unlicensed radio activity, such that the scene birthed and nurtured new music genres like jungle and grime in the 1990s and early 2000s. The film “Drowned City” (available for free on Vimeo) takes a survey of current and former pirate broadcasters in East London, featuring a remarkable degree of access that’s facilitated by hiding the identities of many players.

Towards the start of the film, a former pirate named Jay drives director Faith Millin and her crew around East London pointing out broadcast aerials mounted on top of residential tower blocks (similar to public housing complexes in the U.S.). He notes that many of them are affixed to legitimate antenna masts used for purposes like two-way taxi radio. Even with the density of unlicensed broadcasters in places like Brooklyn and South Florida, I doubt there’s anywhere in the States where such an “aerial tour” would be so easy.

We also follow current broadcasters who have metal parts fabricated for their own home-brew security devices to stop both the authorities and competing stations from tampering with or seizing their equipment. Due to the size of the scene, as well as the heated cat-and-mouse game with Ofcom, the UK radio regulator, and police, pirates keep their transmitters cited away from studios, linking them via internet streams. This helps protect DJs, though it also means transmission gear is left unattended and vulnerable.

Though more sophisticated and mature than in many other cities, the pirate radio scene in London is born from the same seeds as elsewhere: people and communities without access to their own media taking the means to broadcast into their own hands. The success of pirate stations playing hip-hop, R&B, soul and reggae music unheard elsewhere on the radio prompted the BBC to launch 1Xtra, which focuses on urban music and has DJs who are former pirates.

While this may have taken some wind out of the pirate sails, a broadcaster in “Drowned City” notes that stations serving immigrant diasporas from Turkey and Africa have filled in some of the gaps. Again, this is similar to unlicensed broadcasters in the U.S. serving cultural and language minorities otherwise unheard on the dial.

Some of the DJs in the film have been caught and fined, and others are less sanguine about the future of pirate radio in the face of the internet. Yet, others press on, despite the risks and competition for listeners’ ears. “Drowned City” is a fascinating hour-long journey into one of the most iconic broadcast communities in the world.

The post Tour East London’s Pirate Radio Scene in “Drowned City” appeared first on Radio Survivor.

I just listened to the latest episode of The Quietus Hour featuring an interview with Matt Johnson, the principal behind the English post-punk band The The. Although Johnson largely put the band on hiatus—save some film soundtrack work—since its last formal release in 2000, I learned from the interview that on UK election day in 2015 he organized a 12-hour online radio broadcast called Radio Cineola.

Roughly modeled after a shortwave station, the broadcast included discussions about politics, music and poetry with a wide variety of guests. A week later Johnson hosted a second broadcast focused on music and, “discussing procrastination, apathy, inertia and the creative process.”

I really wish I’d known about these programs when they happened. Unfortunately, there are no archives available. However, selections have been integrated into a new 3-CD or 3-LP box set called the “Radio Cinéola Trilogy,” which can be pre-ordered now.

The frustration of the creative process, tackled in the second Radio Cinéola broadcast, is central to a new documentary about Johnson and The The. Titled “The Inertia Variations,” after a poetic cycle by John Tottenham, the film examines Johnson’s own creative inertia, along with his radio broadcasts and dive back into songwriting.

The Inertia Variations trailer from Johanna St Michaels on Vimeo.

Johnson also reads a condensed version of “The Inertia Variations,” set to a soundscape, on disc two of the “Radio Cinéola Trilogy.” Several tracks are played in the Quietus Hour interview, and you can hear bits in this video trailer:

As a writer and broadcaster, the few excerpts of “The Inertia Variations” I’ve now heard hit a little too close to home:

There was a time when I thought

I might have done something by now;

But that was long ago, and over the intervening

Decades I have shifted from prodigy to late-bloomer

To non-bloomer; I have passed my peak without having peaked

Or even begun the ascent, and unless there is something inherently

Salutary to the energy I expend in frustrating myself then

My sacrifices have all been in vain.

Ouch. And, for me, the words have more impact when read aloud by Johnson than when read on the page (or screen).

Though I missed the original broadcasts, I’m fascinated by the tactic of using a radio broadcast as a way out of this creative inertia and blockage. Putting one on requires forcing yourself into a tight schedule, with segments and guests to be arranged, and then ready and waiting to go one air at the precisely correct moment. There’s no time for procrastination, lest the whole affair fall apart.

On the one hand, live broadcasting is a grind. On the other, it’s a discipline that can help loosen rusty hinges on the doors locking up latent creativity. The combination of adrenaline and no do-overs combine to tinder a spark.

It’s something that Eric and I attempt to simulate in producing the Radio Survivor show and podcast. Though we’re not actually live, and do employ post-production editing, we watch the clock and do our best to get most of it done in one take. This approach evolved over the last two-and-a-half years of producing the show.

At the beginning we tended to do more takes and included several segments an episode. Now we typically have just one feature interview or discussion, and record the wrap-arounds in sequence as much as possible. This shift happened as Eric and I got better at working together, but also because the podcast became a true broadcast radio show this year. It turns out it’s much easier to keep a consistent clock if you just do your best to record to the correct length, live. Plus, we think it keeps things snappier.

Now I’m really anxious to hear the entire “Radio Cinéola Trilogy” and see the documentary. Until they’re available in the U.S. I’ll tide myself over with some free downloads on the The The website that are part of a series also titled “Radio Cinéola,” but not necessarily from the broadcasts.

The post Tackling Creative Inertia with Broadcasting: Radio Cinéola appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Decades before the invention of the MP3, the audiocassette, along with the home dubbing deck and four-track tape recorders, put the power to create and distribute recordings into the hands of anyone with the will to record. No longer reliant on record labels or the capital investment needed to rent studio time and press records, by the 1980s an international community of independent-minded artists had emerged, networked via photocopied ’zines, grassroots magazines and P.O. boxes because even the widest home-recorded cassette release was unlikely to be stocked in record stores.

Tapes were just as likely to be traded—one artist swapping her own tapes, or something else of value (like a ’zine), for another’s—as they were to be bought or sold. Even when commerce was involved, the price would only be a few bucks and quantities could be strictly limited, due more to pragmatics like blank tape supplies and dubbing time than anything else.

Shows on community and college radio stations were the few mass media platforms open to playing home recorded and distributed music. One of the longest-lasting of these is “No Pigeonholes Radio” hosted by musician Don Campau since 1985 on community radio KKUP in Cupertino, CA.

Though cassettes, like vinyl, seem to be having a bit of revival—even with their own day—I’ve been fascinated by cassette culture for decades. I stumbled upon “No Pigeonholes Radio” a couple of months ago during a late night ’net research expedition, wherein I dived deep into the oeuvre of experimental musician Hal McGee. I found an interview with McGee that Campau published on his website, The Living Archive of Underground Music, which in turn led me to his radio show.

