Radio Flora: live radio from Hannover

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Radio Flora

Off the dial, not off the air.

Hannover's exiled free radio: blues, ska, sixties rock.

FLORA is short for Freundeskreis Lokal-Radio Hannover, founded in May 1993 when a change to the state broadcasting law opened a five-year trial; the station went on air in June 1997 and was licensed for seven more years in 2002. In March 2007 the regulator decided not to renew, and the ruling that followed named two faults: radio flora still oriented itself too much on the idea of free radio, and gave too little room to opinions from the entrepreneurial sphere. FM stopped at midnight on 31 March 2009.

The stream carried on from the FAUST centre in Linden, where a couple of hundred members and a hundred-odd programme-makers run the place by grassroots vote and take nothing for it. Siggi Seidel started Blue Beat in my Soul in June 1997 — rocksteady, Two Tone, Northern Soul and dub; Wolfgang Platzer keeps Absolute Rock to 1965 through 1975; Buena Onda, in Spanish, dates from the same first summer.

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Hannover, Germany

Radio Flora

Off the dial, not off the air.

Hannover's exiled free radio: blues, ska, sixties rock.

FLORA is short for Freundeskreis Lokal-Radio Hannover, founded in May 1993 when a change to the state broadcasting law opened a five-year trial; the station went on air in June 1997 and was licensed for seven more years in 2002. In March 2007 the regulator decided not to renew, and the ruling that followed named two faults: radio flora still oriented itself too much on the idea of free radio, and gave too little room to opinions from the entrepreneurial sphere. FM stopped at midnight on 31 March 2009.

The stream carried on from the FAUST centre in Linden, where a couple of hundred members and a hundred-odd programme-makers run the place by grassroots vote and take nothing for it. Siggi Seidel started Blue Beat in my Soul in June 1997 — rocksteady, Two Tone, Northern Soul and dub; Wolfgang Platzer keeps Absolute Rock to 1965 through 1975; Buena Onda, in Spanish, dates from the same first summer.