Introducing Radio Liquorice

Hello everyone, and welcome to Radio Liquorice on Hive. I'm Danielle (@daniellemurray).

The title of this post pertains to a podcast that I started from my spare room during the U.K. winter lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, when we were all required by law to stay away from the venues where we were used to meeting, jamming, holding open mics and generally keeping our love of music-making alive. Instead, we threw ourselves into a number of online projects to stay together. One was a Zoom open mic, another was remote collaborative recordings, and yet another was Radio Liquorice.

Born out of my love of radio and audio, and named after my instrument, the clarinet (once nicknamed the "liquorice stick"), Radio Liquorice was first and foremost conceived from the pangs of separation: from life as it used to be before the pandemic; from friends and musical collaborators; and from our audiences, however small and involuntary they may once have been 😁

I had initially hoped to jerry-rig some kind of internet radio station from my spare room, and broadcast live. I tried Mixlr, but I needed an interface I could literally get my hands on, and their insistence on being allowed to use your content as they chose stuck in a lot of people's craw. I then used Zoom to share my computer audio and livestream an audio-only "meeting" to Facebook and YouTube, which was reasonably popular. I have yet to crack Icecast, however.

In the end, I compromised on my ambition to run a live broadcast, and decided instead to focus on a pre-recorded podcast that premieres as a live show with a live chat function on YouTube. I have also published it to Podomatic.

The show was recorded on a Zoom H2n digital recorder, and consists of voice links/cues, recorded by me, mp3s sent to me by my musical friends of themselves performing three songs each, and jingles and stings I made earlier (not sure they'd earn anyone a Blue Peter badge though 😂). I put it together on Audacity in three 'rounds', to make the project easier to fit on the screen and manipulate the large chunks of audio that had to be edited together. I used the Envelope tool to hold sound under, and the simpler Fade In function to bring a tune up as I finished talking. I only needed two tracks, one for voice links and the other for tunes and jingles. Friends joined in to contribute jingles, stings and other interesting sound-clips (think Radio Havana Cuba's station ident!), to make a soundscape that I hope sounds a bit like pirate radio. I grew up listening to Radio Caroline and Laser 558, both broadcasting from ships in the North Sea, and I hope they have imprinted themselves on this podcast through the magic of unconscious memory.

Without further ado, allow me to present Episode 1 of the first (prerecorded) Radio Liquorice podcast by, with and for the Arlesey Jammers.

https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/mldaniellem/episodes/2022-01-17T09_22_09-08_00