Pirates of the Hertzian Waves: Illegal Radio in Transition-Era Bucharest

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Introduction

I like to imagine that Bucharest in the 1990s was not made up of buildings and boulevards, but of frequencies and interference; not of coherent urban strategies—which, in truth, barely exist even today—but of improvisations transmitted from living and drying rooms, attics, or dorms.

There, youngsters aged 15 to 23 cut cables, burned resistors, raised antennas, and improvised connectors with a recklessness and technical inconsistency that was sometimes fatal, yet guided by a remarkable cultural intuition. Unwittingly, they were building a sonic counter-geography of the city, a parallel map drawn not on paper, but across the Hertzian spectrum.

“Pirate radio was merely tolerated as a "necessary evil" of the transition, then eliminated as an obstacle to an orderly market. The state opted for spectrum cleaning rather than integration, leaving the Romanian pirate phenomenon as an unfinished chapter—an informal archive of forum memories and yellowed newspaper scans.”

Photo credits: Gazeta de Sud, July 17, 2001.

Seen today, the pirate radio stations of 1990s and early 2000s Bucharest function as the acoustic memory of a city that no longer exists, yet whose echo still reverberates through urban memory and the informal archives of popular culture. This is not merely about nostalgia, adolescence, or metallic voices dissolving into the background noise of the transition years; it is about a rare moment where technical infrastructure, social precariousness, and the desire for expression overlapped perfectly. They produced an alternative sonic culture that was deeply local and profoundly political, even if it never explicitly claimed to be.

The question this article begins with is simple only on the surface: how did pirate radio stations in post-communist Bucharest function as alternative cultural infrastructures, community-building platforms, and mechanisms of legitimation for music excluded from legal FM?

The answer cannot ignore the fact that these illegal stations were not mere music transmitters, but genuine social devices. They functioned as network nodes, subcultural catalysts, and spaces of symbolic recognition. Here, the dance music of apartment parties met electronic tracks brought on cassette tapes from Germany, the hip-hop of the grey blocks neighbourhoods, and perhaps most significantly manele, the musical genre most excluded from Romania’s cultural mainstream, yet the most pervasive in everyday urban life. Pirate radio stations became, without explicitly assuming the role, the architects of an alternative acoustic geography: a map of the city drawn through unstable, but persistent emissions.

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The Hertzian Anarchy of the Transition Years

After 1989, Romania’s radio spectrum entered a twilight zone. The law was vague, institutions were fragile, and effective control was almost non-existent. “A true Hertzian jungle,” an engineer from the General Inspectorate for Communications and Information Technology called it in an Agenda Zilei article in the late 1990s. The phrase was anything but metaphorical. Frequencies were occupied, abandoned, shifted, overlapped, and contested night after night in a continuous skirmish. “Immediately after the events of December ’89, the first pirate radio stations were reported,” the press of the time noted, surprised by this spontaneous explosion. In 1997, there were more than twenty in the capital alone; by 1999, over thirty-five. The true figure was likely far higher, since many of them broadcast intermittently, like phantoms—only at night, only on weekends, or for just a few hours a day.

Among the loudest names in this sonic jungle was Radio Pro-B. Its founder, DJ Zet, remembers the beginnings in 1996 as a series of "attempts, and more attempts" using a small transmitter: "It only reached two blocks around me." But from 1997 onward, the project took a more ambitious, almost formal turn, establishing a studio and a structure. "From ’97, we could be heard almost all over Bucharest. And because we were in a very high area—Berceni is essentially the highest point in the city—you can imagine," he recalls. Later, after relocating and increasing their power, they reached "almost the entire Prahova Valley."

Pro-B was not an isolated case, but the clearest example of an energy that transformed precariousness into broadcasting power and local influence. This intermittence and mobility were not flaws, but survival strategies. In the total absence of coherent legislation, the frequency became a kind of free territory, a Hertzian commons. Anyone with minimal electronics knowledge and enough courage (or youthful recklessness) could occupy the ether. In reality, this was not pure anarchy, but an improvised democracy of sound, where access was guaranteed neither by the state nor by capital, but by ingenuity and personal risk.

In the literature on alternative media in Central and Eastern Europe, researcher Petr Šrajer describes pirate radio as "a moment of rupture in the symbolic infrastructure of the state," a temporary breach in the absolute monopoly over the spectrum. In the Bucharest of the 1990s, this rupture was not ideologically articulated, but it was lived with rare intensity. Jamming, interference, and background noise were not merely sonic phenomena; they were manifestations of a social, political, and affective condition. In that chaos of signals, a struggle was being played out—unnamed, but real—over the symbolic reconfiguration of one of the state’s most exclusive monopolies: the right to decide who speaks, who listens, and on which frequency it may happen.

