Andrea Langlois et al - Islands of Resistance - Pirate Radio in Canada

CHAP TER 14
Repurposed and Reassembled
Waking Up the Radio
Kristen Roos
this essay outlines my approach to creating
radio art, by winding back and forth between inspirational texts and
recordings. I am also interested in exploring how audio technology
is repurposed, whether by accident, or within the realm of sound art,
hip hop and radio art. In the process, I will explore some of the influences
on my Micro-Radio Project, as well as describe the places and
spaces in which this project’s unlicensed broadcasts have taken place
since 2005.
I’ve downloaded the first text from the C-Theory website, and it’s
right here on my laptop; it’s “The Turntable” by Charles Mudede. In
this essay, Mudede speaks of the idea of repurposing through the use
of the turntable in hip hop. I’ll scroll down to a quote that I like; it’s
under the heading “scratch 5”:
The turntable is always wrenched out of sleep by the hand that wants
to loop a break or to scratch a phrase. In a word, the turntable is awakened
by the DJ who wants to make (or, closer yet, remake), music (or,
closer yet, meta-music); whereas the instrument always sleeps when it
is used to make real music. 1
Let’s press pause on that thought, turn away from the bright screen of
my laptop, take a photocopy of a magazine off my shelf — an Artforum
from 1972, dust it off and open it up to an essay by Robert Smithson
entitled “Cultural Confinement.” 2 In this article, Smithson writes on
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