Irola IrratiaIrola Irratia

Irola began in 1986 as a project of the Irala residents' association: twelve people at the first meeting, then six months spent building a studio inside the disused toilets of the local psychosocial unit — two of the four cubicles, walls knocked through, soundproofed, a window cut. The name records the address: Irola for the wáter, Irala for the barrio, Irratia for radio. Within a year the telecoms ministry was ordering it shut, and the seventy-odd people running it replied that they would die with the microphones on.

Nearly forty years later it is still on 107.5 and still run by assembly, and the grid splits cleanly: antifascist reporting, Kurdish solidarity and ecology on one side, records on the other. El Desenterrador works the far end of the second — noise anthologies from Sub Rosa, Boards of Canada, dub and techno, whatever is long out of print — while the rest runs to garage, punk and death metal.