Skraidantis Radijas - no nonsense radio with nonsense
Skraidantis Radijas (Flying Radio in english) is a radio show where absolute nonsense was spoken and amazing music was played for over six years. It started back in 2005 on newly founded StartFM radio station that promised an alternative to mainstream radio stations and focused on underground music.
Skraidantis Radijas was the first live show that ever aired on StartFM, even their Wikipedia page admits that. And it was probably the most rebellious and off beat show on the station as well. On numerous occasions we were discussing absurd topics, inventing stuff on the go, consulting non-existent “experts” about subjects they know nothing about, etc. Stories were deliberately subjective, many times full of irrelevant details, kind of resembling Gonzo journalism in a way. But we always played nice and rare music.
There were two types of listeners of the show: “I can’t stand the talks, how is it possible to talk such rubbish on live air, but I love the music” and “I love the talks, don’t care much about the music”. The fan base was small but very dedicated. I heard stories about people listening to our show in the bathtub, because that was the only place where the reception for FM signal was good enough.
History
Skraidantis Radijas went through a lot of transformations during the years. The hosts changed, the concepts changed, but the dedication for playing underground music and talking nonsense always remained intact.
First iteration
It all started in 2005 when my friend and colleague Mark Splinter came to me and said: “Hey Garo, let’s do a radio show”. I was hesitant at first as radio at the time was seen as this ancient thing that only plays “commercial” pop music. On top of that I was always a bit shy about my voice as whenever I heard it played back I thought I sounded stupid. This is actually an interesting phenomena and most people experience it, but there is a very simple scientific explanation why our own voice sounds stupid to us .
Anyway, to mitigate my worries about the lameness of the radio stations in general Mark told me that some enthusiastic students from Vilnius University got FM broadcaster license and convinced university to allocate some money for building a broadcasting studio with areas for recording and running live shows. And instead of a boring traditional student radio they aimed to build a proper radio station with a schedule of live shows from people outside university and lots of creative freedom. They gave it a name StartFM. After some back and forth I agreed to try out to do a few shows and see how it goes.
The only thing that was missing was the name for the show. I remember sitting with Mark at Cafe De Paris, a nice cafe in the center of Vilnius, and discussing possible names and the concept for the show. I said that I don’t have any ideas about the name and Mark just said: “well, we can call it Skraidantis Radijas” which in english means Flying Radio. I said “yeah, that sounds cool” and that was it, Skraidantis Radijas was born. Tomas Jefanovas created a nice logo for us that you can see below.
Equipped with the USB stick hosting selection of our favorite music, two beers each and slightly trembling voices we came to the StartFM studio for the first time. I think “The Choice Is Yours” by the hip-hop band Black Sheep was the first track I ever played on the radio. Everybody around was pretty tense as Skraidantis Radijas was the first ever live show to be broadcasted on StartFM radio station. But all went well, we enjoyed doing that and decided to continue with the show.
However it didn’t last long, and sometime in 2006 we were told that the StartFM radio station is “changing concept” and that there will be no more live shows. The main issue was that people running the station were not really in line with how they saw this station evolving, some of the key people had huge expectations of being direct competitors to mainstream radio stations in few years time, while others were way more interested in promoting underground music and various sub-cultures. It all started to crumble and went down pretty quickly. The 94.2 Mhz FM frequency was left playing one song on repeat day and night for several months. That song was “Aš nekenčiu radijo stočių” which translates to “I hate radio stations” by local punk band Turboreanimacija.
The Golder Years
We were sad that StartFM is going down, but didn’t go out of our ways to find other radio station to move to, and to be honest no other radio station would have allowed us to do what we wanted. However, after a while we heard the rumor that there is a new team forming to bring StartFM back to life.
The new director that set to reboot StartFM was Andrius Valašinas a.k.a. Kalashas, punk rock, DIY and open source enthusiast with the nickname inspired by famous soviet automatic rifle AK47, also called Automat Kalashnikov. This time the ambitions were very different. StartFM set out to be fully focused on alternative scene and became the first Lithuanian radio station to exclusively play “non-commercial” music. We couldn’t be happier about this and felt strongly it’s time to bring the Skraidantis Radijas back.
