About Cashmere Radio

Cashmere Radio

Cashmere Radio is Berlin's not-for-profit community experimental radio station — a project dedicated to preserving and reinventing radio as an art form, broadcasting 24 hours a day, seven days a week from its studio headquarters. Founded in 2011 and first broadcasting from a converted living room in Lichtenberg around 2015, it spent its first six years in East Berlin before moving to Wedding. Cashmere plays with the plasticity of the medium itself: it is both a physical station open to the public and an online radio; it keeps regular shows while opening itself to extended and one-off events; it stages durational generative-music performances and installations alongside conventional radio durations. Its motto, played on the luxury-fabric pun — "0% Polyester, 100% Cashmere" — captures the ethos: this is radio as a handcrafted, soft, human medium, the opposite of polyester-smooth format broadcasting. On Fridays and Saturdays the programme also airs terrestrially on 88.4 MHz in Berlin and 90.7 MHz in Potsdam via the 24/3 Radio Netzwerk, a collaboration of six of the city's independent stations.

Overview

Cashmere Radio's ambition, in its own description, is to preserve and further radio and broadcasting practices by playing with the plasticity and malleability of the medium — honouring radio's inherent qualities while challenging them. The station broadcasts around the clock on its website in English and German, with a programme of regular music and talk shows spanning electronic music, hip-hop, jazz, folk and experimental sound, plus interviews with innovative artists, live performances and DJ sets. But the schedule is only half the story: Cashmere treats the studio as a social and performative space, open to the public, where broadcasts become events — all-night ambient sit-ins, live improvisations, installations and commissioned radiophonic works.

The station is part of Berlin's independent-radio ecosystem through the 24/3 Radio Netzwerk, a collaboration between six independent stations — Reboot.FM, BLN.FM, WEAREBORNFREE! Empowerment Radio, Savvy Funk, Radiomobil and Cashmere — which shares the 88.4 MHz (Berlin) and 90.7 MHz (Potsdam) frequencies, giving Cashmere a terrestrial weekend window. The network is itself a statement about Berlin's free-radio scene: six fiercely independent stations pooling a frequency rather than competing for it, each keeping its identity while sharing the dial. Beyond broadcasting, the station organizes workshops, film screenings and art exhibitions, and runs artistic residency programmes — including collaborations with organizations such as Art Music Denmark, which funds residencies for Danish artists to develop their own radio broadcasts in the Cashmere studios, with professional production assistance and daily studio access.

History

Cashmere Radio began in 2011 as a project orchestrated by Masters students from the Universität der Künste Berlin, broadcasting from an unlikely venue: a porcelain factory turned sushi restaurant turned living room in Lichtenberg, in Berlin's far east. The Quietus's visiting reporter described the scene — a barn behind a wooden gate, populated by a multinational cast of Berlin residents, cables hugging the walls, a roundtable of laptops and microphones, musicians cradling handmade devices — and a broadcast that veered from sparse drones to a vaudeville-style cover of "Part of Your World" from The Little Mermaid. The first broadcasts aired around 2015, starting with a handful of fortnightly Tuesday shows and, as the founders cheerfully admitted, not the faintest idea of how to run a radio station beyond requiring a microphone and a functioning cocktail bar. A year later the station counted 27 regular shows and a fully operational broadcasting and performance studio, welcoming guests such as Burnt Friedman, A Guy Called Gerald, Caterina Barbieri and Dynamo Dreesen; by its second birthday in June 2017 it hosted over fifty regular music and talk shows spanning blues to techno, poetry and refugee politics — growth driven entirely by word of mouth in Berlin's creative underground.

The station became a fixture of Berlin's music culture: media partner of the Superbooth electronic-music fair, host of performances and all-night ambient sessions, and — after the closure of Berlin Community Radio in early 2019 — widely seen as having taken up that station's mantle as the most reliable representation of the Berlin music scene in one place. The Berliner, writing during the pandemic, called Cashmere "one of the biggest supporters of independent and aspiring artists in the city as well as a haven for heads, hedonists, and everyone in between" — a description the station has never disowned. After six years in Lichtenberg, Cashmere moved its studio headquarters to Wedding, where it continues as a physical station open to the public and a 24/7 online broadcaster.

Programming

The programme is a mosaic of regular shows and one-off interventions. Weekly and fortnightly shows cover electronic music in all its forms, hip-hop, jazz, folk and experimental sound, alongside talk formats, artist interviews and live sessions. The station's experimental brief produces formats that commercial and public radio would never attempt: extended generative-music performances, durational installations, live improvisations with handmade instruments, and radiophonic pieces that treat the broadcast itself as a composition — works that can run for hours, ignoring the clock that governs conventional radio. Guests have ranged from underground electronic producers to sound artists such as Hans Peter Kuhn, once observed broadcasting with his feet in a paddling pool. The bilingual English-German presentation reflects the station's community: Berlin's international creative scene, for whom Cashmere is a meeting point as much as a broadcaster.

The 24/3 Radio Netzwerk window brings Cashmere to FM listeners in Berlin and Potsdam on Friday and Saturday nights via 88.4 and 90.7 MHz. Special events punctuate the schedule: the famous birthday parties — the second, in June 2017, was a twelve-hour takeover of the Klunkerkranich rooftop with two stages and audiophile sound — festival partnerships, and the residency programmes that bring international artists into the studio to develop new broadcast works.

Organization and Ownership

Cashmere Radio is a not-for-profit community station, run collectively by its community of radio makers, producers and DJs — a community the founders describe as generating its power from the collectivity itself. It is independent of commercial and public-broadcasting structures, sustained by the voluntary labour of its contributors, donations and project funding. The station's board coordinates the programme and the residency schemes, connecting incoming artists with contact persons, studio time and production support. Detailed formal ownership information is not publicly confirmed in the sources consulted; the station presents itself as a community endeavour rather than a company.

Digital Presence

Cashmere's website at cashmereradio.com is the station's 24/7 home: the live stream, the programme schedule and the archive of past broadcasts. The stream is the primary distribution channel — the station was born online and remains an internet station first, with the FM weekend window as an extension. The station is active on social media, announcing shows, events and residencies, and its broadcasts are documented through recordings and mixes that circulate beyond the live moment. The cocktail-bar culture of the early Lichtenberg years — the infamous Cashmere alchemists behind the bar at every party — survives in the station's social life: Cashmere has always understood that radio is a social medium, and the parties, sit-ins and residencies are as much the station as the stream. For a project devoted to the performative and social power of radio, the website is both transmitter and venue: the place where the global audience meets the Wedding studio, day and night, around the clock.