On this week's Snackpoint Charlie: a special simulcast with our radio brother Radio is a Foreign Country, who present "Songs from the Edge of the World." Across fifteen years of recordings, producer Ian Brennan has sought out voices rarely heard beyond the communities where they were recorded. Captured in prisons, refugee camps, remote villages, places of worship, and communities living on the margins, these songs speak with startling honesty about love, loss, displacement, resilience, faith, memory, and survival. This mix traces Brennan's extraordinary body of work from 2011–2025, bringing together singers from every corner of the world whose stories are as unforgettable as their music. These are not polished studio performances but deeply human testimonies—fragile, defiant, and profoundly moving.

YOU HAVE TUNED INTO RADIO IS A FOREIGN COUNTRY.
Somewhere between Tangier and a truck stop outside Amarillo, between a numbers station in the Balkans and a rainstorm hammering corrugated roofs in Manila, we intercepted the signal and never shut the transmitter off again.

The station may not be real, but the ghosts are.

— off-air recordings plucked from shortwave, FM, AM, pirate bands, military spillover, evangelical overload, taxi chatter, fishing fleets, border static, and anonymous operators muttering into the ionosphere

— field recordings captured in deserts, train compartments, mountain shrines, flooded streets, jungle villages, abandoned terminals, and cheap hotel rooms with a radio permanently tuned between stations

— fragments of ethnographic film and forgotten tapes buried in archive basements, never intended to be heard again 

— obscure records and cassettes of exotic provenance, dusted off and sent back into the night on invisible waves

The airwaves are haunted. We merely provide hospitality. 

Snackpoint Charlie is music from elsewhere and beyond, curated / assembled / mashed up by filmmaker / audio artist / music journalist Jeff Economy, broadcast live from a secret location deep in the Catskills. New and newly excavated international obscurities and hits + ethnomusicological field recordings + abstract experiments + shortwave interjections + interviews + live sessions + spoken interludes = imaginary soundtracks to unmade foreign films. Annotated playlists for all shows are at snackpointcharlie.net.