Listening to the World - Antigua and Barbuda

I notice that the list of countries on Wikipedia has been reduced by one. It seems that Wales is not a country.

Sorry, Wales.

And to Antigua and Barbuda.

This is my second Caribbean radio station in a row, so I'm in a very Caribbean mood. I've never been a big fan of the Caribbean, but now I think it might be nice to go someplace with a beach and dial up this sort of radio.

So I've been listening to Liberty Radio ZDK.


The first thing that I heard when I clicked into Liberty Radio was a delightfully groovy Caribbean version of "You Were Always on my Mind" - which became even more groovy and delightful when the DJ broke into the middle of the song to read birthday greetings. The next tune up was apparently about Jesus. I could tell this because the Chorus went "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus."

Further attempts to log in have been thwarted - there seems to be more people who want to listen to the radio than the servers can handle. That is a good thing -- in its own way.

Listening to the World - Anguilla

I think that there are more than one radio stations on Anguilla, but I find this one to be so delightful that I felt no need to find any more.

Two signs that this is the sort of radio station that I find delightful.

1. If you click on their webcam, you get to see a static picture of the cam because it isn't set up yet.
2. Their photo gallery has three pictures. One of the pictures is of their parking lot. The caption reads "Loads of parking space for visiting guests and clients."

The first time I found this station, I logged in, and after a few adverts, I hear what can only be described as the "reading the obituaries out loud show." Two very long and comprehensive death notices were read, listing the names of all the brothers, sisters, cousins, second cousins, aunts, uncles and I think (my brain was starting to glaze over at this point) a few really good friends. This was done over some light jazz. It took about fifteen minutes and then they cut to some syndicated American religious program.

Another bit I caught was a two part public affairs program. The first part had representatives from the "Anguilla Beautification Club." The second half was about hurricane preparedness. The common denominator for both segments is car parts in the front yard -- Clean that stuff up, folks! It makes your yard look nice and it won't hit you in the head when a hurricane comes.

Now, people are going to read this and think that I'm just making fun. In some ways, I am. But I have a lot of respect for these scrappy little stations. These are people whacking a radio station together out of nothing. There aren't any radio executives with advanced degrees in Broadcasting Science working with squads of six-figure earning marketing wonks. If this station was in my town, I'd be pulling into their "loads of parking" and asking if I could volunteer some time helping out. And I bet they wouldn't laugh at me for doing so.

That's why I find this station so delightful.

Listening to the World - Angola

The pattern that has emerged in the process of doing these posts is this:

1. I start looking at my next country.
2. I find some radio stations on the internet.
3. I fail to connect to the radio stations.
4. I write a draft of the post explaining how I was unable to listen to the radio station in question.
5. Just before posting, I double check the links.
6. In the process of double checking, I find a way to connect to the radio station.
7. I chuck the post and start over.

This is the link to Angola's Radio Luanda, which seems to be Radio Angola's music station. The live feed will not load for me, but you can click on the link labeled "Oiça as músicas que estão no top" (Angola's "official" language is Portuguese) to get a nifty mp3 of excerpts of all the songs in their top ten countdown. I venture a guess that all the songs are from local artists. Which makes my inability to log in all the more frustrating.

Listening to the World - Andorra

Before I commence with the latest installment, a question.

What is the word for those goofy sound effects that seem to be present on every single music radio station on the planet? The things that go:

Important Voice: "You are listening to Radio Example" Neeeeeeeee-- Yooooowwwwww Clud Clud Clud Clud "All Hit Radio."

Or:

Stern Female Voice: "It it two minutes past the hour." Bink-dink-a-dink diddly dink "Time for News Update." Bink-dink-a-dink diddly dink "With Chet Example." Bink-dink-a-dink diddly dink.

I'm curious about how these things have come to be so ubiquitous and so similar.

Anyway, to business.

The Principality of Andorra is a small pseudo-independent country (While it is an independent nation, the title of "Co-Prince" is given simultaneously to the current Prime Minister of France and the current Bishop of Urgell. I love crap like this! I want to go there now!) occupying a hunk of the Pyrenees between France and Spain.

The language spoken there is Catalan. I'd always presumed that Catalan was a close sub-dialect of Spanish. I was wrong. It seems to be more related to Portuguese than anything, but I do hear a bit of French rattling around in it.

