Issue 14 · Winter Transmissions
Loopwire is a listener-funded radio zine about noise, tape decay and the people who keep low-power stations alive. We publish in bands — literally.
Feature 01
Ferrous Bros. has pressed tape since 1974, first for insurance depositions, then for a decade of hardcore demos nobody outside three postcodes ever heard. The machines are older than everyone operating them.
We spent four shifts on the floor watching Delia Okonjo run the loader — a device that takes a pancake of raw tape and winds it, with a wet clack, into a shell. Twelve hundred an hour on a good night. On a bad night, the splicer eats a run and the whole batch goes into a bin marked SORRY.
What surprised us was the clientele. Half the orders now come from bedroom labels with fewer than 200 followers, ordering runs of fifty. The other half are audiobooks for a haulage company whose drivers refuse to switch to streaming.
"People think we're nostalgia," Delia says, over the noise. "We're just the cheapest object you can put a song on and still hold."
Rotation Log · Week 46
Departments
A volunteer crew keeps a 12-watt repeater alive on a headland with no road access. We carried the batteries up with them.
Why the SM-adjacent £22 dynamic on every station desk in the country has outlasted three generations of "upgrade".
A line-by-line account of the 2025 budget, including the £340 we spent on a door that closes properly.
Signature Control
Every band on this page shares one transport. Scroll fast and the whole stack accelerates with you; stop, and it settles back to reading pace. Or take manual control.