We were joined by Aidas Simanavičius a.k.a. Allanas, the colleague from the Fresh Rice Crew who was very keen on hosting a radio show. He also happened to know the new director of StartFM and set out to convince him to take Skraidantis Radijas in. It was not that straight forward as Kalashas was very focused on keeping fully underground vibe and wasn’t convinced that the show mostly focused on hip-hop music which was gaining momentum in the mainstream at the time will be a right fit. However, all it took was for him to listen to the recording of one of our previous shows. I remember meeting him for the first time in some student party where legendary band Sportas was playing. He approached us in this loud environment and shouted into our ears: “Guys, I listened to the show, it’s hilarious, let’s do this!”.
Once again we became the first live show to air on the new version of StartFM. January 3-rd, 2007 was the day that we came back into our small, red carpet insulated studio. These were the golden years for the station. They had a team of super motivated young people taking care of all the aspects of running StartFM as well as hosting all sorts of shows. You could find shows about heavy metal, feminism, trance music, breakfast, politics and all sorts of other topics. Even football hooligans had their show on StartFM.
We had all sorts of team outings and seminars in old sports and recreation bases across Lithuania. That was an amazing platform to meet new people, discuss ideas with people of very different opinions and have crazy parties. And all this was driven by idea and enthusiasm, almost nobody was getting paid.
Hosts
There were many people who hosted the show over the years and I don’t even remember who came and went when, but the show was always very vibrant and unpredictable because all of the hosts had quite a personalities. Most prominent hosts were Allanas, Tatva, Andrelis 18, Mark Splinter, Nuits and me, Garo. We were also frequently joined by Dj 2 Fresh, Dj Quazar, Matas Aerobika and Buivis, the legendary figure in Lithuanian party scene.
This was the moment when Skraidantis Radijas truly found it’s identity and both the musical side and the talks were strong (although still loyal to nonsense). We also had many guests ranging from local artists, musicians that came to perform in Lithuania from abroad to now famous Lithuanian movie directors. I remember one show where we had more than ten rappers from Finland in the studio at once, dropping freestyles and doing live improvisations. In the end the whole studio turned into one big party. These definitely were the golder years for both our show and radio station as a whole.
Music
Officially titled as the “hip-hop show” because of our personal background, the music we played actually was a much broader spectrum. We played lots of electronic music, some experimental, some heavier guitar music and all sorts of weird stuff in between.
These are few playlists from our shows and no, Luis Bordeaux - Galaxy repeated seven times is not a mistake. We really did play songs the we really like on repeat for good portion of the show sometimes.
The second installment of StartFM had one limitation on music: we couldn’t play anything that is under the copyright umbrella of RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America). And that is most of the music ever released in the western world as national copyright agencies usually have contracts with RIAA protecting their copyright subjects worldwide. That forced us to actually dig for lots of underground music and unreleased stuff, many times contacting artists directly, asking for their music and permission to play it.
MySpace music hunt
It was the time before Facebook, but one of it’s predecessors called MySpace was already exploding in popularity. For some time this was my main source of new and rare music. They made the platform really nice for musicians and you could just browse and accidentally stumble upon some really interesting music. And you could message the artist directly via their platform which was a game changer. I sent out hundreds of messages and got lots of interesting music. Sometimes artist were just sending digital copies of their music, but many times I got CD and even vinyl records.
One of the most memorable packs I ever got was from the label called Hairy Parents Records . They mostly release a sort of alternative hip-hop tracks and all artists are related to animals, like Dj Alan Lamb, Ian Beef, All Creatures, etc. They sent the whole bunch of 7-inch vinyl records, CDs and all sorts of stickers and other fun stuff. I ended up dedicating the whole show to their music.
Interviews
On several occasions we went to the streets to do some interviews with random people. Usually it was some city festivities like “Kaziukas Faire” or Lithuania specific celebration called “Užgavenės” where people fry all sorts of pancakes, wear masks and costumes, watch the fight between Lašininis (The Fat Man) and Kanapinis (The Cannabis Guy) and eventually burn woman shaped doll called “Morė” on the huge bonfire. All this to convince the long winter to finally go away. If you want to educate yourself more about this subject, watch video showcasing and explaining Užgavenės traditions on YouTube .
