Although in the past we have featured only online radio broadcasting, this time we look at a station still doing it on the airwaves in London. Resonance104.4fm makes public those artworks that have no place in traditional broadcasting. A radio station like no other, that is an archive of the new, the undiscovered, the forgotten, the impossible. It is an invisible gallery, a virtual arts centre whose location is at once local, global and timeless. And that is itself a work of art. Imagine a radio station that responds rapidly to new initiatives, has time to draw breath and reflect. A laboratory for experimentation, that by virtue of its uniqueness brings into being a new audience of listeners and creators. All this and more, Resonance104.4fm aims to make London’s airwaves available to the widest possible range of practitioners of contemporary art.
The service includes “radio artworks” made especially for and exploring the medium of radio. The music based output places an emphasis on alternative and experimental music with a bias towards the avant-garde (how many broadcasters are willing to devote programming to found sounds and field recordings?). The speech based output includes discussion, alternative news, documentary and literary spoken word. Subjects covered include anything from cultural theory to pensioners’ rights and mental health to visual arts. The station provides a service for practising artists and engaged consumers whose interests fall outside the mainstream media or for those whose access to media is restricted or limited due to cultural bias or lack of formal training. The multicultural service transcends age barriers, it’s youngest regular broadcasters are 16, it’s oldest 77, from communities as diverse as Brazilian, Serbian and Congolese who are encouraged to initiate and realise their own programming.
You can hear nonsense sound poetry recorded halfway up a mountain on the Isle of Jura, a preacher in Glasgow or a Babylonian Jewish Choir, a huge variety of unique spoken word radio basically. That’s not to mention great specific music shows such as Is Black Music, featuring maverick black musicians who are involed in non-commerial, alternative outside of the industry mainstream. The program broadcasts Black folk, country, avant-garde, classical and rock music. It encourages the promotion of unusual black music such as Urb Alt and Afro Punk, and is a good way to challenge industry, artist and consumer stereotypes.
Resonance104.4fm started broadcasting on May 1st 2002, established by London Musicians’ Collective. Its brief? To provide a radical alternative to the universal formulae of mainstream broadcasting. Resonance 104.4 fm features programmes made by musicians, artists and critics who represent the diversity of London’s arts scenes, with regular weekly contributions from nearly two hundred musicians, artists, thinkers, critics, activists and instigators. You can also listen online or download one of their various podcasts for maximum aural pleasure.
Jeff Mills is undoubtedly one of the founding fathers of techno music. In this transcript (Part 1 of 3) of a recent interview he has given to the Red Bull Music Academy Radio, you can read all about him starting out on Detroit radio in the mid-80′s, meeting Parliament bassist “Mad” Mike Banks, the evolution of techno, Underground Resistance, traveling for the first time to Europe, Axis, rescoring Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, The Rings of Saturn and treading that careful line between dance-music and high art. Click the record label art to get an idea of the tracks Mills is talking about with links to relevant Youtube videos. Listen to the radio show in full here or download it here. The accompanying tracklist is as follows:
Jeff Mills – Landscape (Utopian Dream) – Tresor
Jeff Mills – Blue Print – Tresor
Underground Resistance – Eye of the Storm – Underground Resistance
Underground Resistance – Predator – Underground Resistance
Underground Resistance – Base Camp Alpha 808 – UR
Underground Resistance – Final Frontier – Underground Resistance
X-101 – G-Force – Tresor
X-102 – Ground Zero (The Planet) – Tresor
X-102 – The Rings Of Saturn – Underground Resistance
Jeff Mills – Perfecture (Somewhere Around Now) – Tresor
Jeff Mills – The Bells – Axis
Jeff Mills – Transformation B (Rotwang’s Revenge) – Tresor
Jeff Mills – Robot Replica – Tresor
The Wizard
My name is Jeff Mills I originate from Detroit, I live in Chicago now, my main profession is to produce music and also to DJ. I try to explore as many different things as I can on behalf of electronic music. I was a street DJ doing residencies at many clubs and happened to be in one club during a live “simulcast” I think it was back in 1982 or ’83. It went so well that I was asked if I could come to the station to do an audition which I did and luckily everything went well so I was offered a job to do a radio show. I assumed the name The Wizard and curated a radio show for about 10 years. At that time the hip hop culture had really moved into the urban centres of the country in America. So much so that it was really dominating the clubs. The clubs that had the DJs that were remnants left over from the disco era and the funk era, these DJs were occupying all the dance clubs in Detroit but when hip hop came, young DJs like myself were somehow replacing those DJs that had been there for years.
