a brief-ish history
in near total obscurity
Hatched Egg
s&S came into being as a happy, extracurricular side project while we (Fausto Cáceres & Dave Cerf) were film students in the early 1990s at the California Institute of the Arts. Crammed together in the institute’s radio closet during our slot, we quickly grew bored and frustrated by conventionally playing music tracks one at a time. We began actively collaging fragments of audio to varying effect in real time with the crates of thrift store audio we amassed each week from the local Salvation Army and discovered that layering two, three, five, or six sources at once was a far more interesting way to interact with both the music and each other. It also allowed us to efficiently preview our newly acquired stacks of mystery media. This all usually consisted of old novelty records, home made tapes, answering machine cassettes, fire & brimstone sermons, storybook LPs and sound effect CDs. We even incorporated a walkie talkie tuned to campus security that I had from my campus job as an RA into the mix. We had no effects, no processors - just fades, cuts, and vari-speed turning of records by hand or cueing fragments on cassette with a pencil. The early aesthetic of our shows was spastic, chaotic, sometimes serene, usually ridiculous, always fun.
“What’s up with the name?”
At the start, our show was titled in the most uninspired way - just our first names on a photocopied flyer. One week though, without anyone informing us beforehand, our slot was pre-empted for a lecture on “Shirley & Spinoza”. We arrived at the station with our stolen Ralph’s supermarket shopping carts full of newly procured audio booty to see the amended schedule and thought that even if not being able to do our show that week, the universe had just handed us a perfect new name. We decided to go with it the following week and simply never gave it back.
FRB (Free Radio Berkeley)
After CalArts, we carried our gleeful, noisy, radio experimenting shenanigans to the San Francisco Bay Area. We had a weekly show on the infamous Free Radio Berkeley community micro FM in the later 90s sandwiched between cop watch and cycling activist slots. There we developed a formula where we would choose a theme, prepare original and plundered sources for days prior and then put them together live on air. The FRB studio equipment was always in some stage of abused malfunction though, so we started doing a one hour show live in my bedroom studio direct to DAT knowing that at least our gear always worked. We’d then make a couple of sandwiches-to-go, jump in my truck, and race to the station to play the tape we’d just made while adding a few live layers on top with extra equipment we’d bring ourselves.
Resonant Frequency
The early influence Don Joyce’s weekly Over the Edge radio show on station KPFA (Berkeley) had on me should not be understated. As a student, I’d drive north for hours in my pickup truck just to be within listening distance of the genius inventive, multichannel, comedic, noise-collage worlds he’d create. After I'd already become a super-fan, I fortuitously met him in the later 90s when he had a brief visiting artists residency at an art camp I worked at one summer. I was given a role to assist him for a week so we spent some time together. I learned he didn’t like to drink water, was already a grumpy old man at age 51 but was still a fascinating eccentric - essentially good natured and brilliantly funny - and indeed took his creative method extremely seriously. When I moved up to the SF Bay Area, Don invited me to be a guest performer on his show a couple of times, but my contributions were undisciplined and honestly horrible. Other Negativland members (and adjacent) had come into my orbit during my Bay Area years with some making occasional s&S appearances in the 2000’s as you’ll hear in numerous old clips. For the most part though, I was merely an inspired fan of the live-radio-as-art-medium aesthetic that Don created.
Compound-Eye
After FRB, Dave & I had a subsequent period as indy FM pirates broadcasting into my immediate neighbourhood with a bit of rough DIY transmitting gear, cable spaghetti all over the place and an antenna on the roof of the Oakland artists’ warehouse space I’d moved into, known then as Compound Eye. The signal didn’t go far, but we’d occasionally hear from someone who’d amazingly manage to tune in while driving across the Bay Bridge! At one point, a lady from the neighbourhood I’d never met before stopped at the compound driveway in a rusty little blue hatchback, asked for me by name and insisted that she was both unwilling nor able to sell the beater she was driving because it was the ONLY place she could pick up s&S Radio! That was indeed a humbling compliment and an early instance of ‘listener feedback’!
2001, First Connect
In the summer of 2001, as promotional build-up for an elaborate, themed feast-for-the-senses Compound-Eye event we were putting on, Dave and I tried our hand at streaming live shows online direct from the little sound studio I had at the far corner of the warehouse. To flesh out the live feeds, we also played from our growing archive of show recordings and a collection of vintage 1950s sci-fi radio dramas. DIY radio streaming was still quite novel then. Not many of us were doing it then and it felt rather technically experimental. We now suddenly had people listening from *far* outside our usual 1km radius - even on other continents! The pressure was suddenly on to create enough material to keep the sounds flowing!
The stream was a big hit of sci-fi party promo, so after the event came and went, we just kept the radio stream going… and going… and going!
A Widening Orbit
After a couple of years, I also became interested in recording outside of the studio and a had a burgeoning interest to pursue ethnographical field recording abroad. I’d gotten sick of the soulless, commercial sound design I’d been doing to pay the bills and wanted to focus my sound chops towards something more meaningful. I met with an old filmmaker friend who had just returned from months in far west China's vast Xinjiang region filming a documentary on travelling traditional Uyghur tightrope walkers. I was blown away by the footage she showed me and the stories she had. I wanted to know more about this fascinating place. So with some research and a bit of effort, I somehow managed to receive a substantial grant to travel to Xinjiang - to document traditional Uyghur folk music. In 2003, I spent almost nine, extremely educational months, immersed and travelling the region to record local musicians in the oases and border areas surrounding the expansive Taklamakan desert. Music was a doorway into a then new-to-me world and reality. I became transfixed. When I returned to California, I felt deeply changed by the entire experience and determined to eventually go back in more open-ended terms to carry on, exploring, recording and studying local languages.
