Hello, this is Agnes Fidget, host of The Inland Buoy and I am searching out for a particularly odd sort of audio for a special episode of The Inland Buoy on Radio Dial Scans. A Radio Dial Scan is an (often) historical recording of snippets from terrestrial radio. I became interested in collecting these primarily because of a cassette recording I made in 1995 of brief excerpts from various radio stations in South Florida. The tape jumps wildly between stations, be it news radio to the hip-hop jamz station to soft rock. It is part collage, part documentary, which was mostly my intent at the time, besides wanting to record my favorite ‘alternative rock’ hits. Also, I love radio and its foundation on the notion of the fleeting. All delightful things are, after all. The aim of my project is to capture the essence of radio and its fleeting nature.

Radio, especially in its pre-internet days, was an ephemeral medium. It remains only somewhat ephemeral, now that most radio stations archive their broadcasts or have digitized their collections. Even if radio today is mostly less-than-ephemeral, it still maintains a certain melancholy romanticism because of the nature of the medium. I am interested in collecting Radio Dial Scans to present moments of the past that have been lost, moments that were really never meant to be captured in the first place.

A good example of a dial scan would be found in the following post from WFMU’s Beware of the Blog, which contains a Dial Scan from the night John Lennon died from various New York radio stations:

WFMU's Beware of the Blog - The Night John Lennon Died

Please send audio submissions of radio broadcasts fifteen years or older in mp3 format to pulleyandsnowtoe (atatat) gmail.com. The more obscure and the more mysterious the better.