Mathew Kabatoff: Articles about you consistently mention pirate radio.
But the type of pirate radio is never specified. Were you only using the
airwaves? What was its context or content?

Heath Bunting: I guess my first contact with pirate radio was listening
to "Radio Caroline," which was a commercial pirate in the '70s in the
UK. It's a quite well known one. It was on a ship in the sea, and if you
look on the net you can find loads of fan sites. It wasn't until my
twenties that I started doing things myself. I was building small 1 Watt
transmitters, just for the fun of it. We eventually managed to get a 20
Watt built for us and we set up a station in Bristol.

MK: Was it music or…

HB: It was a mixture, it was music, techno, and Captain Beefheart, and
all those kind of weird things that you wouldn't normally hear on the
radio at that time. There was also performative pieces and very abstract
annoying experimental noises. I would do those mostly.

MK: Was there a community of people doing pirate radio at that time?

HB: Yeah there were the standard pirates that worked at community music
stations. There was one called SPEC, which stood for "Sim Pause and
Eastern Community radio," that played mostly things like regga and
ragga. There were also a number of the anarchist stations like one
called SYT which I was involved with for a bit over the years. I used to
help them out but I couldn't get along with all the krusty anarchists–
them and all their thrash and gabber. Then there was us and we were the
arty farty bunch.

MK: How many people were involved in your group?

HB: I'd say there were six core participants that would make stuff every
week, and be involved in rigging and finding places to transmit from.

MK: So you were actually mobile, you didn't have it in your basement?

HB: No we used a different location every weekend. It was a weekend
station and just for politeness to the authorities we would move around.
It was a game really. They could have caught us within fifteen minutes
if they really wanted to. If we moved around it was like "okay we're
playing the game."

MK: What was the response? Were you able to see the effects of the
broadcast? It is a difficult question to ask, but who was listening and
how did you affect them?

HB: Well you can never can tell, unless you are doing phone-ins or
something like that. You don't ever get feedback. Or the effects are
quite long in their return. For instance you could be at a party talking
to someone and they could ask you what you do, and you say oh "I do
graffiti or I do radio" and they say "oh I've seen that." Then there are
other people who know you and would listen no matter what's on. They
know it's a local thing and are into it, whatever form it is in. The
thing that always motivated me was the thought of people just tuning
randomly through the dial and coming across something very strange. But
the main thing that was happening with our activity was that it glued
people together and inspired them. People who normally wouldn't do audio
stuff or had done it before were fired up that their work was being
broadcast every weekend.

MK: How did you get to Banff and how did Radio90 (http://radio90.fm)
come to exist? What were some of the debates? I talked to Susan Kenard
and she mentioned that you had had debates about how the station would
function, what communities it would serve, how Internet tools would
affect the largest amount of people possible.

HB: I was originally invited to the Banff Centre to speak at a
conference called "Big Game Hunters," after which I was invited to
attend an artist's residency called "Apocalypso." During that time I was
given a studio and a computer with full internet access, something which
I had never had before. I have had various studios without computers or
an Internet connection, or I would manage to get into a lab for a week,
but I had never had it given all to myself. While I was there I started
listening to net radio from London such as Interface
(http://interface.pirate-radio.co.uk/). I was missing home, and
thought…well this is a very privileged position, why don't I try to
share it. The most obvious way to do that was to put a transmitter on
the back of the computer. I managed to acquire a transmitter for the ten
weeks and had this…well, it was hardly a station but a broadcast.
After "Apocalypso" I was offered a technical job as a "Work Study" which
allowed me to stay on at the Centre, and provided time to formalize the
project. I turned the broadcast into a radio station. I built a studio
and tried to get other people involved. The first person was Susan, who
was skeptical of it even though she had community experience. I
basically ran it for a while and then Susan got involved. We would put
different streams on, Susan and I would both have our own separate
projects and shows, but after a while we decided to automate the whole
thing and provide a focal point for the station as well. At that time we
conceived the scheduler which has been running for several years
continuously.

MK: Can you talk about the scheduler? How was it built? How does it
operate?