Not long after my return, s&S became more of a solo project for me as Dave moved on to other interests, job & creative endeavors. He however continues to periodically contribute original sounds to this day.
The next years at Compound-Eye were particularly fertile, with a good string of influential local collaborations materialising one after another. These featured a steady series of live performances by guests and music-making friends done in the space exclusively for s&S Radio. These shows featured local and touring experimentalists as guests and recurring radio ‘events’ in the compound with fellow Bay Area noise makers. Many were one-offs, but some became recurring live contributors. You still often hear wonderful flashback clips of these on the stream.
The Banana Hut Hideaway (Urumqi => Kunming => Dali, PRC)
In 2006, I followed through with plans to untether from the U.S. I sold my things, parted ways with the compound and relocated to the far edges of the China for what I thought might be a year or two. The universe had other plans though, as life there got it’s hooks in me and the years stretched out far longer.
I remained based in the city of Ürümqi, Xinjiang for two and a half years, before moving to Yunnan province where I remained for another twelve, first in the provincial capital of Kunming and then in glorious postcard town of Dali where I remained for a decade. All the while, I continued to document local sounds (including suspending a stereo microphone over my little cobblestone street for years) and embarked on several extended folk music recording expeditions in other provinces and rural regions, sometimes as commissions.
During alI the years in China, I still managed to continuously operate the virtual s&S station semi-remotely and even live-stream from time to time from my various home studios, which I’d refer to as the Banana Hut Hideaway in broadcasts. Going live was no small feat given the Great Firewall's capricious moods and the ongoing lottery of securing a steady upstream connection to the outside world. For the entirety of my 15 years in the PRC, I continued to incorporate layer on layer of the material and influences from my environments into s&S’s content. I also took part in a then nascent Chinese experimental music scene in Dali which I’d sometimes fold into the stream.
Lifeboat Aotearoa
I was in the middle of an extended recording project in Inner Mongolia when the Covid pandemic hit, grinding China to a complete halt. With some challenge, I was able to make it back home to Dali, but unable to leave the country or travel to New Zealand, where my Kiwi partner had gone to visit family for Christmas. As a result of country closures, she and I weren’t able to reunite for over a year, but by then it was clear that world circumstances had brought a close to a sustainable life in China as a foreigner. So in 2021, I relocated from Dali to Aotearoa New Zealand. I now continue to operate this latest chapter from a home studio at the bottom of the world, which given the precarious state of the planet in 2026, I affectionately refer to as ‘Lifeboat Aotearoa’.
What this thing currently is:
Content remains a mix of archived show clips, heavily curated music, listener sounds, original concoctions, live-to-tape experiments, field recordings and live broadcasts. We also rebroadcast unedited, archived long-form collage mixes and incorporate daily relays of cousin webcaster, the excellent ‘Radio is a Foreign Country’ who transmits from New Orleans. In addition, we feature periodic guest mixes by our long time radio friend, Citronade [Nantes, France] and others. S&S currently also has a dual personality - there is the whimsical, more upbeat obscurities of the usual stream and the thrice daily Quieter Time of Night hour of slower, more subdued textures and cinematic mixes. We aim to broaden the scope further in the coming year with shows dedicated exclusively to listener made music and field recordings among others.
Bouncing, bubbling concoctions and late night fanciful potions made of sound were key to the original recipe of s&S… and though we’ve added new flavours and dimension to our evolving content over the years, the buoyant spirit and sincerity remains. This radio has never been intended for the masses, but for the playful, solitary, late-night lab rat; the studio-bound, socially eccentric, curiosity driven, obsessive art-making listener. It can suit the “buttoned-up-in-a-cubicle by day / fanatical-audio-archeologist by night” types. Fans, turned ‘radio friends’ based all over the world these years have very often fit these profiles. That said though, I continue to be amazed by the range of unexpected characters for whom this stuff resonates - and write in to tell me!
Some have suggested in the past that the kind of sounds one hears on s&S might come off as personal & cultural appropriation for the sake of having ‘weird source material’ with little understanding of its source. There may be 2% truth in that, but they clearly hadn’t listened long enough to understand that there is a certain personal cohesion - I’d maintain that it’s more a genuine and direct reflection of one individual’s cultural affections, life experiences and ticklish ear. It’s simultaneously part sound art museum, part cultural archive, alien jukebox shuffling the sounds of earth, fromagerie & curiosity shop; scrapbook and undefinable sonic sketchpad. I’ve integrated personal recordings from the start - of loved ones, family & friends. As the years roll on, lots of these people have drifted far out of my orbit. Many have also since departed this mortal plane. Amusing recordings of my late parents, for example allow them to live happily on ‘in the mix’. Their voices remain woven into the structure of this harmonious, fantastical living garden of sounds, blooming in perpetuity.
Alrighty then,
I hear that s&S has managed to maintain an audio palette that really can’t be found elsewhere! Perhaps if you’ve gotten this far, you’d agree! Thanks for reading and tuning your digital dial to s&S. May you enjoy these broken, bouncing mixed-up radio waves from your planet!
your Remote Operator
[Fausto Cáceres]