Radio WORM makers: Bart Plantenga / Wreck This Mess
Bart Plantenga brings episodes of Wreck This Mess, every fortnight on Monday from 12-15u.
WTM mashes up expectation & genres in a lo-budget, lo-fi DIY atmosphere in a pirate radio basement & secret studio. Patapoe is legendary: literally pieced, spliced & taped together from donated, found, recycled & bartered-for equipment. Glitches & struggles with technology or its absence or contempt are the human story of radio.
Wreck This Mess: Radio since 1986 @ WFMU, Radio Libertaire, Radio 100, Radio Patapoe in NY/NJ, Paris & Amsterdam…and Radio WORM since November 2021. You can see all previous episodes on the Wreck This Mess mixcloud.
Wreck Gun Discharge 1244 (broadcast on Radio WORM 21)
Part 1 of my Guns diptych: Wreck Gun Discharge 1244 is an arrangement of sad-tragic gun death news bites strewn over a soothing bed of great music. Meanwhile, 1245 imagines the seemingly unimaginable – a world without guns. Gun blasts are replaced by bird songs with the same soothing bed of deceptively peaceful music.
Wreck Loud Violence 1246 (broadcast on Radio WORM 13.12.21)
People killing & maiming over loud music seems preposterous & so all the more fascinating as people evolve but not at all. Cities are alive with levels of violence most thought a distant 90s nightmare. Perps, oft discarded since birth are thru gun crime suddenly lifted to a status of human worthy of notice. The act of killing allows them to gain form, they’re paid attention to for the first time in their lives. Too bad this hard-won recognition will go uncelebrated. Too bad killers don’t reach for Byron, Baraka, Chuck D. or a thesaurus instead of a firearm as they express their inability to adequately express articulate complex thoughts. Music volume is less celebration than wake-up call, a look-at-me gesture from absurd luxury cars they cannot make payments on. Music as weapon to express their inability to express nuance or tenderness, unavailable except in these precious instants when they in the flash of a gun are able to mean something.
The Lowlands ~ Ethno-Illogical Psycho-Radiographies (broadcast on Radio WORM 10.01.22)
LEE SCRATCH PERRY has been a huge influence ever since I discovered mim via his work with Adrian Sherwood & On-U Sound. He transformed WTM producIon through his freedom to mess & sample, creaIng his mulI-barbed sound system, audio-psychedelia. A madman clown-savant & extempraneous poet extraordinaire with a plan. He combined a very dynamic & creaIve mixing style that took dub into the 21st century already back in the late 1980s. The sound, always dense, joyous, irreverently-reverent, anI-authoritarian, created a hypnoIc, alternaIve, fractured cogniIon that mirrors our present over-amped, relentless reality. So I experienced him less as a man with a Imelined biography than as an inspiring energy field. His sound became my sound. & so for WTM 1247 I’ve chosen a non-logical-non-linear approach to his 60-yr legacy of nearly 60 LPS & countless singles, inspiring people globally. I prefer to float in his turbulent sea.