HB: There were two motivations behind the scheduler: the first was we
needed something automated to run the station, and second (it was a bit
of a move on my part) as criticism. A number of groups had been talking
about writing schedulers for quite some time, some even were heavily
funded yet hadn't produced anything. I said publicly that if no one
would make one in the next two months I would write one to embarrass
everybody. At that time I wasn't a programmer and obviously I hadn't
received any money. So after two months, and after realizing that we
needed some form of automation, I wrote one. It took five hours. That
was my first serious bit of Perl programming. It was Susan Kenard's and
my idea. Once we got the scheduler people inserted their one hour shows
into the scheduled time slots. It had the dual purpose of running the
local station, the Banff business, and also being a focal point for
experimental net.radio. Which isn't so much the case now. It seems that
now its just running the station and the content reflects that a bit
more. Its taken on somewhat of a role as the small conventional radio
for listeners in the town of Banff.

MK: Is it common for producers or artists to burn out while working
within practices that are experimental and time-consuming? Or is it a
cyclical effect whereby people work hard for a while, tire and then
either regroup or move on?

HB: I don't think this is the case for Radio90, but either way things
have to keep evolving. Not only do you have to bring new people in but
you also have to create new functions for the station that is based on a
degree of stability. At the end of the day there are people who actually
really enjoy listening. That's the main motive or one of the main
motives, if you can have one for the station. It is there for the
listeners. It's also a source of entertainment for ourselves. It's very
nice to listen to your own station and not know what is going to play.
And it also keeps the intricacies of administration and policy quite
entertaining.

MK: How has pirate radio changed as it moves from the floating radio
transmitter to the Internet?

HB: There are obviously various motivations (some very different from
each other) for why someone would broadcast illegally. Some of the
people are just trying to make money as quick as possible–some of the
stations are then mostly just advertising for clubs, owned and run by
club types who are into all sorts of shady things. Then there are other
pirates where it is just passion for music, like Interface pirate radio
[mentioned above] which came out of Faith FM. They just wanted to play
music that was not played on any other station and were prepared to
break the law to do it. For them, if they can have more listeners and be
more effective by moving onto the net, it doesn't really matter if it is
illegal or not. They might save costs by not getting raided, but really
the illegal side is just an inconvenience. If you look at the anarchist
stations there is a whole form of power in the fact that they are
disobeying the authorities. So moving onto the net for an anarchist
station is a bit silly really, because you are leaving your own
community and territory and basically being forced to be a refugee. An
itinerant refugee on the net so to speak. But if you can somehow combine
the global reach of the Internet with your locality you get the best of
both worlds. Radio90 is a bit of an attempt to do that. If the studio is
used a bit more by the local community to play sets and there are
streams set up to go out locally, then you are better able to cover all
your bases in terms of theory and politics–plus it's just good practice
in terms of the music.

MK: Radio90 occupies a physical space too. Can you talk about how you
got the space?

HB: The space was offered to me because I was an employee of the Banff
Centre and I said I'd like it for my studio. I immediately took
everything out and built all the benches and made an accommodation
upstairs. They weren't quite respectful of that. After I left there was
some threat to the space. They wanted to take it back, so we negotiated
some sort of arrangement. Hopefully the Banff Centre realizes that the
project is internationally recognized and if they tried to do anything
to it there would be some kind of support for Radio90. We know that we
would be prepared to defend that space, but it would never come to that.
There has been a bit of fuss about locks and something about refused
entry for non Radio90 affiliates. It seems that about every six months
someone says Radio90 should live somewhere else: you can live in the
corridors we want that space. It is quite fortunate however that the
space is quite architecturally different from other rooms in Glyde hall,
and it has a long history of alternative practices..

MK: That specific room?

HB: Yeah the one upstairs has been used for like all sorts of things
like weird performances, parties, orgies, and has had people living in
there. It's because it's one of the only rooms that isn't constructed in
an institutional space. The architecture of the Banff Centre has no
public or private space. That room and the room downstairs are free from
that coding and have been since its construction. It has an alternative
history and I think people respect that.

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<a href="/object.rhiz?2133">Continue to Part Two of "Radio Pirate–An
Interview with Heath Bunting."</a>