I've been beating my head against this site for a while and had found loading the radio feed was impossible. But then I found my way to this site which has the correct feed.

You will notice that the station (94.2 FM) is listed as being "local music."

Local music in Andorra is nuts.

I'd put about 20 per cent tops as "local music" although for all I know the songs that seem local are from France and Spain. The rest is what I am forced to call "eclectic."

I hate to use the term "eclectic" because it has come to imply a sort of willful effort to go digging for rare and obscure nuggets that the presenter is delighted for the opportunity to share with an audience that will appreciate the musical nuances of the juxtapositions created when one track follows another of a seemingly unrelated style.

This station might be doing that. Or it might be just some guy in the control room throwing tapes in the machine at random. My favorite moment was when I heard Popcorn followed by the Fine Young Cannibals followed by someone covering The Crash Test Dummies on pan-pipes. Did someone sit down and come up with that, or was it just a fluke? I can't decide. I love that.

Listening to the World - American Samoa

Pardon me if I don't have this entirely correct, but it's a bit more complicated than I was first expecting.

American Samoa is an "American unincorporated unorganized territory." "Unincorporated" means "not under the jurisdiction of a particular American State." "Unorganized" means that the territory's government is not established or overseen by the US, even though it is a US territory.

American Samoa is the only unincorporated unorganized territory that has a civilian population -- all the rest are either home to military bases or completely uninhabited. I had presumed that there would be a military base there. I was wrong, there were bases there in World War Two, but they have now been abandoned.

But the important question remains -- just what is the quality of their "Hit Music Radio?"

Well, it sounds just like American radio, except for the occasional advertisement in Samoan.

Here you go, have a listen.

Listening to the World - Algeria

I want very much to like Algerian radio, but I'm afraid that I have not been having the best of luck with it.

This site seems to be the best place to go for radio from Algeria (I've been clicking through to the French language section, so as to give me at least a fighting chance to find my way around). There are four channels on web feed and by the notes I've been taking the last few weeks they seem to correlate to:

Chaine 1 - Poppier - Dance Music
Chaine 2 - seems to be traditional music
Chaine 3 - talk
Radio El-Bahdja - More festive traditional music

This seems to be the case about sixty percent of the time. There seems to be a lot of talk on all the channels. The signal is pretty choppy, so whatever is going on is generally pretty frustrating to listen to.

Algerians! Do you have better radio? Send me a link!

Listening to the World - Albania

I have, in the past, spent a bit of time listening to Top Albania Radio, as it is the first country that generally shows up on the lists of World Internet Radio stations. I Like TAR, as it has quite a lot of local talent on hand - If I am reading their Playlist correctly, 9 artists on the top 20 are Albanian. Listening for a few days off and on I can say that the local stuff is as good if not better than the stuff on American radio at the moment (though I can chalk some of the betterness to my inability to understand any of the lyrics). There was some stuff in English, but the only thing I was able to recognize was Matisyahu doing "King Without a Crown" (US UK). I don't know all that much about Albania's religious demographic, but I find this a little fascinating.

Listening to the World - Afghanistan (revisited)

When I had a look at Afghanistan radio, I mentioned that I had signed up to Arman FM's mailing list, so I could find out how they are doing. They, or their hired spam-bots, sent me this link to their live feed.

I will say again that I do not speak the language, so I am not certain what is going on, but it sounds to me like they are holding a contest where the callers have to sing a pop song from memory. If the caller doesn't sing the song correctly in time, then time-bomb sound effects start to go off.

Considering what I referred to before as Afghanistan's "infrastructure problems," I have to say that this is the most guts I have ever seen from a pop radio format.

I also note from the link that the Afghans are raising money amongst themselves to give to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Boy, does that make me feel proud to be an American.

Listening to the World - Åland

I'll start by noting that as I understand it, an "A" with a circle over it is different from a normal "A" and comes at the end of the alphabet. But I don't alphabetize things in Wikipedia, so off we go.

Åland is a group of islands between Sweden and Finland. It seems to be one of those territories that has been bounced back and forth as nations conquer each other and now finds itself in a strange semi-autonomous limbo. Currently it is an independent protectorate of Finland even though the inhabitants, as far as I can tell, tend to self-identify as Swedish.

