Hyper Real Radio is dead.
I’ve already hinted at it here and there, but time to make it official: Hyper Real Radio is no more, at least its over on Radio Fritz. I have three more shows and on the day of the third anniversary I’m going off air.
Instead you’ll get a new EDM show (no joke), but more on that below.
Needless to say that I’m heartbroken — FM radio is something that I always wanted to do, loved doing and frankly speaking am very, very good at. I have a very strong and emotional relationship to the format: I grew up discovering a lot of the music I fell in love with through (public broadcast) radio, first through the HR3 Clubnight shows, later on via MDR Sputnik which I caught via satellite and taped on Sunday nights, and once the internet arrived, through downloading pretty much everything BBC Radio1 was broadcasting, from Grooverider and Bailey to John Peel and Mary Anne Hobbs. For the greater part of the last 30 years I’ve started my day with radio as well.
Even though its somewhat of a romantic notion in a time of downloads, podcasts and instant availability, I love radio for its temporal immediacy and its fleetingness: it folds time and space and grounds you in the moment, but it is also immediately gone as well. It creates a very special temporary relationship between the listener and the music, one that I think has a very unique quality and potential. I like to imagine that while skipping through the airwaves somebody catches my show and finds it interesting, informative or maybe even illuminating and transformative.
Its most striking feature however is that it occupies and creates space, both in sense of a media space (as a format, in its geographic extension, but also in terms creating representation and visibility. In a world where culture is dominated by steadily growing and increasingly integrated media empires who treat local narratives as vectors to increase their profitability, its especially important to create and hold space for local cultures and narratives and ensure their continuity that way. Public broadcast has a particularly important role to fullfill and act as a societal counterweight in this regard. Radio can be a map of our social environment and that way also be an advocate for the various actors on that map.
Unsurprisingly the main reason for the cancellation is that the station has to save money: running a station is expensive and the only way to save money is to make cuts. The station is also facing the same challenge as all other radio stations and TV stations, which is a significant audience drain — people turn more and more towards online media, which means that the stations have to adapt their online strategies to become more attractive in their offerings to shifting audience demographics and demands. In theory that is.
Now, I’m not a specialist on radio station operations and have very little insight into the financial innerworkings of the radio station, but I do have the gut feeling that a weekly show run by a single freelance host isn’t a life threatening financial burden — especially because I think that there are quite a few ways the station could save money before cutting away content. Most of the criticism I potentially have in this regard is pretty much the same criticism public broadcast receives generally in Germany: its too institutionalized, too unflexible and that makes it too expensive, and I don’t think my observations can add anything to change or challenge that. May as it be however, the fact that the station equipped the studio with new DJ equipment and which got installed the day after I received the news of the cancellation just adds insult to injury. Also that the station knew that in times of Covid the show was one of my main sources of income.
One thing irks me particularly though, and this is my only open criticism towards the work of other people at the station, is the fact that despite the apparent focus on online content and a very big in-house online team my show received virtually no support from the station — ever. In fact all I got in three years of broadcasting was exactly one (!) retweet… thats it. The station has however money to operate a meme page, fill their Twitter with jokes about masturbation and produce IG content that in my opinion is mediocre at best. Having that much infrastructure available in-house creates a lot of potential to leverage and cross-promote on-air content, tell very interesting and relevant stories and spin off online-native formats with very little effort, but no effort was put into that. In my eyes this is a massive failure.
What pains me the most however is that underground music culture looses yet another much needed platform in this city. Hyper Real Radio was pretty much the only show that gave Berlin’s wider club scene (outside of house and techno) a constant media presence, something that is especially important right now. We can all agree that Berlin’s clubs are about much more than house and techno, the exact opposite rather: whats exciting about Berlin are the new sounds which are constantly emerging and (re-)forming, the things that happen on the fringes and that are carried out into the world from here. This is the main reason why the Berlin club scene is perceived internationally as innovative and diverse as it is, and not because some of the bigger clubs provide never-ending peak time techno hedonism for the easy jetset.
This musical diversity, which mainly takes place in the small clubs and in the off-locations that will probably not survive Covid, also provides a space for many different communities and identities — house and techno are primarily male and white, many other genres are not. It was very important for me to make HRR not only a musically diverse platform, but above all use it as a showcase for the diversity of biographies and identities that find expression in this cultural landscape. Providing that space on air is in my opinion one of the main responsibility a public broadcast station in this city has, one that is much more important than chasing arbitrary online reach figures, only to be outcompeted by any kid in a gaming chair broadcasting on Twitch.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m thankful that I had this opportunity in the first place, but taking all of the above into account the decision to both cancel my show AND create a prime time EDM format instead (which will now run weekly on Saturdays from 8pm to 10pm) is in my eyes not only wrong, but also shows me how detached the radio station is from what is actually going on in this city. It sends a very fatal signal that none of this culture matters and that all the people that I tried to create a space for with the show don’t matter either, at least to them. It sucks.
I haven’t yet decided what I’m going to do going forward — I want to continue with Hyper Real Radio, but not sure how. Maybe it’ll return as a Twitch stream, maybe it’ll come back on one of the many community stations operating internationally, maybe it’ll become something else all together, lets see. As small of a project and contribution as it was, doing this show was one of the most amazing things I have ever done and none of it would have made sense without the over 120 or so guests that I had the nearly 150 episodes the show ran for and without the listeners.
If you ever tuned in and enjoyed it, thats all I ever wanted. Thank you.