From Left to Right: Libertatea, March 20, 2001; Cotidianul, September 5, 2001; România Liberă, March 20, 2002

Pirate Radio as Bricolage

Any space could become a studio: a storage room, a cramped living room, a forgotten shed. In a 1996 report, Cronica Română succinctly described the headquarters of such a station: “A music system, a few speakers thrown around the room, and a telephone—that’s what a pirate radio station looks like.” Everything was improvised, provisional, precarious. Yet, within this apparent precariousness operated a logic that anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss would have called bricolage: the construction of functional, even complex systems from available materials, without prior design or institutional legitimacy, but with a surprising internal coherence.

If the DJ was the face and voice of pirate radio, the electronics specialist was its skeleton, nervous system, and muscles. Without a transmitter, without an antenna, without technical improvisation, nothing existed. This is why, in nearly all testimonies, from the press, forums, and interviews, the same names appear obsessively, like founding figures of an underground technical pantheon: Bogdan B., Costin from Radio X, Pisică, Lixandru, Tiberiu. They connected the raw desire to broadcast with the material capacity to occupy a frequency. A functional transmitter could cost between $150 and $500—enormous sums for teenagers at the time. Consequently, salvaging parts from Diamant TV sets, old radios, or other dismantled devices became standard practice—a form of urban archaeology of waste.

DJ Zet confirms this total dependence on improvised infrastructure: “Many times, the transmitter was more important than the music. If it didn’t work technically, there was no radio. You could change the music, but if the antenna went down, everything disappeared.” This extreme fragility produced a specific ethic: an almost ritual respect for those who “knew,” for those who could build, repair, or save a broadcast from the failure of a burned capacitor. Recovering a 2N3375 transistor from a broken TV wasn’t just thrift. It was an act of rescue.

Pro-B represented the opposite pole of the spectrum, boasting professional microphones, a mixer, and a soundproof studio—a luxury for that era. “Think about it: we had a soundproof studio. I don’t know who else among the pirates had that in the ’90s,” DJ Zet remarks. Yet, he was also intimately familiar with the reality of most stations, defined by an extreme, inventive bricolage: “I went into one guy’s apartment—his radio station was in his bedroom. When I walked in, I felt like I’d entered an electronics repair shop. Cables everywhere, circuit boards… A mixer sitting on the radiator, a mixer he had built himself out of a box with some potentiometers… No, you can’t even imagine it. It’s funny, perhaps, but it’s also beautiful, because in the end, it was pure passion.” This contrast between aspirational professionalism and survival bricolage defined the entire ecosystem, revealing its profound diversity.

Photo credits: Agenda Zilei, July 30, 1999.

Pirate Radio as Community Network and Informal Economy

Pirate radio did not function as a one-way medium, but as an acoustic network of proximity. The landline phone rang incessantly, dedications followed one another obsessively, and identities were forged through the simple repetition of names on air. The stereotypical formula, “Greetings from Ionuț in Colentina to Mihaela in Titan,” was not a radio cliché; it was an act of public self-representation, a way of saying “I exist” and “I am here,” in a city that offered very few other forms of visibility to young people from the periphery. Radio Pro-B excelled at sustaining this community.

DJ Zet describes a phenomenon that transformed the station into a kind of sonic public utility for Berceni district and beyond: “First of all, it was young people. But second, it was playing in a lot of shops. For example, when I walked around Berceni behind Piața Sudului, there was a huge taxi parking lot. There wasn’t a terrace or a taxi sitting with its doors open where you wouldn’t hear Pro-B. We were local heroes.” This omnipresence on terraces, in taxis, kiosks, and small shop speakers showed that pirate radio had long evolved beyond a clandestine hobby to become affective and economic infrastructure.

One aspect often glossed over in the sanitized official histories of Romanian media is that pirate radio stations were, above all, functional economic devices—albeit informal, unstable, and illegal. Pirate radio made some money. Not corporate capital or scalable profit, but fragmented income sufficient to sustain broadcasting, pay modest rents, buy equipment, and sometimes cover fines or “favors.” This informal economy of sound relied on a brutally efficient logic: where organized media infrastructure failed, pirate radio became the primary interface between a community’s demand and an equally informal supply.

