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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
“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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
