Apparently, radio transmissions on unregulated frequencies interfere with normal radio and TV reception and, possibly, aircraft communications. Temporary licences to broadcast are available (from the same people who do TV licences)--but cost around £2000. In Glasgow for four Tuesdays in June you could--conditions permitting--tune into artist-run pirate radio. Necessarily broadcast from various locations on customised equipment, Radio Tuesday was--and still is (further broadcasts are planned)--an experimental radio station with contributions by 40 active artists from Glasgow and beyond.

Despite being very much an intervention into non-art space, Radio Tuesday seemed pitched towards those who were aware of its existence rather than the accidental listener and, like a lot of artist-initiated exhibitions or projects, the intended audience for Radio Tuesday was probably the participants themselves, plus all of their friends. In general, the contributions could be divided into those which responded to established radio formats--documentary, the interview, radio plays, music mixes etc--and those which used the platform of Radio Tuesday to perform in a less referential way.

There were artists making music: Robert Johnston contributed half an hour's worth of frantic electro build-ups and break-downs, with additions and subtractions recorded live; Torsten Lauschman, Fred Pederson and Michael Wilkinson produced Fred Sings Wonderwall, a combination of Simple Text's monotone robot voice unrythmically chanting the words of the Oasis hit over its Karaoke backing track; Tony Swain's untitled lo-fi tune meandered charmingly.

Others took the opportunity to present themselves as DJs. Lucy McKenzie's imaginative mix, Sozialismus, kicked off with the rarely lamented Scheme track, CND--a priceless eighties protest song with wonky three-part harmonies ("CAM-PAIN FOR NU-CL-EAR DISARMAMENT!"). This set the tone for a journey into the strangeness of socio-politically aware pop music: Billy Bragg, UB40, The Style Council, Art & Language with the Red Crayola. Deviations from the theme included Kai Althoff's very fey Subtle Tease track Moodies Schwingt and Atari Teenage Riot's Paranoid. Ewan Imrie's mix, Pukey versus Fat Bob, was an hour-long one-sided battle of the DJs between Pukey (Imrie) and Fat Bob--appropriated unwittingly from his show on Glasgow talk-radio station Scot FM. Over the top of Fat Bob's phone-in Imrie played relentlessly ear-splitting Gabba and extreme noise juxtapositions of the kind to be heard at his club-event collaboration with Robert Johnston, Punish. Sounding more like an archivist than a DJ, Rob Kennedy's No a Tease featured the likes of Richard Nixon and John Zorn.

Bravely situated at a mid-point between visionary, cultural reference and parody, Tom O'Sullivan and Joanne Tatham's suite of poems, January, Moortop, Halfway, Walpurgis and Slacks Wood, sounded very much like the soundtrack to the illustrative sections of an Open University programme. Punctuated with passages of lonely new age-ish music, the poems seemed to refer in a Ted Hughes kind of way to the countryside, changing seasons, various animals and plants and somehow reminded me of watching public-information films while skipping school. Crystal Collins' Great Grandfather Project was a recording of a first-time meeting between Collins, from Bristol, and her great-grandfather, from Dundee. While gamely trying to break through the accent barrier, Collins activated the familiar artist's-family situation of explaining why she is working in video rather than doing paintings.

Hotel Room by Duncan Hamilton was a recording of ambient sound from a very noisy Tokyo hotel room featuring blood-curdling screams from radios or TVs (hopefully) over Japanese background chit-chat. Also functioning as a diary of sorts, See You on the Other Side (work in progress) featured Scott Myle's sleeptalk as captured by a voice-activated dictaphone.

Other artists were engaged with the further reaches of experimental sound: Mark Vernon's Longnamenocansay was a series of random free associations of sampled music and dialogue. David Fulford presented an electro-magnetic recording--City Centre Paris--a kind of aural equivalent to Kirlian photography.

Scott Simpson's Paul and Becky managed to be both--literally-- uncomfortable to listen to and very funny simultaneously, a sort of long-lost collaboration between Derek and Clive and Lou Reed circa Metal Machine Music. Nasty and ominous high-frequency feedback vied with a recorded telephone conversation between two of Simpson's friends describing a night out in Derby ("I had three big wines at the Babbington Arms...tried to get a taxi, driver said 'No, too pissed.'"). The more you strained to hear the dialogue, the more your ears hurt from the electro-noise overdub. We heard about the bouncers at Jack Scrans, the queue for Scream, the lovely girl he's just met that he used to go to infant school with, and then going home to bring up "catsick" (not proper sick) on the sofa. It felt like waking up in a damp cellar with too many lights on. This was followed up by playing Michael Jackson's Farewell my Summer Love drunkenly at various speeds.

Rather than meditating on conventional broadcast formats--à la Juan Muñoz and Gavin Bryar's Shipping Forecast-inspired A Man in a Room Gambling--or the freaking out of unprepared listeners and consumers by messing with their expectations of real radio/TV (Chris Burden's CBTV, Captain Beefheart's Lick my Decals Off Baby TV ad or even Blue Jam), Paul and Becky casually succeeded by not seeming to care too much about precedents.

Exchange 1999 by Daniel Jewesbury was an artificial debate between Daniel Jewesbury (as chairman) and four people, who may have been actual exchange students. Or perhaps they were just doing the accents. In response to questions about the fairness of current attitudes to immigration policies and national identities the guests haltingly read their lines ("We all live in a multicultural society--and that's a great thing!"). The gulf in intonation between Jewesbury's more relaxed conversational style and his guests' pretend engagement in the discussion was slightly chilling.

To mark the end of the project a kind of wrap party featuring live performances by some of the contributors to Radio Tuesday was held at The Buff Club. It was a bit like the final scene in O! Lucky Man where all the characters are suddenly united at a disco. Rob Kennedy and Robert Johnston both played records, Tony Swain's band played some instrumentals, Hayley and Sue Tompkins performed live spoken vocals--urgently repeated words and phrases that gradually then suddenly change. No planes crashed.

Radio Tuesday was broadcast during June, 1999. Excerpts from the broadcasts--and a full programme listing--can be found on the website of the All Horizons Club .

Alan Michael is an artist based in Glasgow.

Review reproduced from CIRCA 90, Winter1999, p. 52