Sitting somewhere between an episode of Father Ted, pirate radio gone rural and a silent disco, The Dark Outside FM is an eccentric radio station where 24 hours of tailor-made music that’s never been heard before is broadcast to the remote Galloway Forest Park in southern Scotland. It began in 2012, when the forest’s artists in residence offered “noise terrorist” Stuart MacLean, AKA Frenchbloke, use of a radio transmitter and he “came up with this stupid idea to play music that nobody has ever heard to a place nobody might hear it,” he says. “As far as I know it’s the only radio station where you have to leave your house to listen to it.”
By accident, though, the experiment has turned into a strange kind of music festival – under the umbrella of Sanctuary, an annual 24-hour “public art laboratory” in the forest – one far removed from the gourmet burger vans and glamping of even the most boutique events. MacLean reckons there were six listeners on the bitterly cold night of the first transmission in 2012, but after word spread online, by 2014 hundreds were turning up to tune in to the small, short-range transmitter.
Drokk, a band made up of Geoff Barrow from Portishead and composer Ben Salisbury, drove eight hours from Bristol to play a 10-minute live set. Barrow says his interest was piqued with frustration with festivals where “the only thing you can do is have a selfie taken with the Motorola parrot. Going up there was like being shot in the arm with this positive feeling of why I enjoy music.”
For 2015, Barrow is providing a previously unheard Portishead track, which will be transmitted alongside music from artists including Ivor Novello-winning soundtrack composer Simon Fisher Turner and Warp records IDM duo Plaid. Every year, MacLean’s request for music to play attracts the leftfield but pop has been heard among the Scots pines, too.
The broadcast of a rare song by Nicola Roberts from Girls Aloud at the first event sent the Popjustice forum into overdrive, while a Richard X track recorded for The X Factor that used a Kelis vocal over Roxy Music’s Love Is The Drug got one 50-year-old couple frisky. “You could see them in their campervan dancing and cooking,” MacLean says.
He is baffled by the willingness of musicians to contribute new tracks and the increasing numbers who turn up to listen to them. Perhaps, as Barrow says, it’s because The Dark Outside taps into a frustration with increasingly homogenous music festivals. Future plans include using a shortwave transmitter to broadcast further afield: “The worse the weather, the better the signal,” says MacLean. “Scotland seems to be the best place to broadcast from, because of the rain.” Amazon, Black Forest: prepare to tune in.
Sanctuary 2015 is at Galloway Forest Park, nr Dumfries, 26 & 27 September
