“The Ultimate Rule ought to be: ‘If it sounds GOOD to you, it's bitchin’; if it sounds BAD to YOU, it’s shitty.’   The more your musical experience, the easier it is to define for yourself what you like and what you don’t like. American radio listeners, raised on a diet of _____ (fill in the blank), have experienced a musical universe so small they cannot begin to know what they like.”
― Frank Zappa, The Real Frank Zappa Book

Radio is a form of technological high magic. There is something about radio that stimulates the imagination; whether it’s tuning in to a distant station, or hearing something new that opens up a door onto a worthy topic of exploration, or transmits heavenly music, there is a mystery to radio that creates a strong pull over those who become enthralled by the medium.  Deindustrial fiction is already under radio’s thrall. Many of the stories I have read in Into the Ruins and New Maps have used radios, to the point where it has become one of the tropes of the genre. I think this points to the resilience of radio for our deindustrial futures, and I think it is worth exploring what the medium might yet become.

The word broadcasting comes to us from agriculture, and is used to describe a way for sowing seeds by scattering them over the soil rather than planting them in tidy rows. Radio is considered the first broadcast medium, for its distribution of audio to a dispersed audience over the airwaves. Though it is spread out wide as a form of mass communication, the effect of listening to radio is more one-on-one. Radio is intimate. Vibrations of a distant person’s voice are converted into traveling electromagnetic waves, then get reconverted into electrical impulses and come out of a speaker to vibrate the air within a listening space. It still remains magical to me after all these years.  To my mind, at its best, radio is on par with literature as a medium for sowing seeds in the imagination.  

Radio can be a literal theater of the imagination. Voices, sounds, and music edited together in a pleasing or thought-provoking way transport the listener to another region. Commercial interests and market forces have put a stranglehold on the medium, however. For the most part, you have to search out the community and college stations, the low-power stations, and even the pirate stations to find programs that are willing to break the self-inflicted format categories typical of the corporate ruled airwaves. Out on the fringes of the dial, and over the edge of what is normally considered acceptable in terms of what you are allowed to do, play and say at a station, are vast portions of imaginary spectrum that remain under-explored.
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These outlier shows are able to take risks that move the form forward without fear of reprisal. No one is paying them to be taste shapers by playing particular songs and they have no one to offend when exercising their freedom of speech because there are no image-sensitive sponsors paying the bills at these stations. These are directions radio would be free to go when the narrow bandwidth of acceptability imposed by advertising is removed. These under-explored areas are also ripe for retrovation. As our future societies downshift in response to being technologically overextended, the simpler decentralized infrastructure of radio will be due to make a comeback, ushering in its next golden age.   

The first golden age of radio was the decade between 1930 and 1940, with some bleed-over into the 1950s when television became the next big thing. Many of the shows that emerged during the golden age were born off the backs of successful vaudeville acts who brought their talent to the airwaves.  The popular pulp fiction of the time floated off its pages to be transformed into new iteration of theater: the radio play. This form of entertainment, where the voices of actors are heard but not seen, accompanied by incidental music and sound effects, is great for the imagination. Radio plays give free rein to listeners to visualize the story unfolding in their own distinct ways, similar to the way a story is imagined when reading. 

Television literally tells a vision of what is in the head of a director. It takes away the chance of visualizing settings and characters. People can have imaginative interactions with TV but in general not much is left up to the viewer.   The stars of the radio comedies, soap operas, and science fiction and mystery plays migrated to TV as it became ascendant. Radio still had power but the variety on individual stations began to dissipate as the concept of the format came in vogue. Stations began to narrow their focus. Some focused on news, sports, talk, talk, talk. Religious broadcasters thumped their bibles in the studio. Music shows and then entire stations diverged into pop, rock, jazz and classical. By the 1980s heavily formatted radio stations had become moribund and varicose. With large corporations owning multiple stations in cities across the country, the sounds of the old, weird America, as heard on regional programs, began to fade, while the sound of McGovCorp cut through any static from coast to coast.

Thinking of all the possibilities radio has, it is a real shame that broadcasting in its commercial aspect long ago fell into such a well-worn, predictable, and boring rut. The songs heard on the air when tuning across the dial have been played so many times there are almost no grooves left on the records. Nor is talk radio exempt. No matter what a person’s political persuasion may be, pundits on both sides of the aisle trot out the same plodding talking points time and again, no matter the issue at hand. It often makes me wonder what the heck the point of all the uninspired and placid propaganda blasted across the spectrum actually is; maybe it’s just a form of anti-thought to occupy the minds of hungry commuters and consumers. Broadcast radio as it now stands is a depreciated spectacle spread across the spectrum. It could be so much more.   