Ads for discos, bars, neighbourhood shops, or private events formed the backbone of survival. There were no contracts, standard rates, or invoices. Everything was negotiable, personal, and based on mutual necessity. DJ Zet explains this mechanic: “We didn’t get rich, but we lived off it. Clubs came to us. They paid us to mention their name every half hour. Sometimes it was money, sometimes access or relationships. The radio became a kind of currency.” In this sense, pirate radio functioned as an embedded cultural agent in the classic sense of economic anthropology: the economy was not separate from social relations, but woven through them. Advertising was not a standardized spot, but a relationship: “I say your name on air, you help us with something.”

This logic explains why pirate radio stations so quickly became nodes of local power, especially in peripheral neighbourhoods. They didn’t just reflect urban life; they organized it. A disco filled up because the DJ announced the meeting on the microphone. Zet recalls: “At one point we said every day: whoever wants to meet us, Friday night at Piața Sudului. Hundreds of people came. The radio wasn’t just sound anymore—it was logistics.” It was social infrastructure in its purest form.

A transmitter stashed inside an ‘abandoned’ stove. Photo credits: Libertatea, August 17, 2001

Pirate Radio as Infrastructure for Excluded Music

There is a critical point in the history of pirate radio in Romania where discussions about technology, bricolage, and illegality become insufficient. At that point, analysis must move from the relatively comfortable question of how they broadcast to the far more uncomfortable and significant one of what was being heard and, crucially, what was forbidden on clean, legitimate FM. Pirate radio was not just an ingenious technical solution in a legislative vacuum; it was, above all, an essential infrastructure for the circulation and legitimation of rejected sound, of music without a cultural passport, of genres stereotypically associated with the popular classes, the periphery, “bad taste,” or raw bodily pleasures. Here intersect two parallel yet fundamental histories of post-communist urban culture: Romanian hip-hop in its raw beginnings, and manele—already massively popular socially, yet almost entirely excluded from the legitimate media space. Both were, at various points in the 1990s, undesirable cultural products, tolerated only in the city’s shadow zones: markets, neighbourhood discos, private parties, or Walkman headphones. Pirate radio was the first infrastructure to grant them constant, locally accessible visibility.

The press captured this almost involuntarily. In 1997, Evenimentul Zilei noted that B.U.G. Mafia “became known among kids thanks to pirate radio stations that broadcast their tracks.” The phrasing is revealing in its lack of drama: not the emerging music industry, nor the fledgling commercial trusts, but the pirates. Romanian hip-hop grew and proliferated within an informal cultural ecology of copied cassettes, live freestyling, and bedroom DJs playing demos recorded under precarious conditions. It was a sound too direct, too harsh, too “from the blocks” for the aesthetically sanitized FM of the early transition, which was obsessed with mimicking Western formats. DJ Zet confirms this: “We didn’t think we were making culture. We played what people asked for. And people asked for things that didn’t exist anywhere on FM.” For Radio Pro-B, that meant a calculated mix: hip-hop, dance music, and inevitably, manele. “If you refused manele, your phone died,” he says lucidly. “And without the phone, there was no radio.” The phone was the umbilical cord connecting the station to the community. While hip-hop was marginally tolerated as a form of “youth rebellion,” manele were met with a far deeper, structural hostility. This wasn’t just a difference in taste, but a full-fledged social classification. Manele carried within their sound the entire social body of the urban periphery: informal labor, Roma ethnicity (real or perceived), and rapid social mobility lacking symbolic legitimacy. This is precisely why they could not be admitted into the “civilized,” Europe-aspiring public soundscape. Pirate radio stations were the first to shatter this symbolic boundary.

Forum testimonies are strikingly clear. One user recalls how, in Suceava, Radio Onyx broadcast between 2002 and 2003: “The first time I tuned in, Adi de la Vâlcea’s 'E tare bruneta' was playing. It caught my attention instantly.” For that listener, the moment was a founding act of cultural recognition. Just as the first grime beats were heard on Rinse FM in early-2000s London, manele entered the airwaves through improvised transmitters. This “sonic night” appears obsessively in memories: “At night, manele were blasting... dedications from index 105 to 811.” Night was not just a tactical time for pirates—fewer inspections, lower visibility—but also their symbolic time. It was the rhythm of taxi drivers, third-shift workers, and neighborhoods that didn’t function according to the institutional, diurnal grid.

Mainstream media treated the phenomenon through moral panic. In 2002, Adevărul ran alarmist headlines about “pirate radio stations, toys that block aeronautical communications.” The article noted, with horror, that “manele could be heard in the headphones of glider pilots.” The image was deliberately grotesque: the state, national security, even the sky, all jammed by “barbaric” sound. Read retrospectively, the scene is eloquent: marginal sound literally invading the infrastructure of power.