Anyway, most of their radio fare seems to be Swedish, which makes sense, as they are reasonably close to Stockholm. I'll get to Sweden eventually.

The one radio station that I could find with a web feed is this one. It seems to be mostly talk. The day that I spent listening I got an opportunity to listen to an interview with Torsten Sommarström (unless he was the interviewer). The person being interviewed seemed to be an older gent, and he was talking about San Francisco. The discussion was interspersed with the occasional polka, so that was sort of nice.

Åland, meanwhile, looks like an excessively cool place. I come to realize that I am a sucker for groups of islands that I've never heard of before.

Listening to the World - Akrotiri and Dhekelia

Wikipedia says:

Akrotiri and Dhekelia are two areas on the island of Cyprus that comprise the Sovereign Base Areas Overseas Territory of the United Kingdom. The bases were retained by the UK following the transition of Cyprus' status from a colony in the British Empire to an independent Commonwealth republic within the Commonwealth of Nations. The United Kingdom retained the bases arising from the strategic location of Cyprus in the Mediterranean Sea.

The upshot is: no independent radio from this entity, it's all British Military rebroadcast hubs and signals from Cyprus.

Rats.

Listening to the World - Afghanistan

The next stop on my tour is Afghanistan. Afghanistan's radio industry seems to be bounding back from what I will refer to as "infrastructure problems."

Much of the radio that I've found from there seems to be sponsored by either the BBC or Voice of America. I think that's cheating, so I kept poking about.

I was then able to find a number of stations that were religious or news-related. Finally I was able to come across a couple of music stations.

The first, Radio A.F.G., seemed to be precisely what I was looking for: a live stream that seemed to be working and music. There were a few breaks and the occasional bit of what sounded like comedy skits, but predominantly music. The music, to my ears, seems to mirror what I've experienced with the rest of Afghan culture (which is barely enough to have a decent opinion, so bear with me) -- by virtue of its location it seems to me to be a mixture of Indian, Muslim, and Russian influences, manifesting in that order. Different enough from Indian music to make me notice differences, (the instrumentation, for example), but a couple of hours in I was up for a curry run. I spent about three days total on this station and only heard one track that I could consider a cultural interloper: Zamfir's "The Lonely Shepherd" of all things.

On closer examination, Radio A.F.G. doesn't meet my criteria, however. It looks like it is web based, and the dj's aren't actually physically in Afghanistan. (There are two from Canada, one from the US, one from Denmark, and another from "Hollandistan" - there is a slot open, if you speak Pashto, this might be your big break!).

So continuing to search, I was able to find Arman FM, which broadcasts a signal to Jalalabad, Kabul, Mazar, Herat and Kandahar. Unfortunately, there is no live feed. There are a few mp3s, but the number of dead pages and my inability to find anything that is dated more recently than 2005 makes me a trifle concerned. So I have just signed onto their mailing list.

Listening to the World - Abkhazia

As part of my never ending quest for things to watch and listen to, I've always been fascinated with foreign broadcasting. As soon as I was able, I've used the internet to dial up stations from whatever country seemed most interesting at the time.

So to start a new project, I've decided to have a listen to a station (or perhaps two or three, depending on how it goes) representing every country on Earth. In alphabetical order.

I'll be using this list from wikipedia, which currently has 245 entries.

The first on the list is Abkhazia. According to Wikipedia, Abkhazia is

a de facto independent republic located on the eastern coast of the Black Sea, bordering the Russian Federation to the north, and within the internationally recognized borders of Georgia. Abkhazia’s independence is not recognized by any international organization or country and it is regarded as an autonomous republic of Georgia.

The capitol of Abkhazia is Sukhumi and the next time you pass through town you can listen to Radio Soma.

Radio Soma is a mostly popular music station (they seem to mix in some jazz and traditional music of the area - there also seems to be blocks of Arabian pop and Classical). There isn't a stream ("Our music stream is not original neither sophisticated - it doesn't matter to put him into the web."), but if you click onto the "what's playing" link, you will find some mp3s that show off the range of music they put out. (The classical tracks that were up when I visited were quite good as were the rest of the more obscure offerings.) You can also listen to the news in Russian and a selection of advertisements.

It is a plucky looking little station. The website claims that they are housed in an abandoned toilet. I hope there's some translation nuance that was missed there.

All in all, I think we're off to a nice start.