MN.25.06.1992 - Before they were Infamous Aum Shinrikyo

COVID disrupted just about everything for me. And by New Years Day 2023, I started wondering if there is any value in continuing the Media Network archive I built about international sound broadcasting in the 20th century. What has always kept me going is unearthing the stories of the past and bumping into amazing people like Dr , who I knew in the 80's as Head of BBC International Audience Research. A year ago, I had the chance to have a zoom call with him. Only now have I found a moment to start montaging it. But you be the judge. Is this aural history still relevant in 2023?

Hello, welcome back to Part 2 of the Maarten van delft tapes. This time with unique studio recordings from the Caribbean made around 1988. Here is the link to LIST.   Just to recap it is January 2023 and I’m playing around in the Media Network archive vault which sits on my hard drive. In the 1970’s and 80’s several of us interested in international broadcasting collected the sign-on and sign-offs of radio stations from around the world. Whilst it was easy to make an off-air tape of a far-off station, there was no guarantee you could hear it just by tuning in the right frequency. In fact the hobby of Dxing, was a popular pastime in some countries where you’d scan the dial looking for a weak station, trying to identify which one it was from an announcement, often given at the top of the hour. In the early 1970’s I remember Maarten van Delft would sometimes play some very clear recordings on Radio Nederland’s DX Juke box programme. And as a fellow jingle and ID collector, I often wondered how he got those tapes. I tried sending small reels of tapes and cassettes to the stations in the hope they would share a recording. Some Eastern European stations did return the tape, most didn’t. Maarten’s secret is that he travelled extensively in South America and Asia and he took his blank reel of tape to the station’s studio and asked them politely to add a recording to his collection. Those tapes went into a box and I picked up and digitized these tapes during covid lockdown in 2019. Fast forward to 2023 and it's time to listen what was on those on those tapes. Today, we’ll select tape F, marked as the Caribbean, with recordings from Santo Domingo, Martinique, Montserrat, Grenada, Barbados, St Vincent, and others. Sit back and imagine listening to a shortwave or AM radio with remarkably clear reception. It would have sounded like this……     And that’s where the tape runs out. I wonder if you recognised any of those famous Caribbean radio stations and spotted a few odd ones out. Maybe you heard them on your own radio. My thanks to Maarten van Delft for sharing these recordings and for helping us radio enthusiasts.  The problem we have with radio Receivers is that they have no memory. The radio may still work, but it won’t tune in to the station as it sounded 40 or 50 years ago. For that we need to thank those with a tape recorder. If you’d like to hear more, then remember media network does have an email address. Drop me a line with your ideas. It is . And Maarten did make a list of the stations you heard today, which I will post in the Media Network vintage vault (see top of this post). So look after yourself in these strange and often surreal times we live in. But for the moment, this is Jonathan Marks saying, back soon, bye for now.

Here is s in this episode: Hello, it is January 2023 and I’m playing around in the Media Network archive vault which sits on my hard drive and beckons me to explore forgotten files when I have a moment to spare. In November 2019, a faithful Dutch MN listener Max van Arnhem contacted me with a request. He had about 19 reel to reel tapes from fellow radio enthusiast Maarten van Delft which he could not digitize because he didn’t have a recorder anymore. As it happens, I just restored a Studer Revox B77 to full working order and so I have the right equipment to digitize many formats. A few weeks later I stopped by his house to pick up the tapes. Now in the 1970’s and 80’s several of us interested in international broadcasting collected the sign-on and sign-offs of radio stations from around the world. Whilst it was easy to make an off-air tape of a far-off station, there was no guarantee you could hear it just by tuning in the right frequency. In fact the hobby of Dxing, was a popular pastime in some countries where you’d scan the dial looking for a weak station, trying to identify which one it was from an announcement, often given at the top of the hour. The problem is that it would often fade out at just the moment when they gave the station ID. In the early 1970’s Maarten van Delft would sometimes play some very clear recordings on Radio Nederland’s DX Juke box programme. And as a fellow jingle and ID collector, I often wondered how he got those tapes. I used to send small reels of tapes and cassettes to the stations in the hope they would share a recording. Some Eastern European stations did, most didn’t. Maarten’s secret is that he travelled extensively in South America and Asia and he took his blank reel of tape to the station’s studio and asked them politely to add a recording to his collection. Those tapes went into a box and those were the tapes I picked up in 2019. Fast forward to 2023 and it's time to listen what was on those on those tapes. Today, we’ll select tape D, marked as Brazil, Argentina and uruguay . Sit back and imagine listening to a shortwave radio with remarkably clear reception. It would have sounded like this…… I wonder if you recognised any of those famous Brazilian radio stations and spotted a few odd ones out. Maybe you heard them on your own radio. My thanks to Maarten van Delft for sharing these recordings and for helping us radio enthusiasts.  The problem we have with radio Receivers is that they have no memory. The radio may still work, but it won’t tune in to the station as it sounded 40 or 50 years ago. For that, we need to thank those with a tape recorder. If you’d like to hear more, then remember media network does have an email address. Drop me a line with your ideas. It is . And Maarten did make a list of the stations you heard today, which I will post in the Media Network vintage vault.