By the ’80s in America, there were few places to experiment with anything off the pre-approved, record-industry-friendly playlists or talking points. If you were lucky there was a college or community station somewhere on the dial where DJs and hosts could play and do what they wanted to. Listener-supported public radio offered some variety, for a time, and in some places pirate radio scenes were (and are) active in their electromagnetic resistance to the mandates of the FCC.  

Free-form radio came about as a result of the creativity of disc jockeys who followed their own muses, playing things of any genre or style, and mixing in talk and made-for-radio audio collages without being beholden to the dictates of a station manager—themselves beholden to corporate interests beholden to making money by selling time to advertisers. Big business doesn’t want views critical of any of their products aired on stations running their ads, thus limiting speech and song. The McGovCorp version of radio also put the kibosh on shows devoted to particular styles. Genres such as ambient, electronica, the heaviest kinds of metal, the most independent punk and rap, and those devoted to ethnic folk music are criminally neglected on the airwaves. This lack of variety often drives some to go pirate.   

​All the things that have normally been shunned to the far edges of the dial and overnight time-slots by McGovCorp are actually the things that could make radio great again. I think that time will come during the long descent as the high costs of television production and internet streaming skid into the obstacles of inflation, resource depletion, and waning public interest in spectacle and propaganda. 

Broadcast radio is only use of the technology. As a form of direct person-to-person communication, radio is a real can of worms. Not in that it causes problems, but that the worms so often wriggle forth to make claim after claim upon a person’s time. Radio is the kind of hobby that can easily become an obsession and take over every aspect of your life. In the coming years those saddled with this obsession may serve to keep distant communities stitched together, support their villages and cities in times of natural disaster or manmade emergency, and otherwise have a blast rag-chewing with people across the country and all around the world.  

Many new converts to the ham way of life come to it from the prepper subculture and already have a built-in mindset around the idea of short and long-term catastrophes affecting civilization. These are the people who are building stations, stashing equipment, and fortifying themselves with knowledge to pass on to others. Not every ham shares these views, of course, yet most are community-minded folk and many participate in public service events where back-up comms provide an extra safety net, should those used by police and fire departments fail. Some hams get involved in the allied hobby of storm spotting, relaying their on-the-ground weather sightings to broadcast stations to put together warnings for the wider public. Others are pure techies who spend little time transmitting and put all their efforts into soldering homebrewed gear on their workbench. Others just use radio as a way to be social and have long back-and-forth conversations and roundtable discussions with their fellows. Still other amateurs just want to chase DX (distant foreign stations) whose call signs they can put into their logbook and exchange QSL cards with (postcards, often with artwork, noting station details and specifics of the exchange). DX chasers often end up with binders and shoeboxes full of these cards from friends far away. Those are just a few cans of worms available to the amateur radio hobbyist. There are many more endeavors within the hobby should you choose to open the can. These include bouncing your radio signal off the moon, learning Morse code, and talking through dedicated ham radio satellites—while we still have them, before Kessler syndrome sets in. 

 The many modes available for hams to operate in also allow a great variety of potential use. Every radio signal that goes over the air is modulated in some way—by voice, by the on-and-off of a tone such as in morse code, or by digital methods that connect one computer to another over-the-air, sans internet. A ham with the right setup can send text messages using radioteletype, for instance. This toolkit can be deployed by those who wish to have a resilient web of communication when the existing web goes down (or becomes so much more full of crap than it is now that it is no longer worth the bother).

The existing ham radio network’s decentralized nature is a core strength. This decentralization will help ensure that it remains viable as society shudders, shutting other doors of connection. In the golden age of radio to come, independently self-organized hams will be able to conduct on-air meetings—called nets—to exchange critical information, news and messages.  If one station shuts down—for the night or even forever—others can remain on the air. If an important message needs to be relayed, the decentralized nature makes it more reliable, as there is no single point of failure.  It is even possible, as the long descent continues, for the dedicated hobbyist to set up their own radio-based Bulletin Board System (BBS) to send email and texts over the airwaves as long as basic computers can be kept running. 

