Contrabanda FMContrabanda FM

Contrabanda has been on 91.4 in Barcelona since January 1991, and nothing about the arrangement has softened since. It runs by open assembly, where anyone who joins gets a vote, and on volunteer labour alone; anyone who wants to make a programme proposes one, which is how a grid of some thirty-five shows assembles itself with nobody directing it. For its thirty-second birthday the station broadcast a day of interviews and live sets rather than a retrospective, which says where the attention sits.

What comes out of that answers to no format. Flamenco d'aquí i d'allà holds two mornings a week, De Raíz works the roots catalogue, Sons da Lusofonia covers the Portuguese-speaking world, Distrito Apache takes hip-hop and Hardcore Radikal does what its name promises. The rest of the grid is talk — labour, housing, prisons, antifascist history — with records filling every gap between.