Active Listening: Dundee Radio Club

We catch up with Becca Clark and Su Shaw from Dundee Radio Club ahead of their maiden broadcast at the start of the month

Feature by Laurie Presswood | 03 Feb 2025
  • Su Shaw and Becca Clark

Scotland’s been enjoying a community radio boom over the last decade, with EHFM, Clyde Built Radio, Radio Buena Vida and Radiophrenia all establishing themselves as fixtures of the cultural landscape. Now Dundee looks set to add its own contribution to that list.

The first official Dundee Radio Club broadcast was technically last August – a three-hour playlist curated around the theme of GRAIN for Hospitalfield’s Summer Festival – but the first live broadcast proper will be a continuous 48-hour listening festival hosted on their website starting on Friday 7 February.

The pieces, songs, and recordings making up the 48 hours are the result of an open call for submissions, broadcast across local creative opportunities boards and the community radio network more widely. Becca Clark and Su Shaw, the duo behind Dundee Radio Club, say they’d initially wondered how much work they’d have to produce themselves to fill the time – but the warmth of response means now, if anything, they have the opposite problem. 

The hundred-odd submissions they’ve received represent a wild and multifarious coming together of form, genre and style. There was no suggested theme, or guiding principle as such, so listeners can expect a mixtape of deep house/modern Italo/weird world bangers from Tom at Dundee’s Le Freak Records sitting alongside the first episode of podcast What The Hat?!, from V&A Dundee's Young People's Collective, sitting in turn beside an excerpt from Tommy Perman’s 2020 album Positive Interactions – a collection of sounds Perman received from friends across the globe, in response to the question, ‘What sounds make you happy?’

For Clark this smash contrast is precisely the point: “One of the things I love about radio is that you tune in, you've no idea what's on, you just happen upon things and it flows into something. You can be listening to an amazing playlist, and then you can be listening to a really abstract documentary, and there's not a space in between... You're listening to proper 90s bangers one minute, and then you're listening to the news the next, [it’s lovely] how quickly you can move between these types of listening or different types of sounds.”


Su Shaw & Becca Clark. Image: Ibi Feher.

They reckon the balance of music to field recordings, poetry and podcast is somewhere close to 50/50, although as Shaw teases, setting them in binary categories like this depends very much on your definition of music. “[There are] quite a lot of submissions which really focus on field recordings, which I would also consider to be quite musical.”

You might expect this from Shaw. Known for her music and sound-based installations under the moniker SHHE, her work frequently explores connections between environment and sound. Clark herself has a track record of experience with student and community radio – this very fitting collaboration is born out of a mutual love of music, found sounds, and deep and active listening.

The two were originally introduced through Creative Dundee‘s Amps network – they mention that although it’s not an official policy as such, the organisation makes a point of putting interesting minds together, connecting people that are making and doing across all creative disciplines in the city to see what ideas might be sparked.

The organisation’s wider work of championing Dundee’s arts community and providing physical space for them is a cause close to Clark and Shaw’s hearts – their own ties to the city are longstanding and tenderly maintained. Shaw comments on Dundee’s incredible creative ecology – the incredible DIY and grassroots projects and programming that takes place there – and you get the sense that the full breadth of that community is reflected in these submissions.

Although the programme has an incredible international presence, there is a distinct local character (a characteristic trait of community radio in the digital age). Animal infrasounds from the Atacama Desert give way to a collaboration between UNESCO City of Design Dundee and the youth work project Hot Chocolate Trust which asks what the future will sound like. There’s even a half-hour instrumental from artist Siôn Parkinson exploring the Dundonian origins of heckling.

There are no plans to archive for future listening. For Clark and Shaw, the defined duration of the project makes for deliberate engagement, and therefore, community. So listen live, and listen intentionally. This sonic effigy of a city will be fleeting and then it'll be gone.


Dundee Radio Club launches with an event at Volk Gallery, The Keiller Centre, Dundee, 7 Feb, 1pm; Dundee Radio Club will then be streaming for 48 hours from 2pm on 7 Feb at dundeeradio.club

http://dundeeradio.club