 In the 1980s, in Czechoslovokia, behind the Iron Curtain, citizen access to home computers, and their experience with them, was very different than the West. The science of cybernetics had been dismissed by the Communists as bourgeois. When the Eastern Bloc started to gander how computers were being used for strategic military and science purposes, the authorities started to change their tune.  The Communist computer scientists had to roll their own systems without help from the bros in Silicon Valley. The machines they came up with would be unfamiliar to most Americans. As Communist products, most were not used as personal computers, but as collective computers for schools, institutions, and a few lucky clubs. Yet, as with so much else, western systems were smuggled in and personal systems cobbled together. An underground subculture coalesced around the exchange of information and programs, often in the form of zines and cassette tapes from amateur radio and computer clubs.  

Early computer programs were often stored on magnetic tape, reel-to-reels on the mainframes, and later cassettes. Engineers involved in the Nederlandse Omroep Stichting (NOS), a Dutch broadcasting organization, realized the data could be transmitted as audio over the air. They got the idea to create broadcasts where people could tape a game or program off the air and use it on their computer. Such programs gained a niche following in Europe in the early 80s. The tapes, and sometimes the radio signals, sometimes crossed over the Iron Curtain to be copied and traded. 

The sound of these programs will be familiar to those who remember dial-up or those with experience of ham radio data modes. Yet the practice of broadcasting computer programs over the air stopped in the mid- to late ’80s as computers sped up. The audio technique of encoding a program didn’t work for 16-bit computers. Cassette storage was out, and floppy disks were in.

A similar situation as existed in the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War could come to the West during the course of its decline. As people are forced to adopt older technologies, a small hacker and ham subculture could trade programs by broadcasting them over radio, to be taped onto cassette and loaded into existing refurbished computers taken out of the basements and garages of avid geeks. Enthusiastic retrovators could do the work to get these vintage computer systems running. When combined with ham-radio-style BBS systems an older ’70s to mid-’80s style of radio-based internet could be kept up for at least some time during the long descent among the technically adept. Mimeographed zines could provide documentation of best practices. 

More recently some ham radio operators have also been known to repurpose wi-fi routers to create line-of-sight internet wireless mesh networks.  Cory Doctorow’s novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town features a punk rocker who runs a dumpster diving operation, salvaging computers to set up a mesh net in Ontario. In the interim before the internet itself is gone, such a mesh net may be useful to those who wish to escape the increasingly censorious panopticon of social media, but want to remain online and able to share files and information.  

Such alternets to the web as it is known today, and other imaginative uses of radio, await the energized hobbyist in its next golden age.

In the absence of a legitimate government, pirate radio is always an option.  The barriers to entry in the broadcasting game aren’t as expensive as one would think, especially if one has a more modest area they wish to cover. If they do their pirate radio on the shortwave part of spectrum they can reach a wider, though smaller audience, due to the propagation effects. Shortwave radio pirates remain active on the air year after year.

Piracy has existed since the beginning of radio broadcasting and there is no reason to think that it will ever stop as long as radio is around. Pirate radio has every reason to continue to proliferate. When certain groups of people and types of programming are kept from speaking their minds and playing the music and sounds related to their culture on the corporate blandwaves, it has even greater appeal. One way of looking at pirate radio is as a “Media Squat,” a term coined by media theorist Douglas Rushkoff. Instead of squatting in an empty unused house, the media squatter takes up residence on an unused frequency. Contrary to the popular conception of squatters, it isn’t a given that they will wreck the place they are squatting. Many make improvements. The same can be said of squatting on a radio frequency and putting out better programming than the stuff trickling down from the big guns. From my study of the current pirate radio scene it seems the FCC is much more liable to hunt down transmitters on the FM and commercial broadcasting portion of the spectrum than they are the sporadic efforts of shortwave pirate radio hobbyists.   

If you want to put your own station on the air without breaking the law, though, there is another option. Part 15 of the FCC regulations ruling electronic communication do allow for smaller FM and AM broadcasting with limited outputs of power and strict guidance for interference with other stations. But small is beautiful, right? These types of stations can potentially reach a block to a few blocks in a city neighborhood, and can be quite fun to run with a minimum of equipment and technical know-how. Certain patriotic groups have even advocated setting up networks of Part 15 stations. Synchronized to a single source, or daisy-chained together, they would play the same material, creating a low-tech network capable of blanketing larger areas—given enough stations. 

