Transceiver Radio—a collaboratively produced experiment in radio as cultural commons—began in 2019 as a curatorial platform and a month-long exhibition at Transformer in Washington, D.C. As of 2022, Transceiver Radio continues to operate as a nomadic community radio station in service to artists, community members and organizers.

We at Transceiver Radio ground our ethos in community radio’s legacy as a public platform full of radical potential. Community radio offers an alternative to both government and corporate-funded media. Community radio is volunteer-run, often cooperatively owned, and open to contributions by anyone in the community with something to say and a willingness to pitch in. Its participatory nature necessitates communication: listeners become broadcasters become listeners. Due to its grassroots growth pattern and the geographic limitations of radio waves, community radio facilitates the development of local identities, especially musical cultures. Transceiver Radio embraces this hyperlocality through participation by artists committed to the cultures of both D.C. and Baltimore, and through a public request-for-proposal process. 

Transceiver Radio draws inspiration from current D.C. community radio stations like WE ACT Radio in Anacostia and those recently departed such as Radio CPR of Mt. Pleasant. We stand in solidarity with their fight against displacement—for space “in the air and on the block,” as Radio CPR’s Amanda Huron puts it—by retransmitting broadcasts from both WE ACT and Radio CPR over the run of the project.

From this spirit comes the work of the artists in Transceiver Radio, artists who continue to find revelation in the model of the community radio station and the figure of the deejay. These artists seize the means of media production—using broadcast as a means to empower diasporic communities through music, to amplify the voices of those who feel they are not being heard, and to insert themselves into the electromagnetic spectrum in order to claim it as public space.

The first iteration of Transceiver Radio was on the airwaves, LIVE in person at TRANSFORMER [1404 P Street, NW Washington, DC 20005], and online at www.transceiverradio.org 03 May–08 June 2019.

2019 Programming Schedule Brochure

Gallery Guide

Press Release

Archive [Much more to be added!]

Instagram

www.transceiverradio.org [created using BINDER]

Stay tuned for future broadcasts!

Hoeteps & Babby:
An Ode to Rosetta

Hoeteps [aka Markele Cullins], born and based in Baltimore, MD, works in a variety of mediums, ranging from photography, design, text, installation, sound, and video. His work explores themes of intimacy, memory, and technology. Babby [now known as Babizulu] is a D.C.-based singer and composer who creates esoteric, soulful soundscapes. Together, for the Transceiver Radio opening night Launch Party, they channeled what they called “a live interference from a future liberated black queer outer space utopia into our regularly scheduled radio programming”—An Ode to Rosetta, in honor of the great gospel singer Rosetta Tharpe.

WLIX 

Baltimore-based artist Mollye Bendell hosts a casual, yet slightly-twisted, amalgamation of audio treats riffing on standard radio station programming. Tune-in for traffic, weather, news, travel, domestic and foreign correspondence, and much more! 

Mollye Bendell utilizes digital and analogue transmissions as ways to extend human connections. She sees the immateriality of electronic media and broadcast as a potent symbol for the persistence of isolation, vulnerability, and longing in an increasingly connected world.

Her WEATHERVANE sculptural radios allow external forces such as wind and bodies to affect their output. The WEATHERVANEs placed around Transformer during the exhibition were tuned-in to Transceiver Radio’s FM broadcast, but were easily knocked out of reception—their quiet precarity asking for an intimate listening interaction.

DE LA 500 

Hosted by Baltimore-based Salvadorian-American multidisciplinary artist, musician, and curator Erick Antonio Benitez, aka Pájaro de la Selva, this series features conversations with and performances by experimental sound practitioners including Bonnie Jones [sound & text artist, co-founder of High Zero], Michelle Luong [artist, poet, guzheng player, violinist], Alex Silva [sound engineer, composer], Renz Balagtas & Gage Branda [of ART PROS podcast], and D.Y.Y.O. LIVE [musician, performance artist] .

Benitez also collaborated with Baltimore-based sound artist Jonathan Rodman on an installation by the restroom of Transformer for the exhibition. The work emerges from the duo’s acoustic research trip throughout the regions of Chile and Colombia from November 2016 to January 2017. These locations include Vicuña, Cochiguaz, Valparaiso, and Santiago in Chile, and Sierra Nevada, La Guajira, Medellín, and Bogotá in Colombia.

On their journey they encountered a series of radios that were found throughout most local markets in both countries.  Their work Flux of Field in Transceiver Radio experiments with these radios in landscapes in order to illuminate borders political, ecological, and electromagnetic—invisible to the naked eye and ear without the proper device.

Saturdays, 04 May–08 June 2019, 1:00-3:00 PM

León City Sounds 
presents
SONIDO TROPICAL 

All vinyl deejay sets featuring records from South America and the Caribbean. D.C.-based León City Sounds proudly broadcasts underrepresented genres of “Latin Music” genres that for many years were discredited as merely music of the working class. 

Saturdays, 04 May–08 June 2019, 4:30–6:00 PM 

SENTIENT PLANET 

A Baltimore-based, all-POC deejay event and mixtape series highlighting the global sounds and niche club genres the DJs feel connected to. Transceiver Radio proudly presents the inaugural presentation of Sentient Planet as a radio program hosted by founder Nikilad. Nikilad embodies the role of the deejay as community organizer and amplifier—seeing music as a crucial communal experience. 

bollymore

A D.C. takeover by the Baltimore-based South Asian arts collective. Focusing on creating spaces of fellowship and exchange amongst the South Asian diaspora. Featuring performances by Kunj, Thammudu, Nikilad, and Jacob Marley. 

RADIO CPR

Fridays, 03 May–07 June 2019, 5:00-6:00 PM

STATION TO STATION 

Artist and musician Hayden Right speculates on radio’s potential as public art with a series of proposed broadcasts for the Maryland Transit Administration’s radio station WTTZ-LP 93.5 FM, a station the MTA pipes into Lite Rail stations across Maryland. The broadcasts include site-specific sound collages of music, field recordings, oral histories, and historical texts.

Thursdays, 09 May–06 June 2019, 3:00–4:00 PM

WE ACT RADIO 

New and encore community radio transmissions from D.C.’s historical African- American Anacostia neighborhood. WE ACT RADIO founder, Kymone Freeman, has become a leading voice in conversations around gentrification in D.C., most recently organizing the #DontMuteDC rallys, a movement he characterizes as “an open rebellion against gentrification— which is not only cultural genocide but the direct result of public policy without public input.” 

08 June 2019, 6:00–9:00 PM

UPTOWN ART HOUSE

presents 

BLACK NOISE FILTER 

LIVE EP Recording & Broadcast

w/ IMKA & MOUNTAIN 

Uptown Art House is a D.C.-based community of creators, curators, and organizers using art as a vehicle for progressive social change. Uptown draws from the deep font of Black music and culture to continuously create something new. On 08 June 2019 they will provide a night of experimental music and sounds to close out Transceiver Radio’s run at Transformer.