This site covers radio art, Hudson Valley news, music, sound art, pirate radio, and more from Tom Roe.
Roe is founder of pirate stations 87X and free103point9 and non-profit radio art organization Wave Farm. Roe is also a radio artist, writer, editor, and club DJ. Roe is a sound transmission artist who performs with transmitters and receivers using multiple bands (FM, CB, walkie-talkie), as well as prepared CDs, vinyl records, electronics, and theremin(s). He coined and popularized the term “transmission art.” Roe has also written about music for The Wire, Signal to Noise, and The New York Post, where he wrote an alternative music column. Roe wrote about the New York City free jazz scene in The Wire magazine’s book Undercurrents: The Hidden Wiring of Modern Music (2002). Roe contributed to a 150-page illustrated catalog (SUNY Press, 2015) about the Videofreex, for a Dorsky Museum show.
Roe has led many "Radio Lab" education lectures and workshops, speaking about how to perform with transmitters and the history of radio performance and microcasting at venues such as Columbia University, Yale University, Brooklyn College, Flux Factory, The Kitchen, NYU's ITP Program, Kids Discover Radio in East Harlem, Grassroots Media Conference at The New School, RPI University in Troy, and other locations. He has also performed at the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea, as well as in Poland, Prague, Germany, and Spain, and at many places in New York City and across the United States.
Roe's Donald Drumpf Theatre was a radio theatre program with sounds culled from the previous week, about a fictional, theatrical presidency. It ran weekly from January 2016 to January 2021 and was broadcast by over forty stations across the U.S. His current program Turn On The News is the weekly newscast from the fictional Radio Network, with parody radio coverage of the radio and its headlines. Now with computerized news readers, and fewer meddling reporters, plus aggregated reporting, and automated music.
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Write to Tom Roe at tomroeradio@proton.me if you would like to contribute words, images, or sounds. Or if you have a problem with something here. You can have your say too. Also, send albums for review, press releases, and whatever you’d like to say to tomroeradio@proton.me. Participate in the comments section, or support this work with a subscription if you can. Thanks for visiting.
