A year-and-a-half ago high school, college and community radio stations shut their studio doors in response to safety measures to prevent the spread of COVID. They quickly scrambled to find ways to stay on air, broadcasting archived programming, allowing DJs to pre-record or even broadcast live from home. We’ve dedicated several episodes to learning how different kinds of stations in a variety of regions confronted the emergency. Whatever methods were employed, today – with the...

Musician, DJ and radio artist Don Joyce passed away nearly six years ago, leaving behind a voluminous archive of his unparalelled collage radio program “Over the Edge.” The documentary “How Radio Isn’t Done” sheds light on this member of Negativland, his life and his work in recontextualizing the never-ending flow of media messages that flood everyday life. Director Ryan Worsley joins to talk about Joyce, his hyper-focused artistic process and what she learned creating this affectionate and...

Mitch Jeserich has been working as a host, producer and reporter for Pacifica Radio and KPFA for two decades. His career in radio was just getting started as a volunteer when 9-11-2001 changed everything. Host Eric Klein and guest Mitch Jeserich are friends and former co-workers at Free Speech Radio News in 2003, where Mitch was covering the capital in Washington D.C. and Eric was working on the tech-team in Berkeley. Letters and Politics on KPFA Letters...

On the show this week we explore a pivotal period for radio news in the 1930s and learn why the Lindbergh kidnapping changed everything. Travel back in time with us. It’s March 1932 and a horrible crime has just occurred, the kidnapping of the 20-month-old son of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh and his wife Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Imagine that you were living in the United States in 1932 and wanted to follow breaking news about this story. If it were 2021, the answer might be Twitter or the...

On this week’s show, we revisit a topic that is near and dear to us, the preservation of sound. This time around the emphasis is on podcasts. Our guest Jeremy Morris is the founder of PodcastRE (which is short for Podcast Research), a searchable, researchable archive of podcasting culture. Morris is Associate Professor, Media and Cultural Studies in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and that’s where PodcastRE was launched. We dig into the...

Portrayals of radio in popular culture provide an interesting glimpse at radio’s role in society. At Radio Survivor, we’ve long been fascinated by radio depictions on both the small and large screen; so it is a treat to dive into this topic with Hemrani Vyas, Programming Coordinator at Turner Classic Movies (TCM). Vyas curated an entire day of radio-themed films for the cable network, focusing on the era of 1930 to 1950. This week we talk about some of the featured films and also dig into a...

Today on the show we rebroadcast one of our favorite episodes from one year ago, which was described this way: On August 27, 2020, nomadic online radio station Radioee.net is presenting a live, translingual 24-hour broadcast, Wireless, featuring 24 radio stations from all over the world. Taking place on the 100th anniversary of the first radio broadcast in Argentina and the first mass public entertainment broadcast in the world; Wireless launches at midnight Buenos Aires time on August...

What do home made short wave radios, flexi discs, and cyanotype photography have in common? Kirk Pearson is a composer and founder of Dogbotic, a full service music and sound studio, a radical multimedia arts workshop, and open source creative technology lab. Kirk joins us today to share the planning and thinking behind their next community workshop, Ear Re-Training, Media Manipulation for the Musical Mind. Show Notes: * Dogbotic Workshops including Ear...

Shortly after its 26th birthday, we revisit this interview celebrating a quarter-century of the MP3. On July 14, 1995 the file extension .MP3 was chosen and set in place for an audio format that would go on to change music. Artist, scholar and curator John Kannenberg marks the 25th anniversary of this event with an online exhibit, “MP3 @ 25: The Anniversary Exhibition” at his Museum of Portable Sound. John joins this episode to explain why it’s important to observe this...

On this week’s show, we take a trip back in time to look at radio in the 1940s and 1950s. During this post-war period, women’s roles were shifting in the workplace and in popular media. Television arrived on the scene, bringing with it some, but not all, of the programming that people knew and loved from radio. Battles were also brewing over radio content, including violence, sex, and portrayals of family life. Our guest, scholar Catherine Martin, has been poring over FCC complaint letters...

What are the odds that a popular television series would feature your college radio station as a backdrop for two episodes? That’s exactly what Jennifer found, when HBO’s “Mare of Easttown” employed a set that accurately recreates Haverford College’s station as a location for the limited-run drama. Jennifer talked with the show’s production designer to get the behind-the-scenes scoop. Paul recently experienced his own radio coincidence when he by chance discovered a storefront radio...

Border radio is one of our favorite topics at Radio Survivor and on this week’s episode we dig into the history of radio broadcasting on the northern border of Mexico. Scholar Sonia Robles shares the stories of some of the lesser-known, small broadcasters whose histories are often overshadowed by the wild tales of higher power border blaster stations. Robles is the author of Mexican Waves: Radio Broadcasting along Mexico’s Northern Border, 1930-1950 and Assistant Professor of History at...

