Reader Mary Payne, webmaster of the Radio London website, took a moment to correct and expand upon my surface gloss of UK pirate radio history in my post about a documentary on 90s pirates told through cassette airchecks. In particular, Ms. Payne notes that the BBC didn’t ban rock music in the 60s. Rather, the […]
Last fall I wrote a post on unlicensed broadcasting on the AM band in the US. The impetus was reading an article on a rare FCC action against a station in Portland, Oregon, which caused me to track down the few other Commission actions against AM pirates in 2010. The so-called Part 15 rules that […]
While pirate radio has existed in the US since the very invention of the medium, it’s had a far more significant impact in the UK. The movie Pirate Radio dramatized how pirates forged cracks in the dam that the staid BBC built against R&B and rock n’ roll in the 60s. But British pirates retained […]
The long-surviving Seattle band Pearl Jam has just announced a new box set re-release of their second and third albums, Vs. and Vitalogy. In addition to five LPs and four CDs, the box set will include a cassette recording of a January 8th, 1995 broadcast from Pearl Jam’s Monkeywrench/Self-Pollution radio series. During the 1995 and […]
I’ve been sharing the progress of San Francisco’s newest community radio station, Radio Valencia, from inception to its launch in August; so was happy to see DJ Tony DuShane’s first-person account of what it was like for him to be at the station from the beginning. Currently an Internet-only station, there are rumors that Radio […]
Radio World recently posted a brief item about three notices of unlicensed operation to three different persons that the FCC issued in Portland, OR to what is apparently the same station operating on the AM dial. There are a good dozen notices issued every month, and not every one gets reported on by RW. Apparently […]
A mysterious pirate radio station cropped up today during the 2010 01SJ Biennial Build Your Own World conference in San Jose, California. According to the festival website, ZER01 and other artistic collaborators will convene in San Jose from September 16-19 to present various events and performances. The pirate radio arm of this event is airing […]
Jose Fritz of the great Arcane Radio Trivia has been traveling around and writing about what he hears on different regional radio dials. He just posted from the Seattle-Tacoma area and it’s interesting that he picks up a very diverse set of noncommercial stations featuring indie rock, NPR news, jazz and even dance music. He […]
Pirate radio has been a favorite topic of mine since I first built a little AM transmitter from a Radio Shack kit as a kid. In the mid-90s, just as the microradio movement started to take off with inspiration from Human Rights Radio’s Mbanna Kanatko and Free Radio Berkeley’s Stephen Dunifer, I started to follow […]
Lately there’s been a lot of buzz about the comings and goings of pirate radio stations, especially in the San Francisco Bay Area. New station Radio Valencia is about to begin broadcasting any day now in San Francisco and pirate radio stalwart Freak Radio Santa Cruz is continuing in its mission, while looking for a […]