Pirate radio and Part 15 stations can be used to create healthier radio ecology than the current monocropping.

The radio hobby is such a can of worms that this column can only scratch the surface of all the possibilities that await those who jump down the rabbit hole into its wonderland. Everything from shortwave listening to radio scanning can be folded into the hobby. For folks who are a bit mic-shy and don’t want to talk on the air themselves, these latter two may be useful places to start. Shortwave listening is one tool for getting information from around the world when other sources fail. Even in times when there is no emergency or crisis, listening to news and views from other countries, hearing their music, and learning about their culture is an engaging past time, as is chasing DX. 
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On the local front, having a scanner radio capable of picking up police, fire, aviation and other signals is a good way to keep tabs on what is going on in your community before the media picks it up and puts their spin on events. Having a scanner will be especially useful to monitor situations in events of civil unrest and natural disasters. I find scanning to be somewhat depressing, as listening to people get arrested or hearing another call to the fire department about an elderly person who has fallen isn’t always my idea of a good time. Yet the practice of listening in to this kind of radio traffic does have a definite use. If you enjoy trains or aviation, it’s pretty easy to pick up comms from rail yards and air traffic control. These are just a few of the doors that can be unlocked with a scanner. Those who become adept at scanning can end up being sleuths of the airwaves, tracking down frequencies and listening to government agents, utility companies, and private businesses all as a way of gathering information and signals intelligence.  

​CARRIER WAVES

In the next golden age there will be numerous ways to interact with radio, similar but different to how things are done now. Business as usual in the radio industry won’t be an option. The cracks in legacy media are already widening, and beneficial weeds are starting to claw their way through. With any luck these early colonizers will make things ripe for a bountiful media ecology that nourishes the soil of the imagination to regenerate the medium so its many untapped possibilities are open for new uses in a declining age. 

Local and hyperlocal broadcasting may once again rise up, giving voice to bioregional concerns and culture. On these shows a truly diverse range of programming could be encouraged. As television falls away actors could find a new home in the revitalized world of the radio drama. The home use of scanners can keep listeners informed of the goings on in their neighborhoods in times of quiet and emergency, allowing them to make up their own minds about events. On the national level, a smaller number of larger AM and shortwave stations could be used to tie the bonds of North America and other continents together. A robust ham radio scene, intertwined with the remnants of the hacker subculture, may give rise to an alternet web of radio based communications. And on these carrier waves the seeds of America’s next great culture may be broadcast across the land.

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This article originally appeared in New Maps.

RE/SOURCES: 

American Radio Relay League (ARRL), <https://www.arrl.org/>. For those in the United States, this is a great resource for all things amateur radio, from getting licensed, to finding a club, to setting up your first ham station and getting on the air.  

DeFelice, Bill. Part 15 Broadcasting: Build Your Own Legal, License-Free, Low Power Radio Station. Self-published, 2016. < https://www.hobbybroadcaster.net/resources/free-part-15-radio-broadcasting-ebook.php> Bill DeFelice has put together a wonderful website at hobbybroadcaster.net devoted to Part 15 broadcasting, with many articles and resources to help people get started.

English, Trevor. “You Could Download Video Games From the Radio in the 1980s.” Interesting Engineering (website), Mar. 8, 2020. <https://interestingengineering.com/science/you-could-download-video-games-from-the-radio-in-the-1980s>

Finkelstein, Norman H. Sounds in the Air: The Golden Age of Radio. New York, N.Y.: Scribners, 1991.
HF Underground. <https://www.hfunderground.com/board/index.php> This site offers the description, “Shortwave Pirate Radio In North America And Around The World, And Other Signals That Go Bump In The Night.” HF Underground is more of a message board where people who listen to shortwave pirates post about what they hear. Active radio pirates have been known to hang out and lurk on the boards.
Lewis, Tom. The Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio. New York, N.Y.: Edward Burlingame Books, 1991. 

Maly, Martin. “Home Computers Behind the Iron Curtain.” Hackaday (website), Dec. 15, 2014. https://hackaday.com/2014/12/15/home-computers-behind-the-iron-curtain/

Philips, Utah. “Radio: The Story of Radio from Crystal Set to ‘Sandman the Midnight D.J.” < https://www.thelongmemory.com/loafers-glory-episodes> The episode in question is number nine of Loafer’s Glory, but any of Utah Phillips amazing slices of radio are worth taking the time to listen to.

