Eruption 101.3 FM

To prepare to write a guide to the UK pirate radio tapes that proliferate online—it appeared in The Wire’s April 2008 issue, one of my favorite assignments ever—I made a sad number of unused spreadsheets, meticulously cataloging hundreds of sets I’ll never play. It gives you an idea of the surfeit—and that was three and a half years ago. So it is with pirate tapes. Before the Web (which hasn’t exactly quieted the action), hundreds of stations proliferated in the UK. Today, you can subscribe to a handful of YouTube, Mixcloud, SoundCloud feeds and get freshly digitized air grabs delivered so regularly it’s as dizzying as keeping up with the pirates themselves was.

This one appeared in July of 2021 on Mixcloud, a trim 31 minutes—”Ruff and [an] unnamed DJ playing mainly hardcore jungle techno,” as the page notes—and its key is Origin Unknown’s “Valley of the Shadows,” better known by its vocal tags: “Long Dark Tunnel,” or “31 Seconds.” It gets a rewind and then chopped by the pause button; what comes back in seems twice as fast—and then to speed up from there. If anything demonstrates the sheer velocity with which this stuff was moving, this does. The sort of sudden jerking changeover described above is all over this tape; that’s part of its charm, in fact. It’s hardly a clean through-line, but an artifact.