Shirley & Spinoza Radio Archive

Free Radio Berkeley (1997-1998)

Posted on June 1st, 1998 by s&S.
Categories: collage, Latest Additions!, live-mix, vintage s&S.

Free Radio Berkeley was an unlicensed community micro-power FM radio station operating in Berkeley in the latter 1990′s. It was the most notorious micro station at the time as it’s unofficial head, having generated murky waters and institutional sympathy with the project, was constantly and admirably embroiled in legal stand-offs with the feds.

s&S had a show there in 1995-96 (just one of us) and 1997-98 (dynamic duo!)….sandwiched between a well done show called Slave Revolt Radio and another featuring the local bike Nazi something or other.

The revolution notwithstanding, FRB was at any given time an abysmal technical wreck (broken decks covered in duct tape glue, buzzing broken turntables that sounded like B-24 air-raids underneath all your tracks, microphones that literally smelled like alcoholic hippie kitchen puke mixed with incense…) but it was time of early ritualistic show making for s AND S that gave us an excuse to happily freak out a little in between proper sound-editing jobs. Lord knows why they gave us, these impostor sound clowns the key.

Because of the chronically trashed state of affairs at FRB, and tired of finding that we couldn’t use the source material we’d brought because the decks were all broken, we enacted two tactics: the first was the assemblage of the original s&S noise kit, a self contained second-hand hard suitcase wired and fitted with CD players, a cassette deck, effects, a mic, mixer, power, etc…All we needed was an outlet and inputs to plug into and we were good to go! As our shows became more sonically ambitious, I started pre-editing sources until we ultimately reached a point where we simply did the entire live show in one take 90 minutes before air-time at my more reliable home bedroom studio, made some sandwiches, then jumped in my pickup-truck toward the station to play the resultant DAT tape and layer a few more things on top…. Yeah, we were cheating, but hell…nothing ever worked at that joint! Plus too many FRB weirdos would drop in to check out what we were doing…thus breaking the spell.
Anyway… FRB… really though – very fond memories! Thanks for putting up with us.

While the motherload of shows from s&S’s Free Radio Berkeley days are not available to me to post in the Archive currently, behold an action-packed list of clips and intros.

ALSO: a 30 minute edit of s&S moments from FRB in 1995 aka “episode 24″ can be found in the Archive HERE

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s&S: episode 24

Posted on October 21st, 1995 by s&S.
Categories: collage, found / thriftstore, improvisation, Latest Additions!, live-mix, vintage s&S.

While the title of this ‘show’ might suggest that it directly followed Episode 23, that’s not exactly the case.

“23″ was a half hour compilation of segments from the first semester of s&S during the CalArts years – compiled from and to cassette in 1993. Episode 24 was also similarly a compilation sampler of unrelated segments but mostly pulled from the shows when S of s&S had a generally solo stint assaulting the micro-power airwaves at Free Radio Berkeley the year or two following (1994-5).

After graduating, S of s&S moved up north to the San Francisco Bay Area, while s of s&S stayed at CalArts for another pair of years to throw more money into the art school well. Often I (s) would generate layered source mix tapes to send north to Dave and he would use use them in the mix of his show at FRB – which was at the time in the converted upstairs bathroom of a group hippie house in Oakland. Truth be told, “s&S north” may have embellished these clips a bit before offing them to me by post back in 1994 or ’5. But a spastic radio-audio letter from a best pal, shoot! what could be more fun to get in the mail?…
And…so…. suddenly, the Berkeley burnout callers revealed proof of the geography…no question that s&S had quite shifted to the Bay Area.

Listen to a Lo-Fi stream here:

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stream / download the Hi-Fi 192kbps MP3 file below:

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s&S: episode 23

Posted on April 1st, 1993 by s&S.
Categories: collage, found / thriftstore, improvisation, Latest Additions!, live-mix, vintage s&S.

From the deep dark corners of the s&S vault:

We first started pushing noises around the mixer for fun as s&S while film students at the California Institute of the Arts in the early 1990′s.

After signing up for our first extra curricular radio show slot, we quickly discovered that straight-up music playing was best reserved for the proverbial birds (and professionals) and that it was just loads more fun once you essentially started dumping all of your records onto the mixer at once. Not only that, but most music really did sound better to our ears at the time with the sound of baaaah-ing sheep in the background… and Gyuoto monk chant LPs did sound better at 78 rpm. I mean, how else could we ever have time or opportunity to preview all the crap that we scavenged from thriftbins the previous weekend?

During this much more spastic era of s&S, we’d shuttle the entire collection of thriftstore records in 2 turbo charged, AA battery powered supermarket shopping carts across campus to the closed circuit radio closet that was KCIA for our weekly show. Obviously improvised micro skits and nonsensical one liners glued together the bursts of glorious thriftcore on the fly each week to the listening enjoyment of the 4 or 5 folks that could actually pick up the signal in their art studios on the floors below.

“Episode 23″ was a half hour compilation of segments from our first semester of shows during 1992-1993. all excerpts taken from the lo-bias audio cassette air-check tapes that we’d kept each week. “23″ was though, simply meant to end up on the B-side on 60 minutes mix tapes sent to friends in the mail at the time…..

enjoy.

-FC

Listen to a Lo-Fi stream here:

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stream / download the Hi-Fi 192kbps MP3 file below:

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