Radio Society of Great Britain (RSGB). <https://rsgb.org/> Our friends across the pond tell us great things about RSGB. It is also open to international members. For those in the UK wishing to get licensed the RSGB will provide the relevant details. 

​Reitz, Ken, ed. The Spectrum Monitor. <https://www.thespectrummonitor.com/> A monthly online PDF magazine covering “Amateur, Shortwave, AM/FM/TV, WiFi, Scanning, Satellites, Vintage Radio and More.” Each issue is a hefty chunk of knowledge, history, how-to, and reports from radio active writers. 

For the past few months I’ve been a regular reader and occasional commenter on Ted Gioa’s substack The Honest Broker. Something I said on his recent post “Nine Observations on the Avant-Garde” caused quite a spark, as those comments, on music and on place, on geography, on the Midwest, caused quite a spark with other readers judging by the amount of “likes” and responses I got to the comments I made. It seems fitting that thoughts on noise music should lead to a meditation on the idea of a Rust Belt Renaissance, but so it goes.

I first started thinking about the idea of a revival of the Rust Belt in the spring of 2009 when John Michael Greer wrote his article “Rethinking the Rust Belt,” originally published on his peak-oil focused blog The Archdruid Report. 

As most of my readers know, I live in Cincinnati, and the idea of this area becoming a revitalized haven during the vagaries of climate change, gradual deindustrialization and attendant downshifting of the financialized economy was very appealing. As I have seen so much of things Mr. Greer has predicted come true in the decades I've been reading him, this remains so. I love my home town, the state I’m from, and the Midwest in general. I love other places too. I have family in Maine and my wife and I sometimes fantasize about moving there. I don’t know the exact contours of our future, but for the foreseeable portion of it, we are here to stay.  

The Rust Belt used to be a hopping place. In the mid-20th century we were coming into our own as a manufacturing economy, making cars, steel, and offering a plethora of services, trading American made goods abroad. In Cincinnati GE was one of the big companies, making plane engines, among other things. Families with one worker could bring home the bread, the bacon, and the butter, raising multiple little ones on a single paycheck. They'd even have some left over to take out their land boats onto the newly paved highways for vacations around the country. The kids could even buy some tchotchkes at the roadside attractions that dotted the landscape. It was a plentiful life even for the working class. Now the working class is oftentimes straight up homeless.

The closing down of the factories and relocation of labor to distant countries by the corporate powers sent these once powerful centers of productivity and culture here in the heartland into crumbling disarray. The same migrations that brought people up from the south to Detroit and elsewhere now caused them to move to other points and these places emptied out, many of the factories closed, and they became the playgrounds of graffiti artists, urban explorers and photographers looking for the perfect centerfold for their next piece of ruin porn.

This exodous happened some fifty years ago. The people who had made a life in the Midwest left when the opportunities were gone. They had to look out for themselves and their own after all. There is no blame. Many found work on the coasts in the seaports, receiving the goods back from overseas that they once were responsible for making to ship there. In the meantime the heartland began to rust, and like the Tinman from Oz, it remained in serious need from some tender care and drops of oil to keep its valves moving.

Yet now the Midwest and Rust Belt are becoming destination spots again as the failed social policies and expensive economies of the east and west coast put a good life out of reach for all but the elites. People who I know who moved away around the time I graduated high school in 1998 are now coming back in drove. These people couldn't wait to get out of Cincinnati for New York, Seattle, or Portland (Oregon, not Maine) are coming back, remembering all the good things about the area.

In the meantime my own neighborhood has become gentrified. A number of those doing the gentrifying are people who have left California. My wife and I have been in our neighborhood for over twenty years. It wasn’t all yoga moms and people pushing strollers with lattes when we got here. Our neighborhood was a mix of Appalachian working class folk, African Americans, gays and lesbians, and of course, artists and creatives. It followed the similar story we all know from our many lessons in gentrification. The artists and alternative types came and pioneered the run down neighborhood, put in some record stores, bars and coffee shops, and others started flocking to the microcultural mecca thus created.  That's why we were here. It was fun and funky, and there was diversity of both kinds of people and kinds of thinking. Now people are flocking to it from all the way on the other side of the country, and its less diverse. That has driven up the real estate costs, part of the same bubble that seems ready to burst all across the country, and bring down the rest of the economy with it. I couldn't move to my house if I sold it now. But relative to coastal dweller,  our homes are downright cheap. For someone coming here from LA, it’s nothing to drop half a million on a flipped house with good bricks and bones. We were lucky and got in when a house here cost less than a hundred grand (minus all the interest the bank got from us) and stayed put. 

