Red Light Radio

» see redlightradio.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Red Light Radio was an internet radio station in a room roughly the size of a parking space, on the Oudekerksplein in Amsterdam, in a unit that had previously been rented by a sex worker. Orpheu de Jong and Hugo van Heijningen started it in 2010. The plan was three months.

What made it different from the thousand other stations streaming out of bedrooms in that decade was the window. The studio was at street level with glass across the front, on a square tourists cross constantly, which meant the broadcast was also a shop display. You could stand outside and watch somebody play records to an audience that was partly in the room, partly on the pavement, and partly in a browser tab on another continent. The schedule ran to around forty live shows a week at its height.

The programming never settled into one genre, which is why the guest list reads the way it does: Mac DeMarco and Chelsea Wolfe in the same archive as Joy Orbison, with NOFX somewhere further down the list. It won Mixcloud's best online radio station award in 2015. The station shared a bloodline with Red Light Records, the shop around the corner, and the two operations fed each other records and people for a decade.

Everything was recorded and uploaded. That turned out to matter more than anyone planned, because the archive is what survives: thousands of hours of shows still sitting on Mixcloud today.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the window ~

Amsterdam had been trying to change what the Oudekerksplein was for since the mid-2000s, buying up the units around the Oude Kerk and renting them to designers and small businesses, away from the trade the square was famous for. Red Light Radio was one of the tenants that policy produced.

Which is why the station's own closing note keeps returning to the word temporary. They had known from the start that the lease on the window was a favor with an expiry date on it. The sentence they wrote at the end puts it plainly: what started as a temporary and fun three month project had extended more than nine fantastic years.

The archived front page from June 2020 still has the layers of the pandemic sitting on top of each other. There is a notice that the studio is closed until at least 6 April. Below it, a series called Residents in Residence, where the regular hosts recorded their shows at home. Below that, a party in Buenos Aires marked canceled.

~ the last saturday ~

The announcement went up in June, apologizing for being late to say it properly, explaining that they were winding up the station's affairs carefully so the ending would leave fond memories behind it. The last broadcast was Saturday 27 June 2020. The station said the lockdowns had accelerated a goodbye that was already coming, which is the most honest version of what happened to a lot of small cultural operations that year.

Afterward the name kept moving for a while, into a shop space shared with Red Light Records and into occasional broadcasts from festivals, but the daily program was finished and redlightradio.net no longer resolves at all. I never stood on that square while the glass was lit. The thing about a radio station that was also a window is that the half of it you had to be there for is exactly the half that could not be archived.

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