I am gradually sorting out my off-air radio cassette collection. I realise that if I don't do it now, I will never get around to it. But I also realise that a lot of off-air recordings are disappearing, especially once the radio programme is made, and very few people keep the original interview or recordings. For some reason, I did. And 40 years later I am so glad I didn't throw things away. Today, I'm sharing an off-air recording of the Falklands Island Broadcasting Station during the Argentine invasion of April 2nd 1982. There are a few places where Patrick Watts, the station manager stops the tape. And in the end, it sounds to me as if the batteries are failing. But you tell me, you can't throw something like this away, can you? For more details check

This is the second edition of DX Juke Box that I hosted, having joined Radio Netherlands a couple of weeks earlier. The programme in those days was a mixture of music and tuning tips contributed by others. My goal, together with Wim van Amstel, was to do more investigative reporting. There was no production budget, but there were plenty of enthusiastic reporters. Before leaving BBC Monitoring I had also recorded several items with people like Richard Measham. In this edition we discussed how the Russian's had taken over Afghan media. Richard revealed that it all started with a tip off from Andy Sennitt.

Look what I found. When I was working for the ORF Shortwave Panorama, BBC Monitoring Service and later Radio Netherlands, I learned the importance of taping everything I was listening to. Radio has no memory. And back in the 70’s and 80’s there was no Wikipedia, no Youtube, no means to check a story on the wires. If you wanted access to Reuters or the wire services you had to monitor radio stations for news. I was collecting media news, so I used to tape colleague broadcasters. Many of the cassettes have gone, but then I discovered a box of mystery cassettes including an edition of warmongers monthly with the familiar voice of Vasily Strelnikov. This is an edition from December 1987 I think. And this is Radio Moscow poking fun at the Americans. It was completely out of sync with the rest of the station's output.

Another early edition of DX Juke Box, with input from my good friend Victor Goonetilleke. I sent him a tape recorder and plenty of cassette. I would phone him and he would record his answers on cassette and send them in. Phone lines were useless in those days. In this edition, Victor was still sending contributions on reel-to-reel tape, recorded at the studios of TWR. Photo when Victor visited RNW about 15 years later.

A little over a month after taking over the programme, I was starting to phase out the music in DX Juke Box and bring in more equipment tests to replace the construction lessons. I got a lot of help from Wim Van Amstel. Basically just fooling around. And learning that editing was supposed to be done electronically in studios. So I found an old machine on the 1st floor and pirated it.

For some reason this trip up North to Friesland to visit Radio Fryslan was digitized but never uploaded to this Media Network collection. So time to put that right. The picture is the modern studio centre. Very much smaller back then.

Going through some cassettes on the last day of February and I discovered several cassettes of BBC's programme for shortwave listeners. World Radio Club and Waveguide. The earliest recording turned out to be from July 1977 which I recorded while at a DX camp in Austria. Nice to hear the voices of Peter Barsby and Henry Hatch.