In addition to neighbors from Californian, a stranger who was a reader of John Michael Greer’s blog got in touch with me last year to ask if I wanted to meet up for coffee. I did. It was kind of awkward but fun. He and his family had just relocated from California. He had some family connections here and they were looking to start a small farm somewhere outside the city. He was really enjoying it so far, and had mentioned part of the reason they came was how culturally chaotic and expensive things had gotten in his home state. 
  
Cincinnati has fared much better than our neighbors up north in Youngstown and Detroit, but those are coming back. Detroit had already been a destination for people with ambitions to go in, buy a really cheap house, fix it up with some elbow grease and get to work building a life and rebuilding the city, maybe with some urban farming thrown in for good measure. Some didn't even buy a house, but pioneered abandoned homes. And so the trend of inward migration from the east and west coasts continues. Part of it has to do with climate change too. Aside from risk of tornadoes and serious thunderstorms, we don’t have a lot of natural disasters in this part of the country. A bit of flooding during the heavy rain season of winter is now becoming more common along our river ways. But there are no wildfires like in California. We don’t have the same issues with regular ongoing drought either.

There are other advantages for people to come here though. We may not have the oceans, but we do have all kinds of rivers and the in the northern parts of the heartland, the Great Lakes -which according to esoteric tradition are poised to become the center of a future great civilization. Another advantage is the age of the cities here. Unlike cities further west, we were built before cars had come to dominate urban planning. Our neighborhoods were already established when walking and horse and buggy were the main ways of getting around, followed by street cars and short-line trains out to the suburbs where the wealthy magnates of industry established themselves. Our neighborhoods are very walkable, built on grids, and already densely built in many cases with older painted lady shotgun houses in rows (like ours) and beautiful Italinate architecture, as well as traditional classical and Art Deco style buildings in our city centers.

People like me who’ve had family here for a few generations don’t need to be convinced about the good life you can have in Cincinnati. But others are cozying up to the cheaper cost of living and the culture we have here. The museum, music, nightlife and art scenes are as fine as anywhere else. And that’s where this starts to tie back in with the avant-garde and the humanities in general.

I know so many people who left for the coasts in order to pursue a life in the arts. LA, San Francisco, NYC, Portland and Seattle, these were the places to go to meet “like minded” people and pursue the dream of making it as an artist, whether in the visual arts, music, writing, acting, what have you. One in particular did make it onto the national and international tier as a musician after moving to New York. He is the exception. Many others have had certain achievements in the arts  but not what can be considered continued commercial success. Not enough to "make it." But the lasting success of building a quality life has evaded quite a few of them and they have come back here, drawn by our many amenities. I'd also say they are drawn by the friendlier disposition of those of us in the Midwest (I heard the latter from two friends who had moved to Seattle, who described the people as standoffish and cold). Back in the early oughts people were talking about this migration from the inner cities of America to the coasts as the Brain Drain, and I resented it then, not least because friends I enjoyed conversing with and some making music with had left. Now I can look back and smile, but  not out of meanness. I stuck to my guns by staying here and through hard work we have managed to get out of debt, when many my age or older even, are starting over again when they come back. But all in all, I am happy they are back, and I welcome the newcomers. There is no blame. Together we can all retrofit the crumbling infrastructure and make something remarkable of these walkable neighborhoods.

In Ted Gioia’s article he cited a conference about the “crisis in the avant-garde” and Lucy Sante in particular who said, “An avant-garde needs a scene, and the cities are too expensive for scenes now. An avant-garde needs an excess of time, and that’s in short supply nearly everywhere.”

In point four of Gioia's article he says, "The avant-garde today is too much about grant-writing, and cozy relationships with the wealthy." I agree for those on the coast, but that wasn't my experience.

Cincinnati always had a small but mighty avant-garde music scene. The people who I looked up to when I was coming up in the nineties had roots in that going back to the punk, industrial and art music scenes of the seventies. It might have been on smaller scale than what was happening in NYC or San Francisco, but it also allowed us to forge our own way and remain scrappy. We weren’t tied to any of the big patrons or donors or institutions in the way the coastal elites were. 

