December 9, 2022 saw the second Easterndaze On Air radio day. Community radios from Central and Eastern Europe connected through the Easterndaze x Berlin platform, in cooperation with Cashmere Radio, in an effort to encourage collaboration between these DIY mediums. Since the first radio day in April 2021, which connected radios and listeners during the pandemic, the war in Ukraine has further heightened a state of political and social crisis.
These radios play a crucial role in their respective artistic and community milieus (being implicitly political, especially in Ukraine, Georgia, Poland, Belarus and Hungary). The project’s participants are these community radios from Central or Eastern Europe: Radio Kapital from Warsaw, Lahmacun Radio from Budapest, 20ft Radio and Gasoline Radio from Kyiv, Mutant Radio from Tblissi, Radio Plato from Minsk along with the Independent Community Radio Network (ICRN) connecting radios in Tallinn, Riga, Vilnius and Helsinki, hosted by Berlin’s Cashmere Radio. The project encompassed collaborative programming, including joint shows and radiophonic contributions created by each radio especially for this live broadcast on FM and online. The session culminated in a panel talk about the issue of community radios, hosted by musicologist and community radio expert Ieva Gudaiyte.