Playlist.

Today’s show is a bit of a strange beast. In addition to the usual tunes, about half of it was dedicated to a pilot episode of what might become a regular environmental-themed current events/talky talk show. I asked a couple of friends if they wanted to come on the air, and a few days later they announced that they had worked out a whole show. They’re calling it “It’s Hot in Here”. I kind of like the idea of “producing” a talk show, and it gives me a chance to make unhelpful quips while they try to do something useful and interesting. So we’ll pitch it to the station execs and see. If it flys, I’ll still be doing the regular show, just an hour shorter.

I feel like we managed to fit a tonne of good music in there anyhow. The stretch from Fred Eaglesmith to John Vanderslice felt downright blessed. (Not bad, given that our chief engineer was ripping and tearing at the patch cords trying to figure out why one of the CD decks was failing at the time.) And Jen, or Gina, or whatever the hell she’s calling herself (what’s up with these dj’s with ambiguous names?) has pretty ace taste in music to play in between the talky talk, so it all adds up pretty well. I had never heard that Rahsaan Roland Kirk song. Good stuff.

• hugonaut13mar2008.mp3

Audio:

Playlist.

Today was great. At first, I was sitting there wondering why I’ve been having a harder time making visceral contact with the music since we moved to the temporary studio (feeling it bodily as Dean Bavington would say). I had a sudden intuition. I rose, and approaching the main overhead light switch for the studio, I turned them off. After the vibe was good.

Here’s where to get the amazing alternate version of Joni Mitchell’s “The Hissing of Summer Lawns”. Note there’s some hints to some other incredible musical oddities sprinkled in there too. Hopefully I’ll be playing more of those in weeks to come.

Here’s Bert demonstrating a far-out super hep drum solo:

Oh groove with him baby.

Read the rest of this entry »

Turns out wcbn’s digital archive stretches all the way back to 2005! Apparently, it went live at 7pm on the 3rd of July, ’05. Unlike these heady days of fat pipes and hi-fi, back in 2005 radio was stored in 19kbps .ogg format. Here it is, as a vaguely historical curiosity.

download

It sounds as though the DJ was not aware of his involvement in that historic moment. Probably nobody told him.

Chances are your player can’t play .ogg. Because chances are you use wonderful itunes. It’s not that it would cost money for Apple to license .ogg and build it into itunes. Ogg is free. It’s not that .ogg is inferior to .mp3 or .mp4 or whatever. In fact, it’s probably better. Apple just doesn’t like things which are open and thus can’t be artificially constricted as a business model. Or maybe it’s just the Apple personality. As Steven Levy famously lied in his 1984 book Hackers, the hacker ethic of openness and sharing has always been central to the Apple Computer corporation.

Man, did I get onto a radio format rant there again? How does that happen.

Anyhow, I would put an online player in to play it for you right from the post, except my player doesn’t play .ogg. Because it’s flash-based, and flash is made by Adobe. It’s not that it it would cost Adobe anything to build .ogg in….

“Now witness the power of this fully armed and operational battle station.”
–Emperor Palpatine

I think I’ve finally got the podcast running for my radio show. It should have been easy–wordpress actually makes podcasting painless–but of course I had to make it work with itunes, and itunes is stupid stupid stupid. Making it work with standards-compliant, normal software: easy. Making it work with tyrannical, we-know-better-than-you, we-know-better-than-the-whole-world itunes: hard.

But I digress. Here’s how to subscribe in (yay!) itunes:

• In the itunes top menu, choose “Advanced” > “Subscribe to Podcast…”
• In the box that appears, copy and paste in the address: http://hughstimson.org/category/radio/feed
• Click OK.
• It should now show up in the list of podcasts under “Library” in the left-hand menu.

Once that’s set up, I assume it’s easy enough to make it automatically download new episodes, automatically send them to your ipod, and so on. Using that fabled Apple user-interface easiness.

