Federation of Magic Pop UFOS

Wave Farm is doing something underground culture usually forgets to do: saving itself while it is still alive. Its Wave Farm Early Days broadcasts dig back into the organization's original incarnation as free103point9 , the Brooklyn microcasting collective founded in 1997 by Greg Anderson, Violet Hopkins and Tom Roe. The current broadcasts pull from overnight transmissions, live performances at the free103point9 Project Space and the old Dispatch Series. This isn't some university arriving forty years later to reconstruct a dead scene from newspaper clippings. The people and institution connected to that scene kept the tapes. That matters. From 1997 through 2004, free103point9 operated performance spaces in Williamsburg and participated in the American microradio movement, which pushed for tiny independent broadcasters operating outside the giant commercial-radio model. Wave Farm notes that this wider movement helped lead toward the creation of low-power FM ...

Before the internet, information did not move quickly. It moved through effort. Photocopied newsletters. Handwritten correspondence. Cassette recordings. Record shops, head shops, college radio stations, convention tables, envelopes weighted with stamps and time. A UFO sighting in a small town could pass through multiple hands, cross state lines, and resurface months later in a zine assembled on a kitchen table under poor lighting and sustained curiosity. There were no algorithms determining what mattered. There were people. Collectors. Broadcasters. Artists. Amateur historians. Witnesses. Obsessives. Pranksters. Citizen reporters before the term existed. Some were meticulous. Some were not. Some preserved what institutions overlooked. Others repeated what they heard until repetition solidified into a form of authority. Movements such as Operation Mindfuck—part prank, part information experiment emerging from Discordian circles—demonstrated how easily narratives could b...