As we wrap up Pride Month, our podcast discussion turns to queer spaces and queer community on the radio and in podcasting, specifically lesbian broadcasters in Canada. Our guest, Stacey Copeland is a media producer and Ph.D. candidate at Simon Fraser University’s School of Communication in Vancouver, Canada. Stacey has been researching the history of lesbian radio shows, including The Lesbian Show and Dykes on Mics. Community radio played an important role in welcoming gay and lesbian...

Just when we thought the Franken FM era might be over for good, the FCC grants “Special Temporary Authority” to a LPTV channel 6 in San Jose, California to keep its analog signal – heard on the FM dial – on the air while transitioning its video signal to digital. We review this news, along with a proposal in front of the FCC to boost low-power FM stations to 250 watts. We also take a look at the most recent issue of The Wire magazine, dedicated to radio in both broadcast and internet...

This week, we take a close look at the history of an influential Spanish language community radio station: KDNA. Located in Washington State, the station launched in 1979 and serves a rural community which includes farm workers and immigrants. Our guest, Monica De La Torre, is Assistant Professor at the School of Transborder Studies at Arizona State University and is the author of a forthcoming book about KDNA called Feminista Frequencies: Community Building through Radio in the Yakima...

From 1961 to 1976 WRVR-FM broadcast a progressive slate of social justice and jazz programming from the Riverside Church on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Beginning in 2018 those archives are being digitized and transcribed by the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, and on June 17 they’re asking volunteers to help correct those transcriptions in a “Transcript-A-Thon” event. We welcome guests Vincent Kelley, Archivist at The Riverside Church Archives, and Ryn Marchese, Engagement and...

The Federal Communications Commission recently announced that November 2, 2021 will mark the opening of the next licensing window for full-power non-commercial / educational (NCE) FM radio stations. The Commission first hinted at this chance back in fall of 2020. Given how often our listeners ask how and when they can get a radio license, we immediately dedicated an episode to that topic. Now that more is known we decided to revisit it. Even though the application window dates have not...

It seems like physical media continues to have a hold on humans, even while most of us in the West engage with online, streaming and virtual media for much, if not most, of our time. Audiocassettes are like radio, in that they have been declared dead multiple times in the last three decades, yet continue to be found, employed and enjoyed by new generations who insist on keeping them alive. Eric just completed a weekend-long cassette hacking workshop, joined by a diverse group of musicians and...

Colleges and high schools are finishing up their first – and, with hope, last – full academic COVID year, and all indicators are that student radio remained on the air, as students adjusted to online classes and socially distant campuses. Jennifer Waits reports back from the Intercollegiate Broadcast System annual conference, held virtually this year, where she gauged the temperature of student broadcasters and the radio professionals who shared their advice with conference attendees. She and...

Renowned radio scholar Michele Hilmes is Professor Emerita, Media and Cultural Studies in the Department of Communication Arts at University of Wisconsin-Madison and has been a long time proponent of the importance of studying radio and sound, which have often been neglected in the broader field of media studies. She joins us on the show to discuss radio studies, her call for new terminology surrounding audio works, and the growing interest in sound studies. Show Notes: *...

Amanda Dawn Christie is an artist enamored with radios and radio waves. The Assistant Professor, Studio Arts at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada) joins us on the show to discuss her most recent transmission art project, Ghosts in the Airglow, in which she created work at the HAARP facility in Alaska. Christie also shares with us the backstory of how she starting working with radio and radio waves, describing her fascination with radio towers and shortwave and recounting her...

This week, we are joined by the hosts of the podcast Rice and Shine. Led by four Seattle-area teenagers, the chat-style program provides a glimpse into the lives of 9th graders beginning high school from a distance during a pandemic. Rice and Shine is an incredible time capsule of the current school year, as hosts Lauren, Sophie, Ava and Grace talk pop culture, discuss the challenges of remote learning, address anti-Asian American violence during the COVID-19 outbreak, and share their...

The PIRATE Act was signed into law more than a year ago, but the rules governing increased fines for unlicensed broadcasting are about to go into effect on April 26. The Act is intended to give the FCC additional tools for tamping down pirate radio activity in hot beds like Boston and Brooklyn, NY, but there are reasons to be skeptical. Brooklyn-based writer, post-production mixer and field recordist David Goren joins to help us tease out the real-world implications. Goren is also the...

What is radio art? What is transmission art? We discuss the experimental side of radio and artistic uses of radio transmissions on our show this week, looking at historical and contemporary examples. Artist and scholar Anna Friz joins us to chat about these concepts, sharing how her college/community radio past in Canada inspired her to immerse herself in the practice of sound art and radio art. Friz is Assistant Professor, Film and Digital Media at University of California, Santa Cruz and...

What is sound art? And what do we know about its origin story? We explore this question and more with our guest this week, artist and educator Judy Dunaway. An adjunct professor in the History of Art Department at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Dunaway’s recent article, “The Forgotten 1979 MoMA Sound Art Exhibition,” is a fascinating look at the history of sound art and highlights important contributions by female artists. In our wide-ranging discussion, we also hear about Dunaway’s...