Cooky batter
You had to be very fast, you had to be technically really advanced, you had to learn the tricks that were happening from DJs from other parts of the country like New York or LA. I was lucky enough to have the time to really master these things and when the radio came it just broadened the idea of being a DJ that was very quick and could transform and do all those kind of things, to manipulate the music to the point that you create another version. I was one of those kids that did that. We were just beginning to start to get the very early releases from Def Jam, Cooky Puss, early Schoolly D things. So I was mixing that with funk, with Chaka Khan, Billy Ocean, I remember having to mix with Millie Vanilli, mixing all these things together with rock and industrial with anything I could get my hands on that was really happening in the street.
I was a DJ for many years before I went to radio, I had done residencies every day of the week at three or four clubs. At the time I was so busy as what we used to call a ‘street DJ’. I really didn’t have an off day. I have always had this skill of programming of being able to cue records very quickly and smoothly, to manipulate three turntables and tape machines were things I learned very early. Now I still have the ability to do those things but just the style of music really dictates how I approach it. As music over the years has gotten more minimal and faster in tempo and almost to the point where you are dealing with individual tracks like you would in a recording studio, so has the technique that you apply in order to program it for people. Three and four turntables has become a way of dealing with that. Not so much reorganising compositions, but using frequencies so you hide sounds within the track by manipulating the EQ and layering, and things like that.
Now That's Funky
Someone from the radio station I worked at, she said she knew a young guy who was in the studio and wanted to make a hip hop record and if I could go by to the studio and help him. As a favour to her, I did. I went by the studio and it was Anthony Srock and he was a big fan of Run DMC and the Beastie Boys and he wanted to make something in that direction. I said, ok, and we started working together. I wasn’t in the group I was just helping them at the time but what happened was that I was doing so much production I should have some interest in what we are doing here. We became good friends as a result of working in the studio and then we eventually decided let’s just get together and make more music like this and so the band Final Cut was put together. We produced the album Deep In 2 The Cut and I didn’t have much pieces of equipment like keyboards and things like that. The only person I knew with a lot of keyboards was Mike Banks. He was in a band where two bands had merged together and had merged their equipment together as well. So they had lots and lots of keyboards and those type of things. So I used to call them up and ask them if I could borrow certain keyboards to produce certain things for this album that we were working on. So he would come over to my apartment and bring the keyboards, would listen to the music that we were producing and thought it was very interesting. The album came out and we went to Berlin for a performance, it was ok. But I realised this kind of music, this kind of sound is not something I could really grasp onto. I left the group Final Cut, Tony Srock had wanted to take it in a less danceable more gothic kind of way. I wanted to stick to dance music so I left the group.
Eye Of The Storm
Somewhere around that time Mike’s band had left to go to LA, they had disbanded as well. Mike and I had kept in contact so we began talking about the idea of getting together, merging our studios together. He had already thought of the name Underground Resistance but he didn’t do anything with it. He registered the name, asked me if I thought it was great, I said yeah let’s do it. And that’s how we started. I was in college – in school and he worked during the day so we could only record at night. So we would record literally from 8 o’clock at night until 7:30 in the morning. We had so much equipment that we could produce multiple tracks at the same time. We had so many tape machines and multitrack machines and so many keyboard setups. Our studio was in the basement of Mike’s mothers place so we had taken the entire basement and set up small work-stations. We would be working on Sonic EP in that corner, and here would be Yolanda, something here, something else here… That’s one of the ways we would produce so much music at the same time.