In other documented cases, manele dedications overlapped directly with police communications. It wasn’t a conscious political act, but a technical side effect of unfiltered equipment. Yet the symbolic effect was devastating: the voice of authority temporarily drowned out by the sound that same order refused to recognize. Romania’s difference lies in the intensity with which manele were constructed as a major cultural threat. In 2006, journalist Ovidiu Nahoi captured this symbolic quarantine: manele were tolerable as long as they remained “on pirate radios cobbled together in apartments lost in Bucharest’s concrete jungle.” The problem arose when they escaped this space. Pirate radio thus functioned as an essential buffer space—a medium that allowed these genres to build audiences without immediately forcing a frontal conflict with mainstream institutions. In this sense, pirates were involuntary but highly effective cultural mediators. Years before digital platforms, they did what YouTube would later do globally: connect massive grassroots demand with supply, bypassing the traditional gatekeepers of taste.

From Left to Right: România Liberă, March 2002; Cotidianul, August 1998; Libertatea, May 2001; Cotidianul, October 2001.

The State as Intermittent Adversary

The relationship between pirate radio and the state was deeply ambiguous. On paper, the law was clear and severe. The 1992 Audiovisual Law stipulated prison sentences from six months to two years for unlicensed broadcasting. In practice, enforcement was inconsistent, chaotic, full of gaps. Almost all testimonies converge on the same paradox: pirate radios were shut down and equipment confiscated almost exclusively following specific complaints—from licensed stations, jammed institutions, and the like. There were no systematic, proactive eradication campaigns. There was tacit tolerance, sometimes bordering on complicity, until someone “got upset” or interference became too obvious and inconvenient.

DJ Zet articulates this perception clearly: “We knew it was illegal, but we didn’t feel like we were doing something wrong. We felt we were filling a gap.” That sentence summarizes pirate radio’s practical, not ideological ethic: not a declared rebellion against the system, but a response to a real need, an institutional void. He describes the ambivalent mechanics of the “hunt”: “Dangerous? It wasn’t dangerous except for being illegal. Our biggest fear was that they’d come and confiscate the equipment. They knew about you, but if you didn’t bother anyone, they didn’t really come. When they went to one station, that one would warn everyone: ‘Guys, there’s a raid… shut down.’ And we’d stop broadcasting for a week.” This temporary suspension was part of the game—a tactical pause, a temporary retreat in a war of attrition with a predictable bureaucratic adversary.

Sometimes, however, interference had serious consequences, exposing the state’s shocking vulnerability. In 2001, the Special Telecommunications Service was reportedly “inoperable for a month,” blocked by a clandestine operator broadcasting on its secret channels “while looking for a girlfriend.” This absurd-sounding incident is a perfect indicator of the fragility of the post-communist state’s infrastructure which was underfunded, technologically outdated. The fact that a neighbourhood kid could jam vital government communications says much about pirate ingenuity, but also about a state still learning how to function.

The end of pirate radio did not come through a decisive state victory over anarchy, nor through coherent media reform. It came through slow exhaustion. Through forced professionalization. Through the relocation of cultural infrastructure. Through a complex mix of fatigue, accumulated fear, pragmatism, and above all, radical technological transformation. Pirate radios were not defeated in an epic battle; they were absorbed, gradually emptied of their original meaning, and eventually replaced. For DJ Zet, the transition moment is not dramatic, but a sober recognition of a new reality: “At some point, it no longer made sense. It wasn’t the same. Either you went legal or you moved online. FM had become too risky and too empty.” His statement perfectly captures the end of an era. Not a spectacular collapse, but a slow, almost natural withdrawal from a space that no longer offered what it once had: opportunity, adrenaline, utility.

After 2003-2004, institutional pressure visibly increased. The National Audiovisual Council consolidated its authority, IGCTI became ANCOM, legislation clarified (even if it remained problematic), and tacit tolerance gradually turned into systematic intervention. The press increasingly noted “annihilations,” “equipment seizures,” “criminal files” against pirates. Libertatea and România Liberă published punitive articles about “the last pirates,” about “kids playing radio,” sublimating threats to national security. The tone was no longer ambiguous or curious, but condemnatory.

At the same time, something far more important than bureaucratic repression was happening: pirate radio was rapidly losing its primary social function. Broadband internet became accessible in cities. MP3s circulated freely. Specialized forums, messengers, later early social and streaming platforms offered something FM could no longer provide: music access without risk, without physical antennas, without fines, without fear of police visits. Sound no longer needed physical ether to circulate. Community no longer had to be geographically proximate; it could be interest-based, dispersed. Exactly what had once been pirate radio’s supreme strength, locality, physical proximity, shared risk, transmitter materiality, suddenly became a disadvantage, an unnecessary burden. DJ Zet speaks explicitly about this threshold of awareness: “When I saw you could reach people without risking anything, without hiding, without carrying transmitters, it was clear it was over.” This is not a statement of defeat, but of realistic adaptation.

