Tape played during broadcast from De La Cruz Collection by DJ Tape Head and DJ Ciro Splicer. Photo: Nicolas Lobo
From parrot toting to Napster downloading, piracy—as meme or metaphor or actuality—is ever _en vogue_. There’s something damned romantic about organized rogues attempting redress of market inequalities by stealing or appropriating property, either material or intellectual; something seductive about the populace setting the price. Somalis snag a few American mariners and jack crates of Jordach. Anderson Cooper dons duckies and wades into Third World morass to proselytize on behalf of “Private Property.” The German education minister, Annette Schavan, bids adieu to her post as a back-dated charge of academic plagiarism nets 60 instances of un-sourced paraphrasing. Such a strange concept—to give credit to an idea, a dream remembered. To copyright the matter that zips across our consciousness. To control the airwaves—the imperceptible algorithms our very lungs and ears intake.
_"Every school I was ever in, they said goodbye to me because I caused too much activity that was not to do with school, that was more to do with having a good time. I was very much someone who believed in getting people to enjoy themselves, have some more fun." —Ronan O'Reilly, founder of 1960's offshore pirate radio outfit, Radio Caroline_
Wherefrom this idea of sound as something that can be owned? Surely Mom and Dad, 40,000 years old, heavy browed and hirstute. Imagine them bumbling through a cave. They can't see because it's dark. So, they grab some rocks and they thump the rocks against the cave wall—the sounds, the echoes, make some sense of things; a bend in the path sounds a little different than a ditch ahead. By sound, they're able to bumble on a little less bumbly. Some litho-what-haves later, cave people come a’torched and cast light upon the pretty wall markings thumped centuries prior. They declare their predecessors visionaries and ascribe meaning to the acoustical marks. Cave drawings—actually sound/signs conceived as grunts and thumps in the dark—are interpreted as figurative expressions. But then, what’s surprising about that? Language evolves as it acquires and develops acoustical figures for the visual world. It’s also man’s triumph of ownership: Those who first possessed the power to name possessed the world.
Radio is no different. As soon as was humanly possible, towers were erected to control the sky, and sound transmission became entangled in who had the right to transmit. But as quickly as radio became about ownership, it became subject to piratical subversion, reconfigurations, interventions, from the political to the didactical. (Consider Mexico's Zapatista's, who ran Radio Insurgente for six years in the last decade, or Free Radio Berkeley Founder Stephen Dunifer's extensive book deals.) What's fabulous about radio piracy is that the term 'pirate radio' does not pertain strictly to its unrestricted output (often the results of the Federal Communications' Commission of the U.S., for instance, not granting licensed play to the little guys) but also its receipt: Some of the first pirate radio was heard, via rigged transistors or veiled turbulence techniques, by unintended listeners.
Frankie America broadcasting from the roof of the Deauville Hotel, Miami Beach. Photo: Addison Walz
Ronan O'Rahilly, like many a movement pioneer, set about initially to serve his own interests, and then saw that expand to serve the interests of many. A band manager, O'Rahilly was trolling for new ways to promote his talents' sounds. He discovered that unlicensed ships in Europe with pirate transmitters were sending audio of their choosing to wee sources in neighboring Scandinavia and the Netherlands. So, he plopped a ship off the coast of Essex and began blasting out audio of his choosing. A movement commenced, which saw DJs from near and far join up to distribute whatever the fuck they wanted. They got high, they got seasick, they imparted wisdom and dance jewels, and they contributed to history's arguably most notable pirate radio run of resistance, technological innovation, and bandwidth badassedness.
DJ Jonnie Walker, a long-time contributor to Radio Caroline who was featured in a 2011 documentary _The Boat That Rocked_, which details Caroline's heyday, told _The Guardian_, "This explosion of music and fashion and teenage excitement—the lid had been kept on it for so long. So when it burst, it really burst, and it did scare the government. They didn't understand the half of it, but they did understand the unifying power of music. That's why the American government put Elvis in the army and why the British police hounded Brian Jones in an attempt to destroy the Stones."
Radio is obviously in different terrain in 2013. The web's boom of self-selective audio interactivity in conjunction with funding crises, like last year's limp-dicked GOP efforts to slash NPR's annual funding, have arguably reduced the impact transmission can have on broad populations. And that which enjoys continued support is certainly not subsumed programming.
Long intrigued by the culture of radio and its detractors, Nicolas Lobo, a mixed media artist based in Miami (the city itself the de facto capital of pirate radio in light of its proximity to Cuba), whose book _Etruscan Monochromes_ contains images documenting his broadcast art which are featured herein, points out that the idea of "subversion" in much of today's available broadcast has been snarfed up by the bro mainstream. "The idea of taste and public standards is important when thinking about radio," he says. "Mediocrity can be just as offensive and even shocking as obscenity. There is a tension on mainstream radio of testing the limits; morning shock jocks having porn stars on the show and saying “ass” but not “fuck” and then playing a fart noise over and over. To me that is incredibly offensive, not because the word ‘ass’ offends me but because very real space is being occupied by a semi-lucrative drunk uncle club."
