Station archive · file 001

The world, as far as we can tell

Nobody at this station is a historian. One of us is a newsreader and the other is a mechanic. What follows is what we've pieced together.

I. The afternoon that stopped

It was a Tuesday in 1957, at twenty past four. The sky turned the colour of weak tea, every clock dial began to glow, and then — very politely — everything stopped. No bang. No sirens. People simply went quiet, the trams rolled to a halt, and the long afternoon began.

It has not ended. The chrome stayed shiny, the songs stayed swing, and the future everyone had been promised was left half-built, like a kitchen nobody finished tiling.

“The world burned out. The radio didn't.”

— Lesya “Static” Koval, painted on the transmitter hut door

II. After

The forest came back first. Then the birds, then the foxes, then the people who had been away. In the north, where the old station stands, the trees grew straight through the roofs and nobody had the heart to stop them.

A city courtyard reclaimed by forest: an ivy-covered tram, a dry fountain and a fox drinking from it — The courtyard by the old tram depot. The fox has right of way.

III. The signal

Lesya built the transmitter from a tram motor, two televisions and something she will only describe as “borrowed”. It sits at the top of an old mast on the left bank. When she switched it on, the first voice to come back through the static was Archie's — mid-sentence, still reading the 1957 shipping forecast.

The records come from a basement under a closed concert hall: thousands of discs nobody remembers recording. We play them in the order the crates fall open.

A homemade transmitter hut on top of a tall mast above a river at sunset — The transmitter hut. 214 steps up. Lesya counts them every time.

A basement full of wooden crates of records under a single bulb — The record library, under the concert hall.

IV. The other Kyiv

Here is the strange part. Every hour, the wire brings news — real news, from a Kyiv that never stopped. Its trams are running. Its people argue about parking and the weather. We can't explain it, so we simply read it to you, with sources, and wish them well.

Station rule No. 1 The news is real. The voices are not. Every story links to where it came from — see the Log.

V. Old papers

Archie keeps a shoebox of advertisements cut from whatever papers blew in. The companies are long gone — if they ever existed. The hosts read them out anyway, between songs, because a station needs sponsors and nobody has complained yet.

All brands here are invented for RADium FM. Any resemblance to real products is a coincidence of the apocalypse.

Read the latest from the other Kyiv →