Letter of Recommendation: Radio Garden
By Rosa Lyster
Nov. 5, 2019
On Tuesday, Oct. 1, at 11:25 a.m. local time, a radio station in Torshavn in the Faroe Islands played a song called “Rave in the Grave,” by the Swedish D.J. AronChupa and Little Sis Nora. “Rave in the Grave” defies description in many ways, but if I were pushed into a corner, I would say that it had an “electro burlesque” feel and reminded me that Tim Burton has a lot to answer for. If I were further pushed, I would say that I am sorry to have heard it, because it will be with me always now, but that I liked the idea of someone in the Faroe Islands — this sparsely populated Danish archipelago in the middle of the North Atlantic where they have developed a specialized term for the problem of falling off a cliff, so often does it happen because of the sudden onset of fog — jerking back from the radio in bewildered disgust at the same moment that I did in my kitchen in Cape Town.
From around 11:30 a.m. onward over in Klaksvik, the Faroe Islands’ second city, they were playing what I can only call sea shanties, one accordion song after the other, men’s voices lifting together to remind the listener of ocean spray and young sailors who will miss their sweethearts but are nevertheless glad to lose sight of land. Some of the sea shanties had English lyrics; others had what I assume were Danish or Faroese ones. All were organized around the principle that the accordion is the main instrument anyone needs in order to make a good or moving song.
Listening to Radio Garden presents many such opportunities for learning about the peculiarities of foreign cultures, and the extent to which they have embraced the accordion. It is a website — conveniently located at radio.garden — that allows users to tune in to live radio around the world. That sounds very simple, and in one sense, it is very simple. The interface is basic and easy to use: Spin the 3-D globe, click on a glowing green dot, representing a city or small town, and choose a radio station. In just seconds, you can go from Klaksvik to Yamoussoukro, the capital of Ivory Coast, where at 10:45 a.m. local time that same day, a station called Radio de la Paix was playing a Francophone cover of “Chimes of Freedom,” also heavy on the accordion.
Over in Conakry, Guinea, Nostalgie Guinée 98.2 FM was broadcasting a conversation between a number of men who sounded very angry, bordering on livid, although their energetically raised voices could also be attributed to the fact that they all seemed to be trying to speak into one microphone positioned at quite a distance from where they were sitting, possibly at the other end of some kind of cavernous hall. They could have all been best friends talking about football. They could have been sworn enemies promising to destroy one another. They could have been talking about the weather.
This is the pleasure of Radio Garden — the window it opens onto other places is both exceptionally vivid and exceptionally limited, like looking through a keyhole, so that you’re compelled to start filling in the rest of the picture yourself. Its interface obliterates all distinction between radio stations, and because radio stations themselves tend to target narrow slices of a population that I don’t necessarily know all that much about to begin with, Radio Garden raises as many questions as it answers. The string of sea shanties I heard could have been a natural result of what happens when you tune into the Faroe Islands’ shanty-only station, or I could have stumbled upon a special, never-to-be-repeated program: 24 hours of commercial-free shanties, a concession to a pushy loyal listener who loves sea shanties more than anything. Maybe it was his birthday.
I haven’t yet been able to answer this question, in part because Radio Garden offers so many appealing distractions, nearly all of them worthy of pause and attention, like Alpha Boys School Radio, the station I found in Jamaica that plays only music featuring past and current students of a 140-year-old vocational school in Kingston.
The school I attended growing up in Durban did not have its own special radio station. We were very ordinary, and did ordinary schoolwork. One project that was frequently repeated between the ages of 7 and 12 began with closing your eyes and spinning a globe, and the country your finger landed on was the one you had to learn about. Every one I chose seemed incredibly far away from South Africa, and I remember the thrill and despair of this distance. Even if I spent every day of the rest of my life visiting everywhere I’d ever felt curious about, and spent all my time staring at people and asking them about what kind of breakfast they like to eat, what made them choose those kinds of jeans, what made them feel bored, what made them laugh and did they agree that picnics are hugely overrated, I’d never be able to learn anything more than a fraction of what I’d like to about how people in other places live. There were too many different places, too many different people and too many different kinds of jeans. As an adult, I am resigned to this reality, but closing my eyes in Cape Town and spinning the globe on Radio Garden gives me that same feeling of being dazzled at how much world there is — and how unknowable so many of its corners will remain.
Rosa Lyster is a writer in Cape Town.
Topic: Radio Garden (Read 1138 times)
