Missives from Deep Wireless

I wish I had the time and money to go to the Deep Wireless Festival of Radio Art and Radio Without Boundaries conference up in Toronto which wrapped up this past weekend. The Festival is “a month-long celebration of radio and transmission art including performances, installations, broadcasts, workshops, (and) a Youth Radio residency.” It’s interesting that with the meteoric decline of commercial radio there seem to be an increasing number of conferences, festivals and events celebrating forms of mostly non-commercial radio and radio art.

At least I can experience elements of Deep Wireless vicariously via blog posts from free103point9’s Tom Roe and Transom.org.
Unfortunately I missed most of free103point9’s live stream — I hope archives are posted soon.

Tom’s blog posts include (itemized because they’re otherwise not easily linked as a group):

• Andra McCartney on soundscapes
• Chris Brookes on the need (or not) for narration, “Oh, Shut Up! Who needs a narrator anyway?”
• Radio that reflects community, which Tom says “was preaching to the converted.”
• Soundscapes of the imagination: the grey area between fact and fiction

  Radio and transmission arts is something I’ve been interested in since I started in (legitimate) radio broadcasting back in 1989, and I’m really glad to see that the internet has only increased interest and helped unite and catalyze artists, rather than discouraging them. I’ve tried to cover the subject on the radioshow here and there, and hope to do more both on the show and on this here blog.

Tom Roe on free103point9’s New FM Station and Microradio Past

Tom Roe, program director for free103point9, was my guest for last week’s radioshow where we discussed that organization’s approach to transmission arts and how they were able to obtain a rare noncommercial full-power FM broadcast license. That show is now available for downloading or listening online.

In the second half of the live broadcast version of the show Tom and I talked a little about the fact that free103point9 actually started out as an unlicensed micropower station in 1997, before deciding to go online only. This makes free103point9 one of only two contemporary broadcast stations to have roots in unlicensed radio. The other one is shortwave station WBCQ whose operator, Allan Weiner, was the man behind the infamous Radio New York International, a station which in 1987 attempted to emulate European pirates by operating off-shore. Weiner wrote a memoir of his pirate radio days called Access to the Airwaves: My Fight for Free Radio. Unfortunately the publisher, Loompanics Press, went out of business in 2006, although it looks like new and used copies are still available online.

Fully indulging in the tangent, after the jump you can watch a compilation video of news coverage of Radio New York International from 1987.
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