Yolanda - Your Time Is Up
I had lots of experience with editing in cutting tape. He had lots of experience in playing keyboards, MIDI and all those things. We just merged. I had brought some compositions from some of the things I had produced and he had brought some older works and we merged those two together, and from there comes the diversity of the tracks when we first started. There were things like Waveform EP which were very dark that comes probably from the Final Cut direction. And there were things like Yolanda that came from some of the things he was doing with his band before we got together. So we could produce lots of different types of things from very early on. We knew that we could produce in multiple directions. We just worked endlessly, once we had finished with something we would start on something immediately. We would never stop really.
More to come in Parts 2 and 3. From that Waveform EP…
Dublab is a non-profit internet radio station based in Los Angeles. As well as broadcasting music they have also been involved in art exhibitions, film projects, live events and record releases. The broadcast is eclectic ranging from electronic and noise to ambient, post-rock and folk. An example of their film work is Secondhand Sureshots where they gave producers five dollars to buy albums from second hand shops and sample the music to create new tracks. Their soundsystem an DJ collective has been featured at diverse venues such as The Getty Centre and Hollywood Bowl. Notable guests include Flying Lotus, Four Tet and Animal Collective.
Below is one of their more avant-garde film / art projects – mi casa es su casa, “an international home field-recording quilt.” It is a collage of sounds from personal spaces around the world. People have sent 30 second recordings of the most interesting sounds in their homes which were then stitched together to offer an audio insight into their intimate environments.
The finished piece was presented at the Sound in Space field recording festival in Los Angeles on Saturday, February 14th 2009 and is also available on dublab.com as a free audio download.
A personal favourite of our antipodean cousins, Soma FM is one of the larger internet-only broadcasters boasting 5.8 million “listening hours” per month. However, they haven’t amassed this figure by playing mainstream music. They’ve got 18 unique unique channels with Groove Salad and Drone Zone being the first two we would recommend. Being listener supported and commercial free means no advertising or annoying interruptions. They describe their mission as searching out and exposing new music to people who may otherwise never encounter it. Since they work on a small listener supported budget they have to move slowly towards their goal of making Soma FM available in as many ways possible – but because they don’t have to answer to investors of venture capitalists, they can broadcast exactly what they want to.
Where does the name Soma come from? It’s a play on words. Soma is the name of many things, but in our case is based on the future’s perfect pleasure drug and the fact that we started broadcasting from San Francisco’s South of Market area, known also as SoMa.
The Dutch west coast and the city of the Hague in particular is a hotbed for the current techno revival. Intergalactic plays round the clock old, new and true school techno. The programming policy is brilliantly relentless. Intergalactic’s blog has a great feature called, “Portraits of the electro scene”, showing photographs of Dutch DJs and artists at home surrounded by keyboards and shelves of records.
The Guardian: Launch the Flash player and there are two other equally niche channels to chose from – Intergalactic Classix focuses on 80s-style synth dance and cheesy disco (every day at 11am there’s a slot I like called NRG Formaggio), while The Dream Machine is a kind of anything-goes ambient-space-jazz freak-out channel, and quite possibly the only place you’ll ever hear the instrumental saxophone-noodling soundtrack to an Italian movie called Porno Shop On 7th Street followed by an ancient clip of James T Kirk reading his captain’s log accompanied by some bongos.
Non of the hits, all of the time! WFMU is a really great radio station which has a well rounded music based blog and covers just about every genre of music out there, found sound, soundscapes, 60′s garage punk, turkish ragga etc… 100% funded by their listeners through an annual on-air fund-raising marathon as well as their annual record fair in Manhattan that occurs the first weekend of November, info for which can be found on the website here.
They are the longest running “Freeform” radio station in America. This is an approach to radio programming in which a station’s management gives the DJ complete control over program content. Freeform shows are as different as the personalities of DJ’s, but they share a feeling of spontaneity, a tendency to play music that is not usually heard. Their ideology tends to be liberal or radical, though their program content is not usually overtly political. WFMU has been the only one of the early freeform stations to survive into the present day (since 1968), with it’s philosophy and (lack of) format intact.
Rolling Stone Magazine, The Village Voice, CMJ and the New York Press have all at one time or another called WFMU “the best radio station in the country”. In recent years the station has gained a large international following due its online operations and counts Simpson’s creator Matt Groening, film director Jim Jarmusch and Velvet Underground founder Lou Reed, among others, as devoted fans of the station.