_I hear a story about an intriguing phenomenon in a place. Like the Singing Sands in the desert. Just the name, the Singing Sands, triggers so many sounds in my head. And if my research inspires me more I might fly out there with my microphones. —Jacob Kirkegaard, sound artist known for recording in abandoned rooms near Chernobyl_
Radio's diffusion is not only due to digital innovation, fund depletion, and idiots making decisions, but also to the fact that our word is increasingly hyper-visual. It might be said that sound has taken hind tit when it comes to stimulation and the power to coerce with verse. Lobo—who created a project in conjunction with Miami's Bass Museum wherein he erected a physical band shell that could host live music performance but also transmit every FM radio station in range at once for a calendar month—suggests we have not lost our way with transmission transgression. Rather, sound is operating with different functionality. "I think sound is actually functioning at a pretty high level in the world right now," he says. "Sound is a wedge, a crowbar for whatever you want to get into, a malleable thing because of our diminished awareness of it. And since we pay less conscious attention to sound it might have more direct influence on society than we give credit for."
In that vein, consider noise pollution. Oceanic ecosystems are being disrupted by commercial ship traffic, sonar, and oil extraction. Physical and mental health in urban centers, now the home of nearly three quarters of the planet, have been compromised by increased highway, rail, and air development and traffic. A 2011 World Health Organization study revealed that western Europeans lose up to 1.6 million years of healthy living annually from noise pollution. Thus, engineers seek to suppress the noise from machines, and cities work to pass noise ordinances and in some instances plop fountains down to counter nasty sound. To substantiate Lobo's point, then, it might be said that audio, like a room full of teenagers, continues to evolve whether you like it or not, and yet it still can't exist without its counter-contingent.
_I've never learned how to compose, so I had to invent ways to create these social events—basically these gatherings of musicians and audience—and see what would happen." -Christian Marclay, sound and video artist_
Viking Funeral broadcasting from De La Cruz Collection. Photo: Nicolas Lobo
Communications scholar Harold Innis contested in the mid-20th century that transmission has rapidly merged into what he called "space-biased" media—ephemeral media that can canvas great distance and which tends toward speedy change and materialism, such as radio or television, but has short exposure time, as opposed to what he dubbed "time-biased" media, such as stone tablets, the aforementioned cave drawings, or oral sources such as the epic poems of Homer, which favor tradition or religion, for instance. Pirate radio bridges the two. Radio is the ephemera; and the ship, as we saw with Radio Caroline—the basements, the backwaters, the foxholes, the ports of transmission—they're the time-based, the permanent. There will always be margins, be they religious, historical, or those of tradition, and they will always need an outlet.
Consider artists Jorge Ulrich and Kris Kahler, whose recent project OneofOne manifests in a big juicy pirate radio van with an interior created by former FLAUNT cover artist lads Justin Lowe and Jonah Freeman. "Are we provocative?" Kahler playfully asks over the phone from New York, a month following the van's warmly received Art Basel, Miami Beach debut. "A black matte van with shag everywhere and LED lights and seats blanketed by naked women that friends of ours have taken to calling the rape van? I'd say so."
Partnering with Alana Heiss' Clocktower Gallery (founded in 1972) which transmits ArtonAir and therein gave OneofOne an immediate broadcast platform, OneofOne snaked about the city in their van, pouring out spontaneous sound—everything from William Burroughs readings to mixes contributed by Davendra Banhart and John Holland of Salem; or rock god Jennifer Herrema, formerly of Royal Trux and currently of that sex pot forget-me-not, Black Bananas, selecting poetry from Kenneth Goldsmith (also a transmission maverick via his beacon of open-source poetics UbuWeb).
Ephemeral, yes. Disruptive, interactive, space-based media, yes. But the physicality of OneofOne's radio van itself served Art Basel as a kind of timeless vesicle, where friends could pile in to enjoy one of culture's most timeless acts: _cruising_, or as Ulrich might call it, "romping about." He shares, "It's sort of an integrated interference in that everyone felt like they were part of the van. And it was an amazing feeling as so many people were interested and with such short notice, from musicians to the engineer help we got, and the commitment to hang out as we romped around the city. It's entertainment—for the sake of enjoyment, cinema, a peep show, whatever—a transmission for enjoyment, rather than say propaganda, or the weather, or economic data. It's a way of trying to shape data and that's interesting. That's the nucleus to the project."
OneofOne's van broke down en route to Miami from New York, and the artists were helped on their way via local generosity somewhere near the Carolinas. Outside the van's hasty production, its content procurement, and its support from Clocktower Gallery, this was the touch point for what would become and remains an ongoing project about community born of interference. "When you're on the road and being free and open, anything can happen," Kahler says. "If you do get a flat tire, say, and someone comes along, who and what and why that person is there is special—it's a kind of interference in some ways, the radio itself is an interference, wanted or not—and yes, you do have a destination, but the actual destination can be the process of getting there. Up next, we're off to Mississippi and then Mexico, and we'll collect content and figure out its transmission."
The sirens and distress signals, each in a hurry, stumble and fall over one another in a tangle of excitement.
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Written by Matthew Bedard
Photographed by Grear Patterson