Note that I’ve had to combine the three hours into a single file (thanks again, Steve Jobs Design Nazi), so it will probably take a while to download an entire episode. Older shows should show up in the list of available episodes, but if you try to download those, you’ll only get the first hour.

This is still mostly experimental, and I’m looking for “feedback” from my “user base”. So if you run into any issues let me know.

If you would like to try accessing the older episodes in their entirety (all three hours), and you aren’t using itunes, you could try using the atom-format feed. This is even more experimental. If it does work at all, the names of the files may be unhelpful, and the episodes may show up out of order. The atom feed is at: http://hughstimson.org/category/radio/feed/atom

Apologies for the long delay. I promised myself this would be the week I figured out the podcasting thing, and that has inevitably taken longer than expected.

But here it all is.

Playlist.

Here’s the Jammin’ the Blues video. I highly recommend watching this.

This week was the first week in the temporary studio. I like it in there, it’s like a diorama of the actual wcbn station. There’s something under-seigey about it. It feels (incredibly) even more like being in a basement. Or a kid’s mock-up of a pirate radio station. Plus if any other radio denizens show up to do radio-related stuff you are all hanging out together, since it’s only the one room. On the other hand, I found it harder to focus on listening to the music, because I was thinking more about the equipment and levels and such. Also, not having acess to the music library is a clear and present bummer.

And levels still got screwed up–got a call from Toledo that the mic was way too low. And there seems to be heavy distortion in the right channel for the first 40-odd minutes, and then it just mysteriously heals itself.

The day I was born I made my first mistake
and by that path
have I sought wisdom ever since — The Mahabharata

I’m noticing that as I do more and more shows, that I’m shifting away from music I really like to listen to, and towards “interesting” music that I figure people might be “interested” in. I suspect this is a common college-radio thing. For one, it’s safer to play interesting music. There is lots of really neat, unexpected material out there, and we can mostly all agree that it is neat and unexpected. On the other hand, picking a really good song is a) more subjective, so I don’t know if it will work for other people and b) kind of personal. What if I play something that I love and really moves me, but upon hearing it on the studio monitors I realize it’s kind of superficial and derivative? That would be embarrassing. So playing the amatuer musicologist seems less risky.

Not that I’m heavily influenced by these fears. I can just feel the joint forces of ease and safety gradually trending me away from playing my favourites. And then of course, there’s the fact that you can’t play 40 favourites a week for 30 odd weeks without, you know, running out of favourites. And there’s nothing wrong with playing interesting music. In fact, I think that’s a great aspect of college radio. But I will continue to try and play stuff that I just balls out love, because I think that’s the best aspect of college radio. I hope someone out there also likes them, but even if they don’t, frankly it’s fun pumping stuff I have affection for out over the gajillion watt broadcast tower.

• hugonaut21feb2008.mp3

Playlist.

And the audio:

Part one (download):

Part two (download):

Part three (download):

So yeah, that was my not-valentines, station-move-day show. I feel good about it. I’m amazed how freaked out I was about fundraising last week, I had frequent sensations of relief today, which I traced each time to not having to think about money. I am, absolutely, useless with money. I may well be useless with music too, but I have a lot more fun with that uselessness.

Here’s the master list of TV station sign-offs.

Thanks to Carl Sagan for calling in from wherever pop-sci cosmologists go when they die. I guess he beat out Pascal’s wager. I asked him if there was actually a god, and he told me (very quick on the draw I thought), billions and billions. Damn. Turns out Dr. Sagan isn’t exactly a Hot Butter fan, more just concerned about them.

Was it just me or did the audio sound kind of funny today?

Dj name suggestions so far: Hugo-not. Stimsong (ouch, jesus). And this formidable list:

dj Voltaire the bastard
dj gas station oj
dj porpoise
dj without a porpoise
dj tub-of-kittens
dj daffodil
dj free lunch
dj grownup
Regular Hugh
Hugh Regular

I think we’re making progress here.

