Community, Just a Click Away: A Chat with Shella Radio

If I am not mistaken, Shella is the Arabic word for posse, which according to one of the dictionaries means a group of people who have a common characteristic or occupation. Who is Shella and what do you all have in common?

Tohfa: I think we all share our love for community-based projects and music that shares the same values. And of course, we all love radios which serve as platforms to amplify voices of minorities.

Patricio: Shella is a home. What we all have in common is a sense of community. We are a group of people that are quite passionate about certain things.

Mariam: I’m Mariam, Syrian-Czech, and I would say I spend a lot of my time on community based-projects, working in the NGO space and “activism”. So all the work I do is based around community and I think everyone in our team has the same understanding for the importance of that word. Shella is a word I grew up using whenever I truly enjoyed what I did with a group of people. Same applies here. It’s time well spent, doing things that we all care about and it’s fuuuun.

Pablo: Shella is a joint effort by a bunch of people who all saw the potential of starting a community radio project in a community where it felt like that was missing. I think everyone who has joined the project recognized that the conditions in the local scene were perfect for something like this to happen.

The radio opened before the summer and you’ve been quite busy. This month you’re taking a break. How do you feel now after the first months of streaming and working together?

Patricio: I personally feel very proud and happy, but we have so much more to learn. We started with a big load of streams in the garden during the summer, and this little break will help us to restructure the way we work. Indoor season will also help us to have a calmer pace and still work on improvements while being active and get ourselves ready for our lovely Planeta Za garden once again.

Mariam: I would say I feel proud and relieved. Everyone who’s involved has put in a lot of effort to power through the busy season of Shella and of projects they’re working on individually. So the month off is something I think we all deserved and needed to reflect and build a better system for our workflow.

Pablo: I feel really proud of all the work we have done so far, but also happy to have a short break from it. We kind of jumped into this whole thing head first, and now that a few months have gone by, I think it’s the perfect time to take a step back. A big part of the purpose of the radio is to have a platform that can benefit our community, and taking this time off has helped us reflect and think of how we can do that to the best of our ability.

What were the moments you cherished the most?

Patricio: Seeing people that I love, supporting the project. Playing and seeing lovely familiar faces through the window.

Mariam: I would say scraping the walls of the studio, while music was playing. As cheesy as it sounds, it felt like a bunch of kids working on a project, trying to figure out how to make it work. Also just Thursdays in the garden in general where all of our friends came together without making plans. It felt like it was a natural place to meet at the end of the day, something I’ve been missing in Prague lately.

Pablo: We invited LuLu and DJ Bubbles to play at the first edition of our New Faces show, and a lot of our friends came to hang out, even though the garden was technically closed. I think this was the first time that people went into the studio to dance in front of the camera, or at least it was the first time that it was encouraged – and it was so much fun. Every New Faces show since then has been amazing for the same reason – newcoming artists enter the studio, usually a bit nervous, and they end up killing it and receiving great feedback from their friends.

I’ve seen you meeting and talking a lot lately in Pluto. What have you been working on? Share some insights!

Tohfa: We are basically restructuring the radio and trying to learn from the previous months. Getting more people involved, working on exciting collaborations with other radios around the world.

Mariam: Firstly we’ve added a few new people to the team and I’m so happy about that. Other than that what we’ve been working on you’ll find boring. Like structuring communication, socials, data entry and scheduling. But there are things I think will be very exciting but it’s too soon to share (wink, wink)

Pablo: Now that we’ve been operating for a few months, we have a better idea of how we want the radio to run. With so many streams every month, there’s a lot of levels of communication that need to happen on a consistent basis, and a lot of the work we’ve been doing this month has been centered around making sure that we know who’s responsible for what, what our internal deadlines are, etc. It’s not the most exciting answer, but doing all of these things better will enable us to keep getting better.

There are hundreds of online radios around the world, a few clicks away. Do we need another one? What is the role of an online radio today in your opinion?

Pablo: Absolutely yes. The main feedback I heard from people after we started Shella was that it was about time for something like this to exist in Prague. I think the fact that there are hundreds of online radios around the world is irrelevant – we’re not trying to compete with them. In my opinion, the role of an online radio is to serve as a way to document a music scene. There’s so many interesting artists and ideas coming out of this city, and I think our role is to capture them and provide a space for them to live.

Tohfa: I believe yes, as in Czechia there are no online radios run by expats, except for Infame Radio. Radios around Europe are mainly run by Europeans, but the four of us – having non-European background – bring something new to the table.

Mariam: Shella is a community-based radio station so its role is to give platform to local artists and speakers, and if that’s all we do, I’ll be content. But I also see so much potential in the project because of how community based it is and how many people care about it. Also it has brought a third-space feeling to its home Planeta Za.

Patricio: We think that this could help the locals to be a few clicks away from a stranger somewhere far away. There is always some room for one more online radio.

Besides providing for the community, is your ambition to grow your audience internationally?

Mariam: YES. Our whole team comes from very different backgrounds, so I think that reflects on the project through the artists we invite and the shows we do or will curate. And I believe that will grow our international audience naturally.

Patricio: Definitely. No question about it. I want to see this radio as one of the main connections between our local scene and other scenes around the world.

Pablo: 100%. This was part of my initial ambition with the radio – I want it to be a platform that people in other countries can refer to when they want to find out about what’s happening in the Czech Republic. There are some platforms doing this already – projects like PAF and Gravity Network have done a lot for artists in this part of the world to reach an international audience. There’s also labels like YUKU that have an international following and have allowed people in other countries to discover Czech artists. My hope is that Shella can do something similar.

Shella Radio invites their fella-fam to take over Ankali’s dance floor and the Listening Room for the first time this Friday.