We use cookies on our website to provide you with the best experience. Most of these are essential and already present.
We do require your explicit consent to save your cart and browsing history between visits. Read about cookies we use here.
Your cart and preferences will not be saved if you leave the site.
play

David Goren

Brooklyn Pirates: Neighbourhoods in the Sky, 2014-2021 (Tape)

Label: Death Is Not The End

Format: Tape

Genre: Library/Soundtracks

Preorder: Released 24th October 2025

€11.30
VAT exempt
+
-
Brooklyn Pirates: Neighbourhoods in the Sky, 2014-2021 documents David Goren’s deep listening project dedicated to Brooklyn’s pirate radio underworld, spanning recordings made between 2014 and 2021. Issued on vinyl for the first time by Death Is Not The End, the album is an extraordinary aural chronicle of New York’s invisible airwaves, focusing primarily on the rich, labyrinthine world of Caribbean-run stations, with excursions into Turkish, Orthodox Jewish, and other broadcast communities.​

Working as both radio producer and sound archivist, David Goren assembles a smorgasbord of illicit FM transmissions, capturing the battered fidelity, distinct patter, and musical overflow of stations rising skyward atop Brooklyn’s rooftops. The collection’s two side-long tracks—nearly an hour in total—are sequenced not as anthropological survey but as immersive sonic documentary, immersing listeners in celebratory dancehall, soca outbursts, pirated sermons, creole gossip, and jostling station IDs. From garbled transmitter glitches to atmospheric urban noise, Goren’s editing honors both the historical fragility and the irrepressible energy of these fleeting neighbourhood broadcasts.​

Goren’s emphasis on marginalized and multicultural voices, the rhythmic textures of local communities, and the precariousness of underground radio, speaks to wider questions about public space, belonging, and cultural resilience. This album is essential for anyone interested in radio art, oral history, or the sonic mapping of New York’s shifting identities—a living museum of borough life, broadcasting just above (and below) the law.

Details
Cat. number: DEATH052
Year: 2021

More from Death Is Not The End

First Blues