Radio Proton: live radio from Dornbirn

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Dusting off the needle…

Radio Proton

Four transmitters, no bosses.

Ländle free radio: deep house, Afrobeat, metal, dialect.

The idea came out of Vorarlberg's socio-cultural scene, and in the early nineties it took the form of up to five pirate transmitters around Bernhard Amann, an hour a week each, one in every district, until radio monitoring and the gendarmerie shut them down. Amann and the artist Gottfried Bechtold then built an association, lost the first regional licence to a newspaper consortium, and joined a constitutional challenge that held up commercial radio in Austria. Proton went on air on 31 March 1999.

Akwaaba Soundsystem runs monthly from Abidjan to Lagos and back through the Congo; DJ Angelhunter runs Es Metal Kränzle; Audiobunka brings beats, freestyle sessions and album reviews from the three-country hip-hop scene, and a long run of house and techno shows fills the nights. A 2025 policy lets the station use AI for transcripts and noise reduction, and forbids a programme hosted entirely by one.

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Dornbirn, Austria

Radio Proton

Four transmitters, no bosses.

Ländle free radio: deep house, Afrobeat, metal, dialect.

The idea came out of Vorarlberg's socio-cultural scene, and in the early nineties it took the form of up to five pirate transmitters around Bernhard Amann, an hour a week each, one in every district, until radio monitoring and the gendarmerie shut them down. Amann and the artist Gottfried Bechtold then built an association, lost the first regional licence to a newspaper consortium, and joined a constitutional challenge that held up commercial radio in Austria. Proton went on air on 31 March 1999.

Akwaaba Soundsystem runs monthly from Abidjan to Lagos and back through the Congo; DJ Angelhunter runs Es Metal Kränzle; Audiobunka brings beats, freestyle sessions and album reviews from the three-country hip-hop scene, and a long run of house and techno shows fills the nights. A 2025 policy lets the station use AI for transcripts and noise reduction, and forbids a programme hosted entirely by one.