Around 1992, approximately in the spring.
Very few of my close ones know – and among those who know, very few remember – that the first radio station I knocked on the door of (literally) was Contact. I didn’t like either the music they played (Contact was always a CHR – contemporary hit radio), or what they said. That’s where the short intervention was invented, which started with the time, continued with the weather or the song, and ended with the wish “pleasant listening”, which I still hate to this day. Without serious content, such as politics, social issues or any field or subject on which people could have different opinions.
But it was the ’90s. Although my parents never complained to me, they couldn’t support me at university anymore with two salaries of teachers severely affected by inflation, so I needed a job. Radio Contact was a ten-minute walk from the Regie dormitory where I lived, it was still one of the few radio stations in Romania, so I could pass as a pretty cool person if I got a job there. My whims regarding the content broadcast could wait. I pretended to be smart by listening to Muddy Waters, Jethro Tull, and Pink Floyd, while at Contact they mostly played “hits” with MC Hammer and similar crap, but as they say, necessity teaches you – it teaches you sometimes all sorts of stupid things, including making compromises.
In those years, if the radio needed “editors”, they simply announced it on air. We’re looking for someone, send us a demo tape… So when I heard the next announcement, I showed up with a demo tape at the Contact headquarters on the top floor of the former ICECHIM building. I knocked on the door, someone opened it, I think it was a woman, I told her what I wanted with my head tilted back because the door was at the end of a three-step staircase from where she looked down on me without inviting me inside, I gave her the tape and that was it. Don’t call us, we’ll call you. That is, we’ll write to you, because at that time in Bucharest there were no mobile phones, not even pagers.
Now, my demo tape said everything about my possibilities, but also about my relationships. It was recorded in my room on “Porcul” microphone – a double cassette recorder SONY famous throughout the dormitory because sometimes it was the only thing that could be heard at night throughout the dormitory. Its microphone was actually a hole similar to the hole where a small jack plug enters. I didn’t know anyone with a studio, anyone who knew someone with a studio, anyone who worked at another radio station. I couldn’t mix the voice with the songs, so I chose to record only the voice. I recorded about three interventions that must have had a minute each, listened to them, rewound the tape, that is, I matched the tape to the beginning of the intervention and that was it.
Don’t look for us, we’ll look for you.
That was my episode with Radio Contact. Not theirs with me.