Pirate radio as an FM phenomenon does not die. It simply moves. First online, then onto social platforms, sometimes keeping the name, sometimes the community, but permanently losing its aura as an act of physical, territorial resistance. Today, Radio Pro-B continues to broadcast from the Romanian online space.

Photo credits: Jurnalul Național, May 6-7, 2000

The Problem of the Absent Community Radio

Going legal, for those pirates who chose or managed to do so, was rarely a form of professional fulfilment, but rather a dilution of their initial energy. Those who reached commercial FM or “respectable” corporate stations quickly discovered that sonic freedom and fluid playlists come at the price of editorial silence and standardization. “In legality, you no longer decide what you play. You decide what is demanded,” says Zet, highlighting a subtle but crucial difference: in pirate radio, “what is demanded” was organic feedback from the immediate community; in legality, it is a formula set by market research, demographic targets, and advertising sell-outs. Demand is mediated and distorted by the logic of profit.

DJ Tony from Radio Alert reflected on this in a 2001 Cotidianul interview with predictable bitterness: “Even if I could reopen the station, I wouldn’t. I’d be ashamed to broadcast on today's FM.” This shift represents a loss of what author Sue Carpenter calls relational density, borrowing a term from social psychology. Pirate radio disappears not when it is banned, but when it "is no longer necessary", when its alternative infrastructure is replaced by technologies that render it obsolete or legal structures that absorb its functions.

Romania fits this model perfectly, yet with a crucial distinction: the near-total absence of community radio as a legitimate translation of pirate energy. Unlike the UK, Hungary, Germany, or Poland, where pirate stations were often legalized and transformed into non-profit community hubs, Romania never produced such an intelligent institutional transition. Pirate radio was merely tolerated as a "necessary evil" of the transition, then eliminated as an obstacle to an orderly market. The state opted for spectrum cleaning rather than integration, leaving the Romanian pirate phenomenon as an unfinished chapter—an informal archive of forum memories and yellowed newspaper scans.

Pirate radio was not an exotic parenthesis of the Romanian transition. It was one of the most coherent and effective forms of social self-organization in post-communist Romania. It was, all at once a bottom-up cultural infrastructure, a functional shadow-economy device, and a platform for excluded voices. Precisely because it was illegal, it was genuinely free. DJ Zet appears not as a romantic hero, but as a lucid witness to this cycle. “I don’t regret anything,” he says. “It was our moment. If we hadn’t done it, nobody would have.” This is the crux of the story. Pirate radio was not about illegality; it was about initiative, about building infrastructure with one's own hands before the state or the market even recognized the need for it.

Today, when sound circulates algorithmically and instantly, pirate FM seems like a relic of a vanished era. Yet, it remains an instructive one, a proof that deep cultural infrastructure can emerge from desperate improvisation and collectively assumed risk. “Today everything is legal,” says Zet, almost ironically. “But I don’t know if it’s still alive.” This is the most uncomfortable conclusion of all. Legality brought order and profit, but it did not solve the problem of the authentic voice. Pirate radio was the first space where the post-communist city—especially its youth—could hear itself without intermediaries. It was, in the purest sense, a sound that did not ask for permission. And in that occupation of the ether lay the most powerful form of cultural resistance of an era.

AFCN

Pirates of the Hertzian Waves: Illegal Radio in Transition-Era Bucharest

Written by:

Share article:

Introduction

The Hertzian Anarchy of the Transition Years

Pirate Radio as Bricolage

Pirate Radio as Community Network and Informal Economy

Pirate Radio as Infrastructure for Excluded Music

The State as Intermittent Adversary

The Problem of the Absent Community Radio

About the Author

Paul Breazu

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THE ATTIC

Pirates of the Hertzian Waves: Illegal Radio in Transition-Era Bucharest

Written by:

Share article:

Introduction

The Attic Newsletter

Follow @theatticmag on Twitter

The Hertzian Anarchy of the Transition Years

Follow @theatticmag on Twitter

Pirate Radio as Bricolage

Pirate Radio as Community Network and Informal Economy

Pirate Radio as Infrastructure for Excluded Music

The State as Intermittent Adversary

The Problem of the Absent Community Radio

About the Author

Paul Breazu

Share this Article

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