Initially focused on home-recording cassette artists, the show now features music released on any format, but is still dedicated to DIY musicians. After listening to some shows in the “No Pigeonholes” archive, I finally decided to drop Campau a line and see if he would be up for an email interview. What follows has been edited for clarity and length.

PR: How and why did you start “No Pigeonholes?”

DC: After I became involved in what was later called cassette culture in 1984 a light went off in my head. I already have a radio show. Why not feature all these tapes I was now getting in trade?

These trades were fostered, to begin with, by reviews in mags such as OP, Sound Choice, Option, Factsheet Five, etc.

I rarely bought tapes. I was very proactive and wrote letters everyday from reviews in these mags, and then from addresses on compilation announcements, and then from little promo papers that used to accompany a trade. I wrote literally thousands of letters (this was well before email) and I would almost always send a trade tape in return.

PR: In the 1980s it was common for college and community radio to play underground and independent music, what did you want to do that was different?

DC: I simply wanted to portray the tape scene that was happening. No styles rejected, not about the music biz, not about “making it.” These were not demos, but the finished product, representing the everyday person who was making music at home.

PR: Stations often didn’t play cassettes on air simply because they are more difficult to cue up than records, and later, CDs. Was it a challenge, from a practical point of view?

DC: It was a challenge. I had to bring in my own tape deck, and sometime two decks just to be able to record it as well. By the way, I have every show since 1985 on tape, CD or digital file. I am slowly uploading them to archive.org.

PR: These days your show features music in a variety of formats, not just cassette. When did that shift first occur?

DC: In the late 90s people started turning their attention to CDs and the tape format became marginalized to some degree. I still got tapes even after 2000, but much less when digital home recording and duplication became affordable and widespread. The heyday of cassette culture is mainly painted as 1985–1995 but, in reality, was a bit longer than that.

PR: As a DJ, these days do you prefer to have the tape, CD or a digital file?

DC: I am a hard copy guy. But, really, I am fine with a digital file now, too. There is nothing holy about tapes. They were simply a means to an end. Cheap, easy to get and easy to mail.

Bandcamp is great and so is Soundcloud. Just don’t fool yourself into thinking you will make lots of money.

PR: Isn’t that no more true today than it was in the heyday of cassette culture in the 80s and 90s?

DC: Yes, but during the heyday of tapes nobody really thought their tape was going to make them big or be profitable. It was only with the advent of the CD, which people felt was somehow more legitimate, did people delude themselves in this way. That delusion continues into today, and many people write me feeling confused and angry because they cannot “make it.”

I try to softly tell them that is not my focus, and although I have played thousands of artists on the show, I have never met one who could do what I did with my job in the produce department of a grocery store: buy a house, have insurance, a pension, three kids and an ability to take care of a family. This simply does not happen in the music business for 99% of artists, ever.

The bottom line: for me, I am OK calling music a “hobby.” But that is evidently a dirty word for many musicians. I always tell people: Get a job and career you can handle and that will enable you to focus on music as an art, or something to have fun with.

PR: Cassettes are seeing a bit of revival in the last few years, even if not quite on par with the vinyl resurgence. What do you think the allure of cassettes is now?

DC: I think there are a number of reasons. First, a counter-reaction to the “invisible” digital culture where there is “no there, there.” Also, an opportunity to have something tangible to offer and hold, with art and unusual presentation. Plus, with tapes there is no easy way to get to specific songs; one must listen to the entire tape unless you want to rewind or fast forward.

To me, though, it was never about format. [It was] not about tapes at all, but about creating community and using affordable means of recording and distribution. Tape culture also offered a way to create relationships with people, too. Heck, I ended up marrying a home taper from New Jersey!

When CDs and digital distribution became the standard [there was] a certain lack of this community. For example, in the old days one would get a tape and a letter, and maybe there might be personal info [shared], and not just music talk. Letters would get exchanged, friendships developed, histories created.

In 1991 Kevyn Dymond and myself traveled to Europe for a five-week tour of other home tapers in Germany, France, Norway and England. We even performed in East Germany right after the Wall came down, with improvising crazy men, Das Freie Orchester. So, the relationship might be extended with a phone call, [or] a possible in-person meeting.

To this day, I have people that are very meaningful to me, and whom I consider to be close friends, that I have never met or even talked to.

Now, things are different. I might get a mass email from an artist saying, “here’s my mp3, can you play it on your show?” There is no asking me how I am, no relationship that goes deeper. It’s a good thing that I have long time friendships with so many people from the old days. This has created continuity for me.

PR: When you get the mass-email asking you to check out a song or artist, do you?

Yes, I do. I try to encourage a personal relationship and push it a little bit. I’ll still air stuff even if I don’t like it, or if it’s impersonal. The show is not about me. It’s about exposing unknown artists, especially those recording at home.

I always write back telling people I got their music. I am one of the few DJs that makes sure everyone knows they got airtime by sending not only playlists, but also links to podcasts with their music.

PR: Are the relationships still being forged in the underground music community?

Yes, I think so. Younger people write me all the time asking about it, and wondering how to do it. It’s hard and relentless work, even in this digital age. Not everyone is a frustrated music biz type. There are still plenty of curious and inventive people doing interesting things.

The internet is not inherently superficial. Relationships, community and personal connections are still possible—in fact, maybe even easier. There are no more trips to the post office, and tremendous amounts of money are saved on postage and materials. But why does it so rarely happen?

We seem to be in a, “look at me, push it out, one-way-street” kind of mentality to a large degree. I think Facebook and social media are a good thing. Sure, there are tons of meaningless crap, but I have made connections and reconnections with people I lost touch with for many years. I like that.

It is fashionable to knock Facebook now. I use it because it works for me. If it doesn’t work for you stop complaining and don’t do it. And while you’re at it, stop bitching that no one wants to buy your music or doesn’t pay attention to you. This is the 21st century, get on the bus if you want to be heard.

PR: Any final tips for people looking to find underground sounds?

The resources are everywhere on the internet. A few good resources are:

• WFMU’s remarkable Free Music Archive (also the subject of Radio Survivor Podcast #1 -PR)
• The Spanish tape archivists SONM
• The Facebook 1980/90s group
• Darrell Draeger’s blog, Die or DIY?
• My experimental radio show on KOWS-FM, “No Pigeonholes EXP”
• The unbelievable UBUWEB
• No Longer Forgotten Music blog
• Tape Attack blog

The post The Spirit of Cassette Culture Lives on ‘No Pigeonholes Radio’ appeared first on Radio Survivor.

While trying to find the Wave Farm Radio feed on TuneIn this afternoon, I stumbled upon “NAISA – New Adventures in Sound Art” and tapped play. What I heard fit the bill of what I was looking for, but from a different source based in Canada: transmission and sound art akin to what Wave Farm broadcasts and supports.

