[Rachel Baker is a member of the worldwide techno, social, radical group
Irational.org. She has worked collaboratively with backspace.org, the
net.audio collective xchange, and has produced an online critical
net.radio guide called TMselector. Baker is currently investigating the
intersection between streaming networks, mobile/FM broadcasts, and
the development and facilitation of local communities. This interview
was performed in August of 2000.]

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Mathew Kabatoff - Can you talk about how you became involved in Pirate
Radio? You have mentioned that you were involved in both pirate and
traditional radio during your time in undergraduate and graduate
schools.

Rachel Baker - When I was in college in Gwent I wasn't involved in
pirate radio at that time, I was actually involved in traditional radio.
I had just graduated from that art school and I was really interested
in radio, I was doing sound art installations and wrote a paper about
sound. One of the first jobs I had when I graduated was working for the
BBC. A partner and I were making one-off programs for BBC Radio 4,
which is not a music but highbrow intellectual station. We sent them a
proposal for a radio program that involved collecting stories, writings
and poetry about the resistance and protest movements that were really
burgeoning in the mid 90s in England.

mk - What were the protests and activities about?

rb - It was really interesting five six years ago, politically, when I
was in my early and mid twenties. Most of the activity came from
environmental groups protesting against road building in the UK, which
was then combined with this movement called 'DIY' or 'Do it Yourself'.
'DIY' was about rejecting the usual channels of political protest, i.e.
writing to your MP (Member of Parliament) and complaining. This form of
protest meant putting yourself physically and bodily at risk, whether it
was in front of the road building machines or climbing trees in order to
protect that environment.

The independent scene was also informed by emerging rave and techno
culture that would host all of these free parties and festivals. This
activity seemed to be somewhat political because of the spontaneity of
the events. Once the word got out as to who was playing what where,
gatherings of people would form in public places for these parties,
which was seen as illegal behavior by the government. New criminal
justice acts were brought in to prevent people from congregating and
having these free shows. This was exciting in the early and mid 90s
because the cultural and political scenes were emerging together and you
could say merging together. My partner and I decided to try identifying
and documenting what was going on by finding people who were writing
about it and making performance poetry. The idea was for a half hour
program on Radio 4 called 'Dissenting Voices' that attempted to find
contemporary political poets of the time and of the age. My partner and
I went around with a tape recorder DAT machine and we recorded these
people, that was my first official radio involvement.


mk - What was happening with your art practice at the time? Did you
start doing pirate radio when you met up with Heath Bunting?

rb - Not quite, it's interesting because I met Heath whilst I was making
that radio program for BBC Radio 4, my research led me to him. At that
time however the Internet, the medium of the Internet was just reaching
its peak. I fell in love with it, I could right from the start see that
the Internet and radio, even before RealAudio and all this software came
along, could be combined and produce something really interesting. I was
also working on my MA and began to research the histories of development
for both radio and the Internet in order to find parallels between the
two.

mk - Yeah all that early utopian communication and community stuff.

rb - Yeah Brechtian, there were definite parallels between the two
mediums that I was interested in exploring. I can remember having many
early conversations with people about how I thought the Internet would
become really interesting when it started using and combining with radio
technologies. My first net.radio projects were not with Heath, but with
Backspace (http://www.backspace.org/). Backspace was this venue in
London where people could hang out and have access to computers, the
Internet, and various technologies like record decks and mixers. There
was a group of us who were streaming audio and doing experiments with
other people on the xchange Network, Re-lab in Latvia, and radio.qualia
in Australia. We would do these little jams where we would send each
other a stream, pick it up, mix it, and then send it back out. Even
though it was a small group of people messing around and playing, about
it was very exciting. Because Backspace was operating as it was, free
access to equipment it also seemed to have an effect on the local
community. I remember one event quite clearly; because Backspace was
situated in an South London urban area by the Themes, it attracted these
young kids, twelve or thirteen year olds, who would come in with their
records and begin to mix and mc. Drum and base was still very popular at
the timeS<caron>right now everyone is listening to 'Garage'.

mk - Garage?

rb - UK Garage it is this big thing in UK Pirate radio, but in 97' there
was alot of drum and base –Baker puts her phone to the radio to let mk
hear what 'garage' sounds like–Garage is a kind of MC styling where
they just talk over the music. Anyway, these kids would come in and they
would just do that, they were really good. They really didn't know much
about the Internet, they just wanted to practice their singing and play
their records. What we did was we started to stream them. We would set
up a web cast and they would, there were about seven or eight of them,
get on chat lines try to find other kids on the net their own age. When
they could find other people they would get them to tune in. They also
incorporated elements of the chat in their rapping and sort of do
shouts…you know…this one goes out to…whoever in wherever. It was
really completely unplanned and spontaneous.

