Red Door Magazine 23

Post-COVID-19 Radio Reconnects:
Berlin’s community-led streaming radio upstart
Keith F’eM holds a virtual sesh thru the lockdown
It’s Thursday afternoon, 4 June 2020. The source
of the radiocast is KeithFeM.com. John Lennon’s
“Mother” just played and a kid’s voice is carefully
reciting the title of another track you just heard:
“Papa Won’t Leave You Henry by Nick Cave and the
Bad Seeds,” he reads slowly. Oskar, age five, does
a weekly show, Fuddle Duddle, with Duncan, his
father, a Canadian living in Berlin for seven years.
Duncan started out doing the radio show on his
own with Oskar spontaneously contributing his
thoughts on songs and sharing stories. He describes
the process of bringing Oskar into the show. “He
started out just doing the news. The news is what
Oskar calls his improvised stories,” Duncan adds.
Oskar’s news – a welcome break from the regular
news this year – reports on things that interest him or
he’s read about – priorities are given to dinosaur talk
and the volcano report, as you’d expect – “I don’t plan
ahead,” he clarifies – but today’s news is that a horse
and an elephant are living together and sharing food
even though they don’t like the same things (hay in
the first case, small trees in the other). He lets listeners
know it’s “okay to be strange,” then adds, “That’s the
end, goodbye for now,” as the opening notes to Bob
Marley’s “No More Trouble” sound.
With lockdown, Duncan says Oskar’s role in the show
evolved. Oskar, like many kids around the world, is
only recently (and only partially) out of lockdown. He
just returned to his kita (preschool), so for most of the
past few months, he’s been at home with his parents.
Duncan, also home, saw this as an opportunity to experiment
with expanding Oskar’s involvement with
the show. “We had time and I thought, hey this would
be a good thing to do together,” Duncan said. “But
it took a little while to figure out how it would work.”
They experimented until they struck upon a recording
process.
“I talk about it in parts,” Oskar explains. Duncan, a musician,
records and edits the show himself, at home,
and is able to upload it to Keith F’eM for broadcast.
This also allows them to take multiple breaks and record
an episode over two or three days. Eventually,
Oskar became more involved in picking and discussing
the music. Duncan would play the songs for him
ahead of time to see if he liked them or not. When
asked what he thinks of the song “Nasty Dan” by
Johnny Cash, Oskar recalls Cash performing it with
Oscar the Grouch on Sesame Street. “See ya at the
end of those songs,” he signs off to the bending guitars
of a Built to Spill classic.
34 www.reddoormagazine.com
The source of the signal is Keith F’eM. The “community
organized internet radio station” went live in May
2019. Managed by a working group of digital musicians,
artists, and sound engineers, it streams diverse
programs created by hosts in Berlin and around the
world with over 1,000 hours of original archived content.
Julia Viebranz-Wiatrek and her husband Ken Wiatrek
were part of the founding members of the NEKJO
project group, which is also behind the Neukölln project
space, SP2. SP2’s last exhibition before shutdown
was “Strong Animal,” a powerful vision of a post-human
society by Berlin illustrator Ali Fitzgerald.
Julia, also a teacher and biologist, offers practical,
philosophical, and growth-oriented perspectives on
the natural world on “Julia’s Gartenshow.” She often
compares what they’re doing at NEKJO to nature’s organic,
evolving network of interrelationships. She first
explored this approach as part of Clementine Clayonnage
in Hamburg. She describes the clayonnage as
“a safe place, open to everyone to experiment with
and within, embraced by a permeable network. We
had everything – art shows, theater performances,
readings, cooking events, a week-long festival.” She
sees it as all one connected thing: “We are still gaining
from the threads woven back then.”
Ken brings up the growth in listenership: “Since the
lockdowns, our average listener counts per show
have exploded (~300%) and the highest rated shows
have seen exponential growth (up to 2000% increases
over previous averages). Keith F’eM’s livestream
chats can turn into a party with people jumping into
the chat from all over the world to catch up and react
to what’s happening on the air. The types of shows
being aired have similarly expanded – quizzes, talk
shows, even spoken word/audio collage stuff. “Everything
fits in,” Ken explains, “everything finds a home.”
Keith F’eM is a streaming radio station and a digital
audio archive, but it’s also a physical thing, an expanding
rhizomatic root-system of cables, soundboards,
and studio equipment squatting in the back
room of a bar closed for the virus from which it takes
its name: That’s Keith.
Keith F’eM got started when Station Manager Olly
Hewitt rigged up a one-button streaming Raspberry
Pi (a type of single-board computer) for the bar. “After
10 days of solid coding I got it running. I also made
the Instructable for it which ended up featured on the
Instructables homepage.” Explaining his motivation,
Olly says, “there is a worldwide community of people
doing what is essentially pirate radio using technology
that is increasingly, unfortunately, under censorship
and control.”