Noise music in the Midwest came out of the feeling of this being a landscape of noise, of rusting factories. In many ways its in our bones. Trent Reznor, who is arguably the most recognizable of musicians working in the industrial genre was born in Pennsylvania and started making his brand of music in Cleveland where he rubbed elbows with the likes of Pere Ubu, the great art punk rockers. The noise in the environtment and the urban decay have gone hand in hand making the Midwest  a place where this kind of music has thrived.

As a commenter by the name of Kerem on the Honest Broker put it, “to locate the contemporary avant-garde, or at least one manifestation of it, perhaps you should shift your focus away from its traditional strongholds. Possibly the most electrifying performance I've ever witnessed was Aaron Dilloway and Victoria Shen (noise musicians from Ohio and the bay area, respectively) on a shared bill earlier this year in St Louis. St. Louis and other cities in the midwest / rust belt are home to thriving, highly localized noise and free improv scenes that operate almost entirely outside of the mainstream culture industry.” I’ve been to several shows in my neighborhood just this year from local and touring musicians myself, all put on completely underground, all put together under the rubric of the DIY ethic.

Thus those coming to the Midwest will have a certain freedom from the mainstream culture industry as another decisive bonus. What kind of music, art, writing and acting people want to do now is up in the air, but living in a place where it is cheaper to build a life, gives more of a possibility to living a frugal Bohemian art-life where less time can be devoted to a day job and just getting by, and more can be devoted to achieving individual and community visions if people are willing to do it DIY.

A Rust Belt renaissance won’t be achieved by art alone, however, but it won’t be achieved without art. As climate change, economic downturn, and limited energy supplies continue to put the pinch on the ability to outsource our lifestyles from overseas, low-tech and small scale industry will return to the Rust Belt as well. This will make the region a viable place for people starting families again and looking to get a home (after that bubble bursts). 

John Michael Greer nailed the nascent trend we are now beginning to see become fulfilled. As we proceed further we can also take to the heartland these words, “One of the implications is that transport costs will no longer be a negligible part of the cost of goods shipped over long distances. More energy-efficient transport modalities will tend to replace less efficient ones because they, and thus the goods they ship, will be more affordable; equally, diseconomies of distance will tend to outweigh economies of scale and foster the reemergence of regional economies. Among the likely beneficiaries of these changes are the towns that thrived best in an earlier, more regional economy — those that are well served by rail and water transport, surrounded by farming regions that don’t depend on irrigation, not too far from major markets, and provided with ample and inexpensive real estate for the factories and warehouses of a downscaled and relocalizing industrial economy.”

Away from the pernicious influence of the self-appointed guardians of culture and taste on the coasts, those born with the inclination to make and make do have many opportunities to put their own vision into action here in the Midwest. There will still be challenges as we adapt to the limits we can no longer rightfully ignore. There will still be challenges as we adapt to the consequences of bad past behaviors. All of this in turn can help create a resilient social and physical infrastructure. Both of these infrastructures are certainly in need of some retrofitting now. They could also use some retrovation. We should look back towards traditional ways of doing things and being together before the internet and streaming put such a vice grip on our social lives.  We need to have more “third places” where the seeds, buds and blooms of the Rust Belt renaissance will begin to form.

The Rust Belt is ready for its devoted old timers, returnees and new comers to join together and build up the book shops, cafes, bars, venues, galleries, breweries, urban farms, apothecaries, smithies, glass blowing studios, pottery barns, and wood shops and more all needed as we downshift from industrial culture to vibrant local life and bioregional communities.      

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In other news my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory is now officially available in North America. US readers can find it on Bookshop.org here , Amazon.com here and fine bookstores everywhere.

I also had the honor of being interviewed by Neil Mason for his wonderful Moonbuilding magazine and substack of the same name. You can get the print issue of Moonbuilding from the Castles in Space bandcamp page, and read the full interview over in this issue of Moonbuilding.

The Radio Phonics Laboratory also received a very nice review from the wonderful Steve Barker in the September issue  487 of Wire Magazine, out on news stands now.  Be sure to check out the magazine if you get the chance, and Steve's great radio show, On the Wire. 

And over at Igloo Magazine there is a feature with my interview with ambient music pioneer Don Slepian, material from which went into the Rad Lab.

To celebrate the US launch of the book, I've created the Rad Lab Vox Machina mix of songs utiiizing vocoders and text to speech software.