• wcbn-2008-02-14-120001-EST.mp3
• wcbn-2008-02-14-130001-EST.mp3
• wcbn-2008-02-14-140001-EST.mp3

Here’s today’s playlist

And the audio:

Part one (download):

Part two (download):

Part three (download):

(yes, I think I played the same King Curtis song twice at the start. I was focusing too hard on making the rest of the show awesome.)

Whalebone wrapper longfellow ferret. That showing up on boingboing the same day I had an EAS test was too much to ignore.

My favourite calls were the guy who didn’t know the name of the band or the song or even really the genre, but cleared it up by singing the chorus to “Sundown” by Gordon Lightfoot, and the the gentlemen who self identified as older and wanted to hear the one that goes “Don’t, push, me, cause I’m on the edge…”.

Okay but seriously, what should my dj name be? The one that got the best response was dj Cellular Automata but that’s a bit complicated.

• wcbn-2008-01-31-120001-EST.mp3
• wcbn-2008-01-31-130002-EST.mp3
• wcbn-2008-01-31-140001-EST.mp3

If this is thursday afternoon then sign me up. I’m still getting used to being awake during my shows, and it’s starting to really work for me. The radio listening public seems to be every bit as awake as I am, and I spent more time making banter on the blower with callers-in than yakking on the mic. Some great requests. And some folks just called up to say they liked it. Thanks. So did I.

Things started out well for me, and then somewhere around Danko Jones just got really good. The fact that tubular bells went over well (I had a dj email to say he had stopped doing what he was doing just to listen, and another burst into the booth with thumbs up) put a final coat of gloss on the whole experience. Maybe sitting in a room pressing play on songs doesn’t warrant this much satisfaction, but I get it anyway.

In retrospect, maybe it was destined to go well from the moment I got free hot chocolate on the diag on the way to the station.

Playlist.

Who knew Bob Seeger was from Ann Arbor? At least three people called up and started with “you’re a young guy so I guess you don’t know this but…” on that and other subjects. Hell yes, I am a young guy. I should play some Utah Phillips next week. The best call (blasting the 8-track from the van with the carpeting all the way up to the ceiling) was of course in response to Quadda Gadda De Vida. Now that I’ve heard it, I’m amazed nobody has thought to play 4 copies of Inna Gadda De Vida at the same time before.

Part one (download):

Part two (download):

Part three (download):

Part four (download):

Still haven’t figured out the best way to do the podcast. Maybe next week.

update: here’s Rev. Andrew’s on it’s own:

The Reverend also provides this report of the event:

The idea started when I was organizing my records and discovered that I had 2 LPs as well as the CD version.
I had to do something creative or face up to being the kind of geek who would have four copies of the same obscure psychedelic rock album.

The Dwyer’s had introduced me to the idea of playing two of the same record at once with their “two way larry” feature (saturdays at 6:00, optional Lawrence Welk video on public television) so I was thinking of playing multiple copies. As soon as I thought of the “Quadda Gadda Da Vida” name I knew I had to be four copies at once.
I could have bought a third LP copy at Encore for $6 but that seemed silly what with already having two LP copies so I went with my old cassette copy (ca 1978), a CD copy and the two LPs. Besides I had just bought the David Van Tiegham cover….

I began with the tape cued, the CD cued and the two LPs cued.
Turntable one received an additional turn backwards and turntable two got two additional turns backwards.
I started the cassette like normal, counted to thirty and started the CD and the turntables.
I had intended to have the CD and turntable levels down but you can hear one of the other copies in the beginning before I faded it down.
After about 5 minutes I faded the CD into the mix, after another 4 minutes or so you can hear turntable one come is (with prominent record noise) then in another 4 minutes the second turntable comes in.

Setting the levels was problematic, the meters only give you the totals so it was hard to know which device to turn up or down.
I should have set the levels beforehand and noted the settings so I could have all the copies playing the same level.

So it wasn’t perfect but I suppose that wasn’t really the goal.
It was fun and I sincