E-Mail This Article to a Friend Local air Radio on the borderline BY JOSH KUN

The myth is that Tijuana is a shock, that after you’ve driven south down Interstate 5 through San Diego, the city just ambushes you, that in a matter of minutes you’ve crossed the line into a whole other world. But if you’re paying attention as you drive, the shift from Southern California to Northern Mexico is actually more like a slow dissolve than a jump cut. The freeway divider goes from solid cement to cheap chain-link fence. Once you hit Chula Vista, you can start to see Tijuana from your car window: the gleaming, silver arch next to Plaza Santa Cecilia framing a hillside Tijuana colonia, the Mexican flag flying over a city that looks just an offramp away.

And until January, if you kept your radio tuned to 98.9 FM, you could hear the signal of MORE FM start to come in — the Tijuana alterna-rock station that switched back and forth between Shakira and Pink, the Offspring and Soda Stereo, promos for Tijuana nightclubs and ads for San Diego lawyers. As dated and mainstream as it could sometimes be, it was still radio for border dwellers and border commuters, a local station with a built-in bi-national audience. It’s how I would always know that I was officially in the borderlands of Nike outlets and INS checkpoints, and that I was getting closer to Tijuana.

Now MORE FM is an English-dominant hip-hop station with a photo of P. Diddy on its Web site. The old MORE FM was just as corporate as the new MORE FM, but its bi-lingual music mix made its border location indisputable, radio broadcast from the heart of 21st-century Tijuana. In the age of Clear Channel and commercial-free satellite radio, stations that speak a local language have become harder to find. Instead of being audio portraits of the places they broadcast from, most stations are now little more than audio portraits of syndication deals, federal censorship, and corporate monopoly.

Preserving the fading relationship between radio and local place is at the heart of "Sublime Frequencies," a series of CDs dedicated to what its founder, Alan Bishop, calls "international radio collage." The first two releases, Radio Palestine and Radio Morocco, use bits of music, commercials, news, bumpers, and mike patter to deliver up each place at a particular time — 1985 and 1983 respectively — through its broadcast sounds.

Radio Palestine contains a summer’s worth of Eastern Mediterranean radio jammed into a ragged hour-plus pastiche. Nothing lasts too long here. Bishop is an ADD dial spinner, and we hear Arabic voices clicking into British voices, Beirut pop bumping into traditional Egyptian music, Hebrew speeches fading into signal squelches and feedback. The violent fissures and bloody separations that, off the dial, characterize Radio Palestine’s map of Amman, Cairo, Beirut, Jerusalem, and Alexandria are replaced here by harmless static and frequency jumps — brief interruptions in a cross-cultural musical utopia.

Radio Morocco follows the same restless æsthetic, zeroing in on North Africa via Radio Tangier International and coming up with the wilder mix of the two CDs. There’s ragtime parlor piano, Gnawa trance, laser-gun explosions, José Feliciano, cinematic flute trills, piercing oud laments, pockets of salsa, sidewinding Arabic blues, and what I swear are the opening notes of The People’s Court.

As Bishop points out in his notes, the most incredible thing about these broadcasts — which are full of African and Arabic pop — is that though they were sent out in the wake of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, there’s not a trace of Michael anywhere. Indeed, both Radio Palestine and Radio Morocco are remarkably free of US influence, and that makes the radio summers of 1983 and 1985 not just time capsules of the Middle East and Africa but time capsules of an era when the global saturation of US pop wasn’t common sense.

The same is true of the radio collages included on Mexico 100, a double-disc anthology put together by Sanborn’s, Mexico’s leading national restaurant/general-store chain. As opposed to the regionalism of Bishop’s CDs, Mexico 100 is a national project, setting out to build an "actual time machine" of Mexican musical history. Although it’s stuffed full of a century’s worth of songs, the highlight is what links them all together: jingles for potato chips, toys, and chocolates and historic live radio broadcasts — the death announcements for Frida Kahlo and Pedro Infante, Octavio Paz winning the Nobel Prize, and the election of President Vicente Fox Quesada. There’s also a news report on the 1985 Mexico City earthquake that, after beginning calmly, ends with a cry of "Ay chihuahua!" and the sudden rumble of falling buildings.

You can buy Mexico 100 only in Mexico (a very un-NAFTA move). On a recent trip back from Tijuana, I put it on as I waited in line to cross instead of tuning into the new MORE FM. The effect wasn’t the same, but at least what I was hearing told me something about where I was, an actual place on a map that couldn’t be anywhere else.