Tilos Rádió: live radio from Budapest

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Tilos Rádió

Thirty-five years of not asking.

Forbidden by name, pirate by birth, still on 90. 3.

Tilos az Á, a downtown Budapest club, gave the station its name and its first crew — the DJ Zsolt Palotai among them — when a group of regulars decided Hungary needed a radio the law had no category for. The first broadcast went out on 21 August 1991 from a moving car, on a transmitter passed on by a Dutch crew, the site changing nightly to stay ahead of the police. A few hours a week grew into round-the-clock within a year, and after the 1993 frequency law forced a pause, a licence came in 1995 for the night shift alone.

Nobody has ever been paid for a programme and no advertisement has ever aired, which leaves the grid to whoever will build a show: jungle and drum & bass through the small hours, hypnotic techno from the Bloc crew, dub and roots sets, Hungarian hip-hop, modern jazz nobody else plays, and Népzene, the oldest folk show on Hungarian radio. Jövőzene, Palotai's since 1991, runs in his memory.

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Budapest, Hungary

Tilos Rádió

Thirty-five years of not asking.

Forbidden by name, pirate by birth, still on 90. 3.

Tilos az Á, a downtown Budapest club, gave the station its name and its first crew — the DJ Zsolt Palotai among them — when a group of regulars decided Hungary needed a radio the law had no category for. The first broadcast went out on 21 August 1991 from a moving car, on a transmitter passed on by a Dutch crew, the site changing nightly to stay ahead of the police. A few hours a week grew into round-the-clock within a year, and after the 1993 frequency law forced a pause, a licence came in 1995 for the night shift alone.

Nobody has ever been paid for a programme and no advertisement has ever aired, which leaves the grid to whoever will build a show: jungle and drum & bass through the small hours, hypnotic techno from the Bloc crew, dub and roots sets, Hungarian hip-hop, modern jazz nobody else plays, and Népzene, the oldest folk show on Hungarian radio. Jövőzene, Palotai's since 1991, runs in his memory.