Five Songs on Radiohive

Radiohive Eleanor is the most cheerful illegal media dissident I’ve ever met. We caught up with her on the third floor of a dingy office building in an NYC location she made me swear not to reveal. The offices housed a lot of socialist/communist/anarchist organizations, media outlets, NGOs, etc., a little lefty Alamo in a sea of finance and fashion and affluence. A busy and secretive-seeming older man with glasses, a briefcase, and an anachronistic tweed suit passed us in the fluorescent-lit stairwell on the way up to the studio of what is, to my knowledge, Manhattan’s only pirate radio station, on which Joel, Tyler, Anna and I were about to perform live. He pointed us to the door and skulked off to write a manifesto or something, and we filed in.

The studio was a cramped office with a decent street view, the transmitter apparently homemade and housed in a beat up film canister Faraday cage, the monitor a boom box with unrealistically killer bass response. Eleanor, chirpy and focused, set us up to broadcast in minutes. I plugged a delay pedal and dynamic microphone directly into the board, set the levels right, and waited for her to start the broadcast and announce us. Joel opened fire with bursts of static and warped harmonies from his microcassette recorder, Tyler beat on the floor, and we started singing songs. Here’s a link: Radiohive.