The questions we were asking were mostly as absurd as our talks during the show. Sometimes we just came up to people asking “Why?” or “Who?” and the whole interview would end up being the person trying to figure out what the hell are we even asking. It is funny how much power just having the microphone in your hand and telling people you are from the radio station grants you. Suddenly people feel obliged to talk to you and look smart, even if they are clearly being asked nonsensical things. On this topic we always went to do the interviews with the microphone which was not connected to anything, cable went to my pocket. We just needed it to look more credible. To make it even more absurd we always had a computer mouse dangling from the microphone for no good reason.
We also visited various political protests and and similar events. One of the most memorable was the first ever gay pride event in Vilnius back in 2010. It sparked a lot of controversy in conservative and still quite religious Lithuania with some people trying to portray it as a march of pure evil and others being “very worried” about the safety of people attending the event and saying that our society is “not ready yet” for such events. There were tons of police officers and helicopters flying around protecting few hundred peaceful and happy people walking a short stretch in the city from an angry mob that gathered to spew their hatred. I filmed all these angry, hate filled faces trying to shatter the fence, populist politicians disobeying direct police orders and trying to lead angry mob to do some “social justice”, priests with bunch of elderly ladies trying to pray the gay away, nationalists giving out newspapers explaining how events like these are part of “western occupation” efforts and every other breed of lunatics you can think of.
Positive fact I should also mention is that just 10 years after, same event took place in the main street of Vilnius, there were no fences, few police officers mostly arranging logistics with traffic, few thousand happy and smiling people, many of them with their children, and just a tiny angry bunch brought to location in an organized manner by populist politicians in exchange for free alcohol hopelessly trying to insult the participants and just getting smiles back from them.
Lone Ranger period
After running strong for a few years, motivation and energy to run the show started to go down. Me and Allanas were frequently the only hosts present and one day even he told me that he doesn’t want to do this anymore. I was also feeling that the show doesn’t have the edge anymore, but I was still thinking about how to revitalize it by changing the concept, maybe bringing new people in and working more on social media content. Being stubborn I still decided to give it a shot even if I have to do it solo.
Sometimes I just played some music, other times I invited some guests, mostly musicians and Djs, and talked more about their music and some relevant stuff, although detours into the nonsense land were still frequent. I ran a show like this for a few months, but eventually had to admin to myself that the vibe is not there anymore, it’s time close this chapter up and move on. The last show aired on 18-th of May, 2011. After that, around 200 shows or half a month worth of content in, Skraidantis Radijas went for summer vacation and never came back. Or did he?
Reunion 2016
Five years after the end of the show we decided to do a reunion, one long show with lots of hosts and guests. Legendary team of Allanas, Tatva, Nuits, Andrelis 18, Tadas Quazar, 2 Fresh and Buivis all assembled in the same StartFM basement. The station already had new modern studio in the center of the city, but we refused to broadcast the show from there and insisted old studio to be opened so the feel is authentic. The only other show that was still broadcasting from this basement was “Audronaša”, the legendary heavy metal show that started around the same time as Skraidantis Radijas and was already running for almost ten years.
With this glitchy animated GIF we invited our old listeners to join us one more time and remember good old days. I don’t think we made a very good show and if I remember correctly the broadcast crashed halfway and we had to break into the server room to restart the equipment, but we definitely had lots of fun and remembered tons of old stories.
Modern Day Reboot
As corona virus was sweeping the globe in 2020 one of the original hosts Tatva convinced Andrelis 18 to bring Skraidantis Radijas back. StartFM at this point already had a new and modern studio full with all the equipment you could wish for, separate rooms for recording and even facilities for live TV broadcasting.
This time the concept was a bit different, playing music from vinyl records only and being lighter on talking rubbish. Copyright limitations were also not an issue anymore. So the music profile changed quite a lot into an interesting mixture of modern weird stuff from Andrelis 18 collection and legendary cross-genre classics from Tatva’s side. They ran the show for several months and finished around twenty episodes. You can listen to this latest installment of Skraidantis Radijas on Mixcloud . Golden era shows are buried deep in the archives and not available anywhere online.