“shirley and Spinoza Radio is an ongoing, eclectic audio stream of far-flung obscurities and concoctions from all earthly times and places… terrestrially bound…and otherwise.”

A brief history:

Shirley & Spinoza was born as a joyful extracurricular side project while as film students at CalArts in the early 90s in the institute’s radio closet where we would layer and collage using the boxes of thrift store audio we’d amass each week. We then carried our gleeful radio experimenting shenanigans to the San Francisco Bay Area in later years with a period as FM pirates broadcasting into the neighbourhood with rough DIY transmitting gear and an antenna on the roof of the Oakland warehouse I lived in. Eventually, we moved to a round-the-clock online streaming existence in 2001, initially as promotion for a themed event at the space (when such things were still quite novel) and just kept it going… and going… and going!

The several years in Oakland were particularly fertile creatively with many influential collaborations born during that era, flashbacks of which you still hear on the stream.  After ultimately leaving the U.S. and moving to the far edges of the China in 2006, I still managed to run the station (despite the regular Great Firewall frustrations) for the entirety of my many years there, adopting layer on layer of influences from those environments into our content. I now continue to operate this latest chapter from a home studio in Aotearoa at the bottom of the world, a mix of archived show clips, heavily curated music, original sounds and live broadcasts. 

Bouncing, bubbling concoctions and late night whimsical potions made of sound were key to the original recipe of s&S… and though we’ve added a good many flavours to the evolving content over the years, the buoyant spirit and sincerity remains. This radio has never been intended for the masses, but for the playful, solitary, late-night lab rat; the studio-bound, socially eccentric, obsessive art maker… or even the “buttoned up in a cubicle by day / fanatical audio-archeologist by night” type. We’ve certainly made a bunch of radio friends all over the world over the years who’d loosely fit those descriptions and then some… and have somehow managed to consistently maintain an audio palette that cannot be found elsewhere!