COMMON GROUND with REFUGE WORLDWIDE

After years of exchange across airwaves, HF and RW curated a club night together for the first time in February. How was it for you?

I love HEAVY FEELIGNS, I’m a big fan boy of Parissa and the project, so it was a pleasure to join in the party with you all. Real stuff.

I believe you also played at OPEN GROUND for the first time yourself. How did you like the space? Did it influence your selections?

It was such an honour to take a bag of dub to play in a venue like OPEN GROUND. A sound system tailored to the music I really love is such a rarity for me, so I was excited to get to the venue and get a feel for what all the hype is about. It was an intense experience, the hype is real. But yeah knowing who the owners are and what their background is, I took the opportunity to bring a little dub siren and a lot of roots, digidub, dancehall etc.

I want to know where all of this started for you. How did Refuge come to life? I understand that it grew out of a fundraising initiative?

Before it was REFUGE WORLDWIDE, it was just REFUGE. And it was mostly what in Germany you would call Soli-Parties. I was a new arrival in Berlin in 2014. Soon after, there was a big flashpoint in the Syrian civil war and a lot of people were coming to Germany to get away from the bombing after Angela Merkel “opened the borders”. While a lot of folks were staying in tents or temporary shelters, I was a UK resident very easily living in Berlin, doing an internship at Resident Advisor and working at Beatport. I felt strongly that I wanted to contribute to the city beyond only being part of the music scene. So the easiest thing for me at that point was fundraisers. I had a lot of contacts so I invited some DJs and we shared the money with different organizations. But I think fundraising as a long-term strategy is not so well rounded. So soon after I got involved more in the grassroots activist scene in Berlin. I got with a group called GIVE SOMETHING BACK to Berlin. But then Covid came and the natural progression was to take events online. And when you’re online, all of a sudden you’re WORLDWIDE. So we added that to the name and decided to take it into radio format.

So it started with a political idea but it was always connected to music. What is the interplay between the two?

For me, everything is inherently political. By that extension, I am a great believer in the fact that music is also political. Whether that’s hunting down stories or rebel songs or folk music. It’s about identity and telling stories. That was really important to me. At some stages, I was around club music and reclaiming spaces. Then it was about platforming voices. For example, yesterday we had a show about ICE in the US, today we had a show about the class system in India. These are directly political shows but politics runs through everything we do. Curation is also a form of activism. It’s all socially minded.

Would you say that Refuge had a specific musical origin? Some scene or genre that it was originally more based in?

For sure. When the soli parties started, it was club and techno focused because of the spaces and times you were doing it. But with the development of the radio, we were really hoping to have all these different genres that we do now. Originally, the station showed that there are people in Berlin who listen to other things outside of house and techno and who want to be represented by other sounds. And it was real freedom for us as well to break out of just having club music and parties and be able to go for whatever, be that some strain of jazz, dub or hiphop or funk. That’s just an enjoyable listening experience for anyone and way more representative of people in this city and around the world.

How do you go about these kinds of collaborations between RW & HF?

HEAVY FEELINGS is definitely one of the more natural ones. Like I don’t even remember ever not knowing a connection with HEAVY FEELINGS by now. Everything grows naturally, we never really try to force things. You meet someone, develop a relationship over some shared sounds and then it just grows. Parissa did some shows here, then we invited her to a festival, then HF invited us over. In general, I think collaborations are something we’re just very lucky with. It’s very rare that we go to a festival or club and afterwards feel like it sucked. And if you’re friends already, it’s always gonna turn into some kind of positive experience. We’re always looking for common ground, which is why it was a fitting name for our event in Open Ground.

So what does community mean to you, especially as an online radio?

I think community is people who show up for each other, both in the local area and the online space. It’s a support network that you can rely on. It’s a sharing of resources, stories, experiences and spaces. Again, it’s about not having a one-directional relationship. A community is circular. Maybe Richard and I are the custodians of the keys but we’re also trying to create an environment where everyone is interacting with each other. Exchange is a very central component of a healthy community. And I think that’s what we’ve been able to foster with the physical space. People can come here without having to spend any money. They can listen to music, have a conversation, join a workshop. It’s for anyone in the area, for anyone connected to us online, for anyone who wants to contribute and exchange. Our community developed organically around these digital and physical hubs.

Was having a physical site always part of your approach to running an online radio?

Yes. Though it’s very hard to run a community or non-profit space. And it’s very, very hard to run an online radio. Doing those two together, you make it especially difficult for yourself. There’s dozens of web radios in the world but not that many have a physical space. It helps and it hinders. Having a bar or cafe, you can make money that you can use to offer other services to your area or your residents. And that’s what we wanted to do. Oona Bar physically wasn’t quite big enough for all the ideas we had. Now we moved to Niemetzstraße, where we have more square meters to play with. We have a music studio that people can use. We have an event room, we have workshops pretty much every week. That’s a big part of our so-called community outreach.

So you have a community that listens to your radio from all over the world and a community that comes by your space in Berlin. What is your relationship to this city?

Berlin is a very international city. It’s a music capital and hub. There’s hundreds of DJs here (at this point, George chuckles a bit). It’s a huge pool to draw from. And it’s a city that’s always been focused on art, culture, music, politics. It’s kind of the perfect storm for a web radio.

And people mostly come to Niemetzstraße to do their recording?

I’d say about 80% of the shows are done here and 20% are sent to us from around the world.

Is there anything you’d like to see more in your program?

To be honest: No. I’m really happy with it. A very small thing is that maybe hosts sometimes could invite more guests and have more interviews. But otherwise, we’re in a very good place. I would love to have more money to be on air more time and give more people time. The station is streaming 24/7 but there’s only like 10 hours a day that are live. If we had more money, I would start at 6am and go until midnight. Then we could have even more great music, even more great conversations.