mk - So you were just using the tools to make things happen as opposed
to having a specific agenda?

rb - Yeah there was no real specific agenda at that time it was just
playing. We did apply for a grant from the Arts Council of England to
try to formalize Backspace a little bit. It did evolve somewhat, but
Backspace was a group of very chaotic and disorganized people so it
never did get very formal, it just wasn't that kind of place. But that
was where I learned well almost everything, I really enjoyed it. There
is now a web-site which is maintained by James from Backspace called
'rad.spc.org' (http://www.rad.scp.org) where you can see what backspace
radio was involved and to some extent still is involved in, it's a
legacy of what went on.

mk - What was going on with streaming media elsewhere at the time? What
ideas and projects were being proposed at the time?

rb - There was a great conference in Berlin in 1998 called 'Radio Days',
that was organized by Meecro and Convex TV which in some ways was a post
net.art thing. A group of us were quite excited about the possibilities
of streaming media and using tools such as RealAudio to do so. I also
think that the community had become somewhat bored with net.art and this
was the next big thing. We were able to look at new tools such as Thomax
Kaullmans Orang audio database, and hang out with people like Pit
Schulz, and have workshops in these great clubs in Berlin. There were
also several audio projects, both local and networked that we were able
to look at as well. I remember one project that dealt with Beach Boys
and the strange phenomena around how their last album was never
finished. I don't know if you know the exact story or mythology, but die
hard Beach Boys fans posted recordings of various Beach Boys samples
online that were made available so that users could create their own
'last' Beach Boys album. That was very interesting in terms of global
collaboration and of people building music together.

mk - Can you talk about TM selector, what were the motivations behind
its production?

rb - TM selector cropped up in my mind at Banff during discussions at
'Sync or Stream', this too was in '98, regarding streaming media and
commercialization. For everyone involved in independent production it
was very obvious that dot.com fever had hit streaming media and the
commercial sector threatened to overtake our production. It seemed
quite clear to me that we needed to create a forum for the network of
producers to discuss and think critically about what we were doing, in
order to safeguard our cultural network whilst redefining it. At the
time there was nothing except for a few lists on the Exchange network.
With TM selector I wanted to create a directory of online audio projects
specifically for the alternative scene. I started it last year as a
4-page printed newsletter that could be distributed as an insert into
magazines like mute or just flyered around generally. I only made one
edition however, I had imagined I could do a monthly thing, but
obviously it costs money. There were ways I wanted to get around the
money issue, the most obvious was to design it in digital format post it
as an acrobat file where users at their own cost could download it. But
you know people are lazy and they don't always have the time and the
resources.

mk - You couldn't have formed stronger partnerships up with metamute or
rhizome.org? Wasn't there any type of infrastructure available for you
to further develop this project?

rb - No there wasn't anything available. I think it was partly
financial, but the fact is that to do a project such as this, which is
intended to be long term, consistent, and in the material form, you need
enormous amounts of energy and momentum to keep going because your
activity can quickly be overtaken by the commercial sector. It's a
visibility thing you need to be sharp and well funded to be even
visible. As well many people who were involved in net culture and who
were working on streaming media at the time were starting to become
employed by the commercial sector.

mk - Yeah even with you, you have worked for razorfish…

rb - Yes but I didn't work with streaming media, I was just doing boring
web design to get some money. But really you get to a stage where you
need to pay the rent and you can't go on doing this independent media
stuff no matter how fun and how rewarding it is. Truthfully I don't
worry too much about the fact that people are moving into the commercial
sector because you learn alot anyway and you can redirect some of those
resources back into the independent production. On my own I haven't
done any commercial stuff except being apart of a little start up music
company that wanted to be an online label and record shop, but it, they
folded.

mk - Have you noticed any effects on local populations or communities as
a result from working with net.radio? You mentioned the kids beat-boxing
at Backspace, are there any other examples?

rb - I think the kids are such a great example because the legacy of
those moments are with those kids in whatever they do in their future
lives which is tied implicitly to that form of practice. Other examples
of community building through radio and net.radio are interface
(http://interface.pirate-radio.co.uk/pirate.html), which have an
extremely loyal audience, both on and off the net. Irational did a
project with Hull community radio in the North of England called
'Livestock', I did the website and Kate Rich was responsible for the
project. It was a streamed/fm combination of audio content mostly being
made by local residents of this very poor town called Stockton. Giving
people access to broadcast tools and public airwaves can have a
tremendous personal impact. People are able to feel empowered and
confident by the fact that they are using the tools and interacting with
a public space. Even if there are only five or six listeners it doesn't
really matter, they know that they are still in a public space to some
description.

mk - Do you think that pirate radio has changed as a result of the
Internet and audio streaming? It seems that there is a difference in the
practice of pirating a designated frequency on the fm dial and streaming
live over the Internet. What effects have resulted?

rb - The main thing that has occurred for pirates since the advent of
streaming is additional presence and distribution over the net, it is
really difficult to say whether or not there have been changes in
content. I have noticed however, an increased amount of one-off pirate
projects that happen for only one evening. The reasons for this is
either there is much more of this activity or that the information
channels for publicity and dissemination are better; instead of hearing
from a friend or another pirate radio broadcast, I get an email telling
me when and where. When you are plugged into the proper information
network it is much easier to identify what is going on. It then happens
that you find out about some obscure little pirate project that isn't
necessarily based on music, rather it is journalistic, or satirical, or
political. An example of this happened in Brighton a year ago where a
little pirate transmission, for a whole day, did a spoof of BBC Radio 4,
which as I was saying I used to work for. Also again, Radio 4 is a very
highbrow intellectual station with a middle class audience and a very
rigid programming schedule. What the pirate transmission did was they
created their own programs, which were extremely satirical of BBC Radio
4 and for an entire day, sent it up the whole channel.

In terms of activist or political pirate broadcasts, it seems that
people have become more daring in the face of greater punishment from
the authorities. As recently as June 18th during the 'Reclaim the
Streets' protests, which were similar to the WTO protests in Seattle, a
number of pirates such as Interference FM were directing and performing
anti-capitalist protests over fm and streamed airwaves. The increase in
the amount of communication channels seems to have provided a space for
more activity, if you can't go here then you can go there. As far as the
music pirates are concerned, which have been around for years and years,
the story goes that the only reason they are tolerated is because more
established radio stations such as the BBC poach their talent. They know
that certain pirates operate at certain times and if they create a
program that sounds the same or even has the same djs then they can
entice listeners. But either way they are still vital to the vibrancy of
cultural life and many of the independent scenes.

mk - Can radio be used to alter signs, codes, and meaning? We are so
used to thinking about the visual in either forms of the written word or
the image.

rb - There was an idea that was being tossed around in Berlin at about
jingles and how they are the audio equivalent of logos. I took that idea
and did a project called 'millennium jingle' where people could have an
ident, and be identified by sounds. So, I Rachel Baker would have such
and such a sound that would define who and how I was. As far audio/radio
operating in the same way as written language to change codes and
symbols, I don't think it works in the same way it is a different
medium. I think there is a lot of space for satirizing existing formats
of radio because they relied for so long on traditional formats. Convex
TV did a project on formats, much like the pirate transmission in
Brighton, where they took apart and deconstructed the format of BBC
Radio 4. I don't know what radio sounds like in Canada or the United
States, but people become very comfortable with radio, it becomes part
of their daily lives, and they schedule their rituals around it. I know
I used to do that; I would tune into specific radio programs through out
my day and consume radio in a very specific way. I had my favorite
programs and it would structure my day.

I think now however I have become less addicted to the radio because
media for the most part has converged, I am just as likely to surf the
web, as I am to switch the radio on. I don't follow those patterns as
much as I used to although I'm sure people still do. I was having this
conversation with someone else, but I was thinking about how when I was
a teenager I definitely had specific programs I wanted to tune into
which know informed my day and my activities. I wondered if that was
still the case with young people with young listeners.

mk - Like you said about the convergence of media, I think that younger
listeners are more likely to access a variety of media sources to find
out what is going on. I can remember when I was a teenager, the rave
scene was just emerging in Calgary, and I used to stay up late at night
in order to find out from the local independent radio station where,
when, and who to call for directions to the next event. Now that same
independent will directly say where the next rave is, I suppose they
assume that the audience is large enough and/or people could just as
well look on the Internet than listen in. Or it is just an indication
changing medias, demography1s, trends, etc.

rb - Personally I have been feeling overwhelmed by amount of media and
information directed that is either directed or made available. It has
caused not only my listening habits but also my habits of media
consumption to become less ritualized and much more accidental. I'm
actually tending towards coming off the media fix, I tend to do things
in the real world more and more you know going for walks. Although, I'm
really quite excited by things like napster, the idea of databased music
and audio like what is happening at Orang. I like that the encounter
with media is completely different from tuning in at a specific time,
unless its obviously a live stream, but I'm more and more interested in
searching around archives and sites for published audio.

mk - Any thoughts on new technologies such radio streaming over cellular
frequencies?

rb - One of my bylines for the TM selector was "net audio for the
connoisseur", I think the changes in the mechanisms of delivery makes
connoisseurs of people. That means that people become more
discriminating to about what they want to hear. There are many issues
about how we start listening to things and how your ear changes
according to how the medium is delivering the sound. This happened when
cds came along, a kind of evolution in recording and distribution that
changes the way that we hear and encounter audio, and we sort of have to
adjust our hearing and that1s kinda interesting.