Originally a blog about running a Pirate Radio Station in Boulder Colorado, USA from early 2000 to early 2005 when the FCC finally shut Boulder Free Radio (KBFR) down. Will continue to post though on the developments of underground radio in all forms, analog and digital (from pirate radio to Podcasting).
Pop-Up Magazine’s next event is coming around the corner.
You mention in your write up (a tad dismissively) that you sound like an anthropologist, but I actually think that’s a very interesting and relevant fact, not necessarily something to downplay. You are treating a sonic space as some unknown, or indeterminate zone, much in the way an anthropologist approaches an unknown culture. In our world with its primacy of sight, the sound world is a bit like a foreign setting, one with which we are both familiar, and unfamiliar, one that is charted instinctually; we unconsciously use sound to navigate space with out being aware of it analytically or knowingly, so this suggests that your project is an attempt to create a new mental map of “sound space,” even if it is in the guise of a game. In a similar manner, our relationships with other people have a distinct cultural and interpersonal aural dynamic, but in a way in which we are not necessarily consciously aware. We respond instinctually and emotionally to speech and movement made by others, but we do not think about these things explicitly. Like the aphasiacs that Oliver Sacks studied who don’t understand language but can hear in Ronald Regan’s voice that he is lying or speaking insincerely, we derive a whole world of meaning, a culture if you will, from hearing one another’s voices, even at a preverbal non-linguistic level. All of this is at play in your project…
— David Earle, in response to my final project proposal for the Radio Production class.
I’m like you in that, can’t stay away from it, but I never go in, no, I think the last time I went in was with you. [Pause.] Just be near it. [Pause.] Today it’s calm, but I often hear it above in the house and walking the roads and start talking, oh just loud enough to drown it, nobody notices. [Pause.] But I’d be talking now no matter where I was, I once went to Switzerland to get away from the cursed thing and never stopped all the time I was there. [Pause.] I usen’t to need anyone, just to myself, stories, there was a great one about an old fellow named Bolton, I never finished it, I never finished any of them, I never finished anything, everything always went on for ever.
— Excerpt from Embers: A Piece for Radio by Samuel Beckett.
DJ Soul - Live On The Frozen Files (February 1st 2012)
This mix is actually a radio show, and is an hour of ‘breaks’ - parts of original songs that were sampled for Hip-Hop records. While that in itself is nothing new, the whole performance used original records and was live. There isn’t a tracklist (there are about 70 tracks featured, too long to include them all) but the music should be recognizable.
Currently listening to Marc Chalosse’s remix of Antonin Artaud’s “Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu” (“To Have Done with the Judgement of God”).
My roommates are going to drop me off at an asylum any day now.
Gregory Gangemi: Can I just ask you to begin at the beginning, with your broad definition of radio art?
Gregory Whitehead: Well, for one thing, taking experimental audio and then passively broadcasting it does not qualify for me as radio art. Radio art has to be some kind of event or performance or presentation --- a “play” in the broadest sense -- that deals with the fundamental materials of radio, and the material of radio is not just amorphous sound. Radio is mostly a set of relationships, an intricate triangulation of listener, “player” and system. It’s also a huge corporate beast, and the awareness that you’re working within a highly capitalized network. Finally, there is the way in which radio is listened to, frequently in an extremely low-fi environment, with people listening on a car radio, or they’re in the kitchen and they’re cooking and they’re listening with only half an ear. To me, radio art comes to grips with all of that, it comes to grips with both the context of production is and the context of listening. That’s why when I write about radio art I try to stress the idea of relationships, not because I don’t love to play around with sound, but because cool sound is not enough.
I have to make an important phone call but your track list is so wonderful that I can’t bring myself to lower the volume.
Hopelessly devoted,
Jess