I heard host and sound artist Eleanor King describe her experiences as an artist in Halifax, Nova Scotia, as she introduced the show “Cross Waves Series #7: Top Songs,” a series she curates featuring “artists who consider the musical form of the pop song as a point of departure.” Pieces included a pastiche of versions of Led Zeppelin’s classic rock warhorse “Stairway to Heaven,” and one from Ryan Maguire made from the sound that is removed from Neil Young’s “Tonight’s The Night” through being compressed into an MP3 file.

Coincidentally, earlier in the day I listened to Bang & Olufsen’s “Sound Matters” podcast, the newest episode of which concerns the topic of music and fidelity that is lost in different sound media, like MP3s. Maguire is interviewed, and his piece “A Ghost in the MP3” is featured. The funny thing is that when I fired up my podcast app, I hadn’t intended to dive into sound art, even though I planned to tune in to the Wave Farm’s “Twenty Performances for Twenty Years” live anniversary broadcast later in the day. It just so happened that the “Sound Matters” episode was at the top of my download queue.

Back to “New Adventures in Sound Art” — the online station is a project of NAISA, a non-profit based in South River, Ontario, a couple hours north of Toronto. The group puts on a host of annual sound art events, including the Deep Wireless Festival of Radio & Transmission Art in January/February, the NAISA Sound Bash Series in March, the Sound Travels Festival of Sound Art in July/August and the SOUNDplay Festival in October/November, the latter of which is in progress. This past June NAISA opened its North Media Arts Centre that has a large exhibition space, a small café, a community gallery and workshop space.

I certainly recommend NAISA’s online radio station, and if I’m ever in that part of Ontario I definitely want to stop in.

The post Happy Coincidences in Sound Art Radio appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Transmission arts organization and community broadcaster the Wave Farm celebrates its 20th anniversary this Saturday with an event at the Fridman Gallery in New York City, titled, “Wave Farm 1997–2017: Twenty Performances for Twenty Years.” From noon to 10 PM, 22 sound and transmission artists will perform, including Wave Farm artistic director Tom Roe and Jeff Kolar, whom I interviewed four-and-a-half years ago.

The Wave Farm is singularly unique in that it was founded to support the creation of art that uses transmission technologies and also operates a full-power non-commercial FM station, WGXC-FM (which, incidentally, just signed on to air our radio show), which can showcase that art and practice. The station is based in Acra, NY, sited on the titular farm, home to the Wave Farm Study Center. That’s where the organization hosts an artist residency program, research library, and site-specific installations by collaborating artists. Because the farm is in a rural area, the station primarily broadcasts out of a studio in the larger town of Hudson, about 18 miles east, and also broadcasts Tuesdays from the Catskill Public Library.

Wave Farm Radio is a Part 15 AM and internet station located on the farm that broadcasts transmission art and experimental sounds 24/7.

Over email I asked Tom to reflect on 20 years of community broadcasting. He corrected the record, noting that, “we have done radio art—more accurately, transmission art—for 20 years. We did ‘community broadcasting’ some during our micro radio period, and then later, when we got a full-power FM license we had to do ‘community broadcasting’ again because that was what we preached about (for) FM signals for our entire existence.”

The “micro radio period” he refers to is free103point9, a micropower radio arts collective that had its maiden broadcast on March 7, 1997 in Brooklyn. So, properly, Wave Farm’s 20 years date back to that first transmission, after which it evolved into an arts non-profit, later launching WGXC’s FM signal in 2011.

The late 90s was a time before low-power FM, which meant it was difficult to impossible to start a new community radio station in many places, especially crowded urban markets like New York or San Francisco. As Tom recalled, community radio activists were concerned about gaining access to the airwaves, “and we thought there should be some concern about the content, once that access was allowed.” Hence the focus on transmission art.

What’s transmission art? Tom elucidates:

“We believe weird things like the 60Hz hum of electrical lights in a radio studio is not silence, and that the word ‘podcast’ is an advertisement for Apple, not a type of audio show. Our ‘community broadcasting’ now includes a webstream/station that just plays the sounds from inside a pond in the community (from the artist Zach Poff), and a weather webstream/station that turns weather sounds into electronic music (from the artist Quintron).”

Charting the changes over the last 20 years, Tom observed, “technology makes community broadcasting easier now than in 1997.” Technology allows WGXC to have its remote studios in Hudson and Catskill, as well as to broadcast town meetings live.

“We have a new box at a bar in Catskill where the artists can open the box, open a laptop in that box, press the on button, and then they are on the air,” he said. “We teach folks attending local town meetings or events how to pull out their cell phones and record or stream meetings. I used to joke that we try to make 1940s radio with 2010s technology.”

If you can’t make it to the Fridman Gallery Saturday, you can hear it on WGXC on the air in the Hudson Valley and online. The station is also having its Fall Harvest pledge drive, so it’s a great occasion to support this truly singular enterprise that serves both the communities of Hudson and Greene Counties and the global transmission art community.

Also in New York City, Wave Farm is partnered with Jeff Kolar’s Radius for the Sonic Arcade exhibition, happening through Feb. 24, 2018 at the Museum of Arts and Design. On the fourth Saturday of the month museum visitors will experience a microradio broadcast of Wave Farm’s WGXC 90.7-FM programming via radios available at the exhibition. The exhibition features interactive installations, immersive environments, and performing objects that explore how the ephemeral and abstract nature of sound is made material.

The post Wave Farm Celebrates 20 Years of Transmission Art appeared first on Radio Survivor.

For my third Hybrid Highbrow podcast I have assembled a collection of tango pieces written by late-19th and early 20th-century classical composers. They include Albéniz, Shostakovich, Milhaud, Mompou, Stravinsky, Satie, and Poulenc. Listening to these wonderful compositions, and reading up on the history of tango, I am struck by the explosive impact that this genre had on the musical and cultural world. Suddenly here was a uniquely gorgeous dance form that compelled the classical music scene to take notice and respond. That they did, with pieces that remain as fresh as when they were composed.

I’ve also added two fire-breathing renditions of Ángel Villoldo’s formative 1903 tango song El Choclo. Enjoy!

The post Hybrid Highbrow podcast #3: Classical tango! appeared first on Radio Survivor.

“Radio Silence” is a ten-part radio event from Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz that will launch on July 29 with a live performance on Independence Mall in Philadelphia. The series returns famed Iraqi broadcast journalist Bahjat Adulawahed to the airwaves, along with the talents of Iraqi refugees, Iraq War veterans, musicians and performers, to frame the experiences of the participants and reconstruct an Iraq “dematerialized by literal destruction and diasporadic separation.”

According to Mural Arts,

Material is drawn from their own experiences in Iraq, America, and in between–from the progressive Iraq of the 1960s, to the decimation of physical and emotional landscapes during and after the 2003 American invasion and subsequent war in Iraq, to the realities of life in the United States, post-immigration and/or post-war. The program animates Iraq through scattered protagonists, conflating geography, time, and experience, as the audio (ranging from field recording and first-person narrative to music and poetry), layers like fragments of excavated artifacts.

The Prometheus Radio Project is a presenting partner along with Mural Arts Philadelphia, Warrior Writers and Philadelphia public access and LPFM station PhillyCAM. The entire series will be available free to air for non-commercial stations, as well as available streaming online and as a podcast for listeners. The project partners hope to bring together a global network of stations to air this unique radio performance project.

The July 29 kick-off performance will be broadcast live on PhillyCAM, and available as a live stream. Learn more at the Mural Arts website.

Here’s a trailer for “Radio Silence”:

The post ‘Radio Silence’ – 10-Part Series Explores Iraq & Its Displacements appeared first on Radio Survivor.

For 40 years Mark Talbot hosted his UK-based radio show “Second Side Up.” On cassette. Only on cassette.

At its peak the show had 40 listeners, but duplicating that many tapes became too big of a financial drain on the DJ, so he scaled back.

I learned about “Second Side Up” from the Australian podcast “This Is About,” presented by producer David Waters, who discovered the show when Talbot listed the tapes for sale online. He contacted the cassette DJ to learn this utterly captivating, and very human, story. Waters also produced a slightly longer audio documentary for BBC Radio 3.

Anyone who grew up with a cassette recorder can probably relate to playing DJ alone or with friends. I actually would share tapes with my best friend in grade school, who seemed to enjoy my goofy attempts at sixth-grade humor, intermixed with songs or bits from comedy records. But a listener of one was about as far as it got.

Tapes have also been used as audio letters over the years, with the sound of one’s voice lending a type of intimacy absent from the written page. I’m sure songs and other audio bits have been included, too. However, as form of correspondence, I doubt many audio letters had more than a couple of listeners, either.

“Second Side Up” isn’t too far away from these. Talbot’s longest-standing listener was his mom, to whom he would dedicate songs or fill in details on his life.

In 2017 “Second Side Up” sounds a lot like a podcast or hobby internet radio show. Only it started in 1974, 30 years before podcasting, 19 years before internet radio, and even a good 8 years before Howard Stern took his uniquely confessional and self-conscious style of DJing to the New York airwaves on WNBC-AM.

“Second Side Up” is certainly unique in the length of its run as an ultra-DIY cassette-distributed radio show. Yet, the idea of a distributing radio shows on cassette isn’t that unusual, even if the form faded in the internet era.

Slack in your Tape and on the Air

“The Hour of Slack” is the show that comes most readily to mind. Produced by the Church of the Subgenius, this long-running program of audio collage and dadaist sermon-like rants was distributed on cassette to college and community stations beginning back in 1985. Stations paid a small fee to have the show mailed each week, and any listener or fan was free to order their own copy of any episode.

In fact, although the show is available as a podcast now, Subgeniuses can still get a mail subscription to “The Hour of Slack” on CD. While it is actually broadcast terrestrially, one can make a strong argument that cassette (and now CD) was a significant distribution channel.

Working in community radio in the 1990s I recall many other syndicated programs arriving in the mail via cassette, like “Radio Nation” (from The Nation magazine), FAIR’s “Counterspin,” and “Making Contact.” Occasionally sorting the mail I also spotted unsolicited tapes, usually from evangelical Christian producers or the military, which often ended up in the hands of late-night freeform collagists.

Christian programs were widely distributed on cassette, whether they were intended for broadcast or just home listening. Focus on the Family’s radio drama “Adventures in Odyssey,” is one well-known example.

Cassette Magazines

More akin to “Second Side Up” is audio mail art, in which artists mailed tapes to other artists or listeners. Often simply referred to under the umbrella term “cassette culture,” these tapes might have been distributed singly, or in greater numbers. The content could vary wildly, from straightforward home-recorded songs and musique concrète to spoken word and programs that resemble more traditional radio shows in format.

Beginning in 1973, “Audio Arts” was a British contemporary art “sound magazine” that lasted nearly as long as “Second Side Up,” wrapping up in 2006, after 33 years in production. Early editions featured contributions from Noam Chomsky, Margaret Henry and W.B. Yeats, while latter releases included artists like Chuck Close, Dorothy Cross, Wim Wenders and Vanessa Beecroft. All 24 volumes are digitized and archived online by the Tate museum.

The New York City based “Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine” exposed listeners to avant garde music, sound art and spoken word. It ran from 1983–1993, and the archives are available at Ubuweb.

The Ferric Form(alism) of Radio

Though both self-consciously adopted the moniker “magazine,” neither “Audio Arts” nor “Tellus” embraced the formalisms of radio, like back announcing, or really announcing anything at all. Probably with a degree confidence, the producers apparently assumed the curious listener could just read the insert, since there was no assumption that the programs would actually be broadcast. However, things might be less certain for the listener who acquired a dub unaccompanied by a copy of the insert.

It’s that very formalism of radio announcing that makes the “Second Side Up” story so singular and compelling. As the first practical and widely-available home sound recording medium, in hindsight it’s inevitable that the cassette would be used to distribute editorially curated sound collections, from the mix tape to these more original works. So it’s even a little surprising that there aren’t more strict radio shows distributed on tape—at least ones that are well-known or easily discovered.

Finishing out this survey, I have to point out the deep irony contained in the so-called “podcast patent,” which was used to extort royalty payments from prominent podcasters just a few years ago. That patent, filed in 1996 before the advent of the mp3 file, was actually for a cassette-based audio magazine program that would be distributed by mail as a serial subscription. That’s right: one patent troll claimed that podcasting started out back in the mid–90s, on cassette.

Even in this broader context, Mark Talbot’s 40-year run as a super-niche cassette DJ is both fascinating and admirable. Such dedication to narrow-casting puts all but the most tenacious underground tape labels to shame.

At the end of the “This Is About” episode, presenter Jordan Raskopoulos suggests that maybe someone should “digitize and podcast all that stuff.” Yes, please.

The post Radio on Tape: from ‘Second Side Up’ to ‘The Hour of Slack’ appeared first on Radio Survivor.

I woke up Saturday morning to bits of news about the devastating fire at the Ghost Ship warehouse in Oakland late Friday night. Friends posted messages on social media, expressing concern for loved ones who were at the music event and who hadn’t been heard from. I clicked on the party invitation for the show that had taken place there and noticed that a friend of mine had marked “interested” on the invitation and suddenly I was worried for him too. I couldn’t tear myself away from local news coverage of the fire and got sadder and sadder as I learned more about the lost and the dead (36 people died, making it the deadliest fire in the U.S. in 13 years). As days went by and names were announced, I found out that those who had perished were friends of friends. It was an underground music event that drew independently-minded artists to the space in Oakland. It could have easily been me or my friends.

Many people have been expressing that sentiment and those of us who are involved with college radio are very likely to have been to music shows in similarly funky venues. When I first saw photos of the Ghost Ship, it had the familiar look of offbeat places that I’ve been to. On that initial glance at mood-lit pictures of the instrument and antique-filled space, I was intrigued. Having grown up going to thrift stores and antique shows with my family, I’m drawn to out-of-the-ordinary decor; which is probably why I enjoy artist spaces and college radio stations that are full of personality.

I realize also that many of us have admittedly taken risks by going to see music in dangerous settings, whether in a jam-packed club, in someone’s dark basement or in a warehouse. A friend of mine told me that she’s been thinking about all of the clubs and venues where she’s seen bands play, many of which have limited exits. Even though she knows she’s taken risks, she said she’d do it again. We take our chances and set aside fears to do what we love.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m angry that the Ghost Ship was particularly unsafe. After seeing the less glamorous images of wonky plumbing, makeshift heating and piles of trash, I have big concerns. For the moment, though, I’m not going to rant or place blame; I just want to mourn for the creative individuals who have sadly passed on.

As the names of those lost in the fire have been confirmed, I’m saddened to hear about all of these amazing lives cut short, including students, visual artists, musicians, filmmakers, sound artists, singers, writers, ‘zine enthusiasts and college radio DJs. Unsurprisingly, there are many people with radio connections. University of California, Berkeley’s college radio station KALX wrote that four of its volunteers died in the fire: Chelsea Faith Dolan (DJ Cherushii), Griffin Madden (DJ Laura), Vanessa Plotkin and Jennifer Morris.

Additional victims include photographer Amanda Allen Kershaw, who had a college radio past when she was a student at Bridgewater State University. According to the Boston Globe, she hosted an ’80s music show. Another former radio DJ, Ben Runnels (aka Charlie Prowler of the band Introflirt), died in the fire. He’d been on the air in Massachusetts at WQRC, at WBTN (as Program Manager and Station Engineer) and at alternative station WEQX, also in Vermont. Most recently he was doing the show The Croon Wave for Bombshells Radio. Strawberry Tongue’s Dawn Marie writes, “Ben’s show, The Croon Wave, debuted on Bombshells Radio on March 3, 2016. His style was pure perfection and class. He made my somewhat kitschy station remarkably sexy and professional. Again, I was blown away, not only by his passion for music, his recording production, his detail for perfection, but, also by his genuineness. He inspired me to work even harder, and to strive for more.”

The San Francisco Chronicle writes about musician Feral Pines’ high school radio past at WWPT in Westport, Connecticut, saying, “at Staples High School, she hosted a radio show on the campus station, introducing Ska to student listeners.”

Many of the folks lost in the fire had intersected with San Francisco Bay Area college radio, even if they weren’t radio hosts themselves. Sound engineer and musician Barrett Clark (Katabatik and the Press Democrat have nice tributes) was friends with many KFJC volunteers and had also performed live on KFJC DJ Belladonna’s radio show. As was the case with many of the other underground musicians who perished or are missing following the fire (including Cash Askew of the band Them are Us Too, Johnny Igaz of Nackt, Chelsea Faith Dolan of Cherushii, Ben Runnels and Denalda Nicole Renae of Introflirt, Travis Hough of Ghost of Lightning, Joseph Matlock who performed as Obsidian Blade and Joey Casio, and Jason McCarty of Dilatedears, Alienslang, Sabreteeth, Nerfbau and many other projects), Clark’s music, under various monikers, including POLAR and R.M.S., could be heard on various college radio stations.

I’m imaging that in the weeks to come, we’ll learn of more radio folks and I would love to hear their stories. My heart aches for the friends and families of everyone lost in the fire. If you’d like to lend support to those affected by the fire, some options are listed here. Numerous vigils and benefits have been taking place since the fire, including some upcoming events in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Update: I  just learned that musician and visual artist Jason McCarty (also known as Jsun McCarty) worked on an interesting radio project while a student in the new genres class “Hidden Noise: Record Label Project” at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) with instructor Julio Cesar Morales (who also started a pirate radio station at SFAI!). According to the Southern Exposure website, his work was part of the Neighborhood Radio Project that included, “DeyCast, an experimental radio program. Sound installations by Mike Daddona and Jsun McCarty.”

The post Mourning those Lost in Oakland, including College Radio Participants from KALX appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Jennifer Waits brings us the voices of three programmers at a mysterious and chaotic community station with deep connections to the Los Angeles art scene. KCHUNG is an unlicensed part 15 AM radio station with about 40 station managers and extremely eclectic programming.

Paul Riismandel wrote a series of articles, offering strongly worded advice for struggling community radio stations. He lays out his arguments in detail on the podcast and discusses the ideas and issues with his co-hosts. Read what all the fuss is about in the show notes links below.

Contributions from listeners and readers like you allow us not to rely on click-bait ads. We greatly appreciate the 36 people who support Radio Survivor with a monthly contribution to our Patreon campaign, but more contributions are needed to keep this project sustainable and grow what we do. Even a monthly pledge of $1 makes a big difference. Please contribute at http://patreon.com/radio-survivor

Show Notes

• KCHUNG
• LA’s KCHUNG Radio Demonstrates the Power of Part 15 Broadcasting from 2014
• “Riffin” a KCHUNG talk show hosted by Max Maslansky
• Trapped in the Grid: Why Community Radio Risks Irrelevance
• Public Access vs. Public Service – Addressing the Biggest Hidden Tension in Community Radio

Editor’s note: This episode was originally titled “Radio Anarchy vs Order” but then we decided that it was a bit misleading. Learn why on episode #75.

The post Podcast #74 – Station or Static? KCHUNG Is L.A.’s Underground Radio appeared first on Radio Survivor.

I was very saddened to learn that the actor Bill Nunn has died. Spike Lee announced the news on his Instagram account:

“officialspikelee My Dear Friend, My Dear Morehouse Brother- Da Great Actor Bill Nunn As Most Of You Know Him As Radio Raheem Passed Away This Morning In His Hometown Of Pittsburgh. Long Live Bill NUNN. RADIO RAHEEM Is Now RESTING IN POWER. RADIO RAHEEM WILL ALWAYS BE FIGHTING DA POWERS DAT BE. MAY GOD WATCH OVER BILL NUNN.”

Radio Raheem, played by Bill Nunn, greeting Spike Lee in “Do the Right Thing” (1989).

Nunn is best known and remembered for his powerful role as Radio Raheem in Lee’s great movie “Do the Right Thing” (1989). The film focuses on racial tensions and gentrification in a Brooklyn neighborhood. Raheem functions as a king of itinerant boombox carrier, a Buddha figure wandering about town with his music, exchanging greetings with locals, and ultimately perishing at the hands of police during a riot outside a pizza parlor.

I regard “Do the Right Thing” as easily one of the best radio themed movies ever made. Two decades after the release of the film, Nunn’s personification of Raheem remained so iconic that Lee revised it for a video protesting the police murder of Eric Garner, a Staten Island man who died in a police choke hold in 2014.

According to The New York Times, Nunn died of cancer. He was 63. YouTube has many fond remembrances of him. Here is just one:

The post Farewell Bill Nunn, aka Radio Raheem appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Happy World Listening Day! It’s a day set aside to do some deep listening wherever you are. Pull out your earbuds, stash your phone away, and take a walk through your neighborhood and listen to the world around you.

I remember walking my daughter to school one day when she was a preschooler and she looked up to the trees, saying, “listen to that beautiful music.” She was talking about the birds singing overhead and I was struck by the fact that as an adult, I had ceased to think about bird noises in the same way that a child does. And she was right. It was beautiful music.

A few years later when we were walking to her elementary school, we crossed a street when road work was taking place. My daughter turned to me and relayed that the jackhammer sounded like something that would be played on KFJC, the college radio station where I DJ. That time I was impressed, as it made me realize that she also recognized that noise could be music.

As I make my way through the city, it saddens me to see so many people glued to devices; muting out the world around them. We all learn so much when we observe and listen to the world around us; which is part of the reason why I think World Listening Day is such a wonderful project.

Additionally, this year’s theme, “Sounds Lost and Found” is in keeping with my own passion for history and archives. According to organizer World Listening Project:

World Listening Day 2016’s theme, ‘Sounds Lost and Found,’ calls on reminiscing, listening and observing what changes in our soundscapes have occurred in recent decades—be it language, nature, technology, music or even silence itself. For ‘Sounds Lost and Found,’ we invite you to dig into crates of vinyl and cassettes, dive into digital archives, and engage deeply with memories and unheard languages to rediscover or identify these ‘lost sounds.’ In doing so, ‘Sounds Lost and Found’ hopes to spotlight the need for effective and accessible conservatory efforts to be implemented to preserve some of these sounds—whether those efforts include archival projects, changing our daily practices or supporting the preservation of indigenous languages and engaging with the keepers of and archiving fading oral traditions where that seems impossible. We can protect and celebrate sounds whose vitality can be vulnerable and fragile.”

Whether you opt to listen to vintage radio, a cylinder recording, the sounds in a National Park, the rumble of nearby trains, or live music; enjoy the act of listening. I know I will.

The post World Listening Day Asks Us to Tune in to Our Environment appeared first on Radio Survivor.

As I mentioned in a piece earlier this week, a highlight of last weekend’s UCRN (University of California Radio Network) conference for me was a pair of presentations by sound artist Anna Friz. Also a former college radio DJ and program director, Friz is now Assistant Professor, Film & Digital Media at University of California, Santa Cruz. Read on for my report on her sessions. Also, be sure to listen to this week’s Radio Survivor Podcast. I talk about WTBU’s horrible fire, provide details about speaking opportunities at the fall CBI conference in Philadelphia, and chat about the benefits of college radio getting played on campus.

A Brief History of Radio and Transmission Art

Anna Friz outlined the history of radio and transmission art during a morning talk at UCRN. A radio optimist, Friz proclaimed, “radio will survive the apocalypse.” She’s not only a sound artist, but also has a college radio past, having served as a Program Director at University of British Columbia’s campus-community station CITR in Vancouver, Canada. She explained that radio art stemmed from the question, “What else could we do with the radio?” and pointed out that it is “not always easy listening.” She embraces the DIY opportunities inherent in radio and shared photos of radios crafted out of oat boxes and first aid kit tins, arguing that, “radio is robust stuff and you can build it at home.”

Looking at radio art from a global perspective, Friz said that it’s important to examine how radio began in different countries. She pointed out that in North America, amateurs were the first people making and doing radio, whereas in Europe, state monopolies were first. Coinciding with this, she explained that the avant garde art movement started in Europe at around the same time that radio was in its infancy (1912-1920).  Simultaneously, there was an interest in industrial sounds, such as the sounds of cars. That legacy of sound art continued with artists like Antonin Artaud, who was commissioned to do a piece by French national radio in 1947. The ensuing piece, Judgment of God, “horrified” the producers with its “visceral” ranting full of screaming and hissing. While Friz calls it “great stuff,” the powers that be in the 1940s decided to suppress it until 1964. When Judgment of God was eventually played it still caused an “uproar” and was “shocking to a lot of people,” according to Friz.

In addition to the sort of radio art crafted by Artaud, another piece of sound history relates to radio studios, where tools like reel-to-reel tape allowed for the use of the “studio as an instrument.” Sound art pioneer Daphne Oram was the co-founder of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and developed oramics, a process in which visual scores were turned into audible sounds. Others, like Gregory Whitehead, created experimental sounds for radio. Whitehead did “scream studies,” asking people to leaving screaming messages onto an answering machine. He then crafted radio shows made up of these screams.

A moment from the history of radio art. Anna Friz discussing Daphne Oram. Photo: J. Waits.

“Radio can also be an instrument,” according to Friz. She pointed out that instruments like the theremin (which she describes as the first electronic instrument) and the ondes Martenot, which were both invented by radio operators and both utilize radio technology. Other artists have used radio transmitters in their work. In the 1980s Tetsuo Kogawa built tiny 1 or 2 watt transmitters that he would perform with, using them to create radio silence and interference. Today, sound artists like Friz are doing a wide variety of projects that utilize collections of physical radios, pirate radio transmissions, unusual antennas, and pieces that work to pick up natural radio frequencies.

College Radio Graveyards as Fertile Place for Experimentation

While at campus-community radio station CITR in the late 1990s, Friz was involved with starting up an on-air tradition in which the station plays 24 hours of radio art. She described it as a “technical shake-up” in which DJs were asked to make all the sounds for their shows. She said that it was “a really great thing to do for the station,” and encouraged the UCRN attendees to consider doing similar projects at their college radio stations.

Friz argued that, “you have this incredible resource” and specifically mentioned “overnight” or the graveyard shift as perfect for experimentation. “The night is the most special, interesting time,” she added, calling it a “fertile place” and an “opportunity” for DJ freedom. Having designed overnight radio programs, she gave a lot of credit to listeners, saying, “your listeners are more experimental than you think.” In her afternoon session (which focused more on Friz’s current radio projects), she elaborated, saying that the listening “audience is the most open” late at night. She described a 4am tape loop show in Vancouver that was well-loved by local garbage collectors, who would often call in. Reflecting on the experimental sounds and sleepy haze during late night, she opined, “that kind of altered state…is so special.”

The benefits to station members are huge too. Friz explained that radio art projects often get “volunteers more involved with sound production,” making for a more engaged and more creative group of DJs.

I couldn’t agree more.

I’d love to hear if your station is doing experimental projects or it is has shows devoted to radio art. What do your DJs and listeners enjoy about these programs?

Anna Friz discussing radio art at UCRN college radio conference at KZSC. Photo: J. Waits

College Radio Day Vinylthon Tomorrow

Coinciding with Record Store Day, more than 40 college radio stations will be playing vinyl records on Saturday, April 16th. College Radio Day came up with the idea for the Vinylthon and is encouraging stations to play at least one hour of all-vinyl programming. For some stations this is a novelty, whereas for others it will be a typical day of programming.

A Look at Boston University’s College Radio Station WTBU

Especially in light of the recent fire, it’s a treat to look at this student-crafted short film of the Boston University college radio station.

More U.S. College Radio News

KSSU Celebrates 25 Years as Sac State’s Scrappy Student-Run Radio Station (Sacramento News & Review)

Making the Case for More Student Media Funding (Grand Valley Lanthorn)

Verge Campus Playlists from the Lion (Verge Campus)

Tennessee AP Announces 2016 College Journalism Winners (Chattanooga Times Free Press)

Radiothon Supports College Radio Station WHFR (Dearborn Press & Guide)

DePauw Student Media Hosts Live Town Hall with President-Elect (DePauw University)

Campus Radio Station and a College Prank at Presbyterian Junior College Radio Station (Fay Observer)

Lincoln College Station WLNX Wins IBS Award (Lincoln Courier)

International College Radio News in Canada, UK, and India

CITR and CJSF to Broadcast Live from Vancouver Record Stores on Record Store Day (CITR)

Radio 1 to Air Student Radio Curated Show (Complete Music Update)

How You Could Get a Student Radio Playlist Show on BBC1 Radio (audioBoom)

Memories of a Student Station – DCUfm (Radio Today)

Core Radio Cambridge Will Be Added to Local DAB Multiplex (Radio Magazine)

Community Radio Experience Empowers Girl Students in India (The Statesman)

The post College Radio Watch: Celebrating the Power of Radio Art appeared first on Radio Survivor.

We’re happy to return to the second part of our interview with radio scholar and radio artist Magz Hall. In the first part of the interview, Hall detailed the many ways in which we can understand radio, in both a contemporary and historical context, through the lens of radio art. She introduced us to a number of fascinating projects that she has been involved with and discussed the connection between her practice and community radio broadcasting.

In this second half, Hall picks up on these themes and takes us into the future by explaining how she imagines alternative trajectories for FM broadcasting. She ends our interview by pointing to some of the projects she is currently working on, including one which calls attention to the important environmental aspect of radio.

Radio Survivor: How is your work on radio art and new media technology influenced by media history?

Magz Hall: All my radio art work draws on media history, mainly radio histories. I have been drawn to researching the overlooked parts of that history and wanted to represent them in installation form. The history of radio arts is very fragmented and buried, so I had to dig deep and that’s how I found gems like du Vernet and many others discussed in my thesis.

Radio Survivor: Many of your radio installations are connected by a theme of imagining alternative futures for FM broadcasting. Would you care to expand on your vision for what some of these alternative futures might be? I’d be particularly curious to know if and how the regulation of FM broadcasting factors into any of your installations or projects.

Magz Hall: Numbers presents a scenario in which the numbers stations have moved to FM as a simultaneously conspicuous and covert communication tool of outlawed gangs, groups, agents, and political movements. As the internet becomes ever more heavily policed, Numbers considers how activists may re-appropriate communication technologies considered obsolete, challenging the boundaries of public and private space, the subject and the collective, as well as the boundaries between political and aesthetic practice.

A series of micro FM transmitters broadcasts through twelve radios encrypted messages taken from the tweets originating within the Occupy movement. Visitors to the gallery space were also invited to write encrypted messages for future broadcast using the code provided.

Numbers installation. Photo: Magz Hall

Part of a running theme throughout the Switch Off project will be to discuss the future of FM via its documented past, and Numbers connects with the long history of political activists embracing and experimenting with radio since its inception; from the Futurists’ La Radia (1933) to Free Radio stations across Europe such as the Italian Radio Alice (1970s), London’s Interference FM (1999), to Occupy’s Mayday Radio (2012) in New York.

The Occupy movement tweets struck me as highly radiophonic material for this work and wholly fitting for artistic dissemination as the movement reflected the subjective shifts engendered by new media in that: “[t]he assemblies have a power that is dispersed and decentralized, with proclamations of uncertain, ambiguous authorship.”

Numbers considers that, as the internet becomes ever more subject to surveillance and pre-emptive policing, activists may be forced to consider radical offline communications tactics, in this case the re-appropriation of terrestrial radio, making communication at once covert and highly visible: hidden in plain sight.

Regulation is complicit in all the works in terms of theme, content, and broadcast method as these were set up as imagined unsanctioned broadcasts on the FM spectrum. The actual installation works were broadcast and heard on conventional FM, DAB, and Internet radio. One action, Sound Train was illegally broadcast from a train. This action imagined how, in the future, we might all broadcast on the FM band from anywhere, for any distance, just as we do now with internet streaming.

The idea behind Babble Station continues with the theme of the possible futures of FM radio. In this case, the spectrum would be used for baby monitors. Radio promotes the semiotic aspects of the voice via the musicality of speech, a point of view drawn from the work of Rudolf Arnheim, who, in 1936, described radio as “developing to a further degree our feelings for the musical elements of speech and all sounds.” There is an innate communicative musicality to infants’ pre-speech utterances that I wanted to explore.

Infants’ sounds, like dead air, are not often broadcast, so a station that took this to an extreme, and was a hypothetical future of the medium, appealed to me as a playful way of examining these relationships. “Babbling” is universally defined by Mladen Dolar as the pre-symbolic use of the voice. As Dolar points out, “In fans” (as in infants) literally means “the one who cannot speak.” I liked the idea that this was a non-verbal broadcast, yet full of meaning.

Babble Station exhibit. Photo: Magz Hall

Radio Survivor: Finally, what else are you working on these days?

Magz Hall: I just finished a research residency at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) where I have produced a new sound installation, which is on exhibition there for the next year.

Tree Radio has transformed an oak tree at the Sculpture Park into a micro radio station. A transmitter embedded into the tree relays a fluctuating sound as the trees react to light, via sensors on the tree and probes in the tree (which also relay its water levels as electronic tones). Visitors at YSP can pick up the tree’s transmissions on their personal FM devices (such as phones with FM) if they are standing next to or near the tree.

This work addresses issues surrounding the rate that new digital technology often becomes out-of-date, as it uses 100-year-old tried and tested wireless technology. I have been working at the intersection between art and technology and this project takes forward my current interests.

Tree Radio. Photo: Magz Hall

I wanted to make people think about trees and the root of all wireless technology: radio, and how simple and green it can be to use: Wireless, free, and solar powered. The tree transmitter reveals the hidden facets of organic tree life using simple FM wireless technology.

General George Owen Squire, the U.S. Army’s Chief Signal Officer and incidentally the inventor of Muzak, back in 1919, described how “[all] trees, of all kinds and all heights, growing anywhere—are nature’s own wireless towers and antenna combined.” He called this “talking through the trees.” He used trees as an antenna to pick up radio signals for the Army. I wanted to do the reverse and use trees to send out a signal as radio. I loved the idea of actually hearing the trees talk. This project allows one to hear the tree responding to light and water as sound.

New digital wireless communication today is often disguised as trees and this is a playful way of getting people to think about trees as transmitters and radio’s early military history. The other aim of the project was to connect people with radio technology and simple electronics. The project was kick-started by an Art for the Environment residency awarded by UAL, where I completed my PhD on radio art. For me, this is just phase one of this research project which I plan to develop further.

Tree Radio is currently exhibited at YSP until next year.

The post Radio Art and New Media in Radio Studies: An Interview with Magz Hall – Pt. 2 appeared first on Radio Survivor.

When Don Joyce of the band Negativland passed away in July we learned that the group is in the process of archiving the 34-year catalog of its Over The Edge radio show, anchored by Joyce since the very beginning. Now the first stage of the project is public, with 941 episodes of the program available at the Internet Archive.

A live freeform collage show that’s been on KPFA in Berkeley, CA since 1981, Over The Edge is hard to describe to anyone who hasn’t heard it. It’s best to quote a description penned by Joyce himself:

“OTE’s weekly themed mixes are made live and spontaneously on the air from a variety of formats and equipment used to do live sound cut ups and collage while mixing, including the frequent use of the now long dead analog technology of radio broadcast cart machines. On each themed episode of OTE there is a plan and there is no plan. Existing within the parallel universe of the Universal Media Netweb, the OTE mix consists of found sounds of many kinds from many sources put together on the run as the continuous audio collage progresses, along with live electronics (often from our Boopers), live sound processing, and all sorts of recurring themes and characters.”

A Negativland fan since college in the early 90s, I had heard of Over The Edge and for years pined away to actually hear the show. A few years after graduation I borrowed from a fellow community radio DJ a few air check cassettes of the show that the band sold by mail-order and learned the wait was worth it. I was also jealous of Bay Area radio listeners who could just tune in their radios every Thursday at midnight to experience and partake in (they take live callers, with the instruction “don’t say ‘hello’” because when your phone stops ringing you’re on the air) the sonic chaos.

When KPFA started its first live stream in the mid–90s I tied up my phone line on the occasional early Friday morning at 2 AM (I lived in Central Time) to tap into the barely AM-quality stream that I could siphon through my dial-up connection. I’m sure I sometimes fell asleep before my ISP would dump my multi-hour connection.

Negativland then started releasing edited Over The Edge CD compilations that let me get my dose with comparative ease. One of my absolute favorites remains Dick Vaughn’s Moribund Music of the 70s, an all-too-skewed-but-accurate send-up of classic top 40 radio culled from shows in which they also staged a put-on for unsuspecting listeners by playing soft rock moldy oldies like “Bill, Don’t Be a Hero.” That disc only gets better every time I listen to it.

The very medium of radio is frequent fodder for Negativland, as easily heard in the archive. My podcast co-host Eric Klein has heartily recommended shows in the occasional series “How Radio Was Done” (there are 106!). There is also the mirror series, “How Radio Isn’t Done” (only 22 episodes). Starting with the first episodes in these series are probably as good a place as any for the uninitiated to get their start with Over The Edge.

Frankly, it’s nearly impossible to overstate the influence of Negativland and this show on our post-modern media environment. Over The Edge was really the site of some of the first mash-ups and mass broadcast of remix culture. Millions of YouTubers and DJs owe a debt of gratitude, whether they know it or not.

My enormous gratitude goes to the members of Negativland for taking on the herculean task of sourcing, digitizing, cataloging and uploading these 941 shows. As I continue to slog through my own comparatively minuscule archive my respect for their accomplishment only grows. Big thanks also go to the Internet Archive for hosting the Over The Edge archive, along with millions-upon-millions of other audio programs, videos, documents and other content that otherwise might be forever lost, but is now accessible to anyone with an internet connection.

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The winners from 2013/14 hailed from Zimbabwe, Australia, and Mexico. The winners from 2012 were from Uganda and Jamaica. In fact, back then I wrote a piece about those plays. Kingston resident Janet Morrison’s piece focused on an elderly couple in a fishing village who have to bring up their teenage grand kids. Kampala based writer Angella Emwuron’s play narrated the adventures of an errant child who takes an ill advised trip to that city and makes friends with a street urchin.

The competition is open from October 1 through January 31, 2016. All the rules are here, but a few stand out. You’ve got to send in a script for a 53 minute radio play that includes a maximum of six central characters, plus a synopsis of no longer than 400 words. Your script will compete for one of three prizes: the English as a first language prize, the English as a second language prize, and the Georgi Markov prize for scripts that show “outstanding potential.”

The post BBC World Service launches radio play competition number 25 appeared first on Radio Survivor.

Ever since I first tuned in a staticky sequence of numbers in Spanish on the shortwave radio I got for Christmas as a kid, I’ve been fascinated by numbers stations which are thought to broadcast coded messages to spies and other clandestine agents. An upcoming art exhibition uses the structure of numbers stations to interrogate how numbers and statistics are employed in aggressive policing tactics.

Artists Mendi + Keith Obadike are creating a new performance and installation of sound and objects called Numbers Stations [Furtive Movements] at the Ryan Lee Gallery in New York City. The work “employs the radical misuse of the data that reduces Black bodies to numbers.”

According to a press release,

The exhibition is preceded by a 30-minute performance conducted at the gallery on the eve of the opening. Using a radio transmitter and tone generators, the artists will read a series of numbers culled from the self-reported Stop-and-Frisk data of 123 New York Police Department precincts. The numbers exist as the material, the subject, and the score of the work: the artists’ voices and fragmented music tones are processed, broadcast, and played back in real-time during the performance and later as a recording for the duration of the exhibition.

The performance happens September 9 at 5 PM, and the exhibition opening is September 10, 6 – 8 PM. The artists invite collaboration online using the hashtag #numbersstation.

The post Art Installation Uses Numbers Stations to Interrogate ‘Misuse of Data that Reduces Black Bodies to Numbers’ appeared first on Radio Survivor.