Cassette
David Goren is a radio producer and audio archivist based in Brooklyn, NY. For several years he's researched New York City’s pirate radio community, producing “New York City’s Pirates of the Air” for the BBC World Service & "Outlaws of the Airwaves: The Rise of Pirate Radio Station WBAD” for KCRW’s Lost Notes podcast. More recently, Goren has been cataloguing his meandering across his local pirate radio frequencies via the Brooklyn Pirate Radio Sound Map (BPRSM) - tracing the lingering connections between unlicensed radio broadcasting and Brooklyn's local neighbourhood culture in the digital age.
Brooklyn Pirates: Neighbourhoods in the Sky, 2014-2021 pulls together a clutch of cut-up recordings captured by David on the BPRSM, traversing the dial across raucous soca jams & kompas, through to Grenadian election news, Haitian funeral announcements and ads for Jamaican patty shops & spiritual healers - plus broadcasts from Turkish, and Orthodox & Sephardic Jewish pirate stations to boot.
Covering a period between the mid-2010s right up to earlier this year, the B side in particular captures the uniquely idiosyncratic and hyper-local reactions of the Brooklyn pirates to the global disintegration of the early 2020s - the coronavirus pandemic, George Floyd, the US election and more - acting as a vital document of social history demonstrating the value of DIY community broadcasts during a period of worldwide lockdowns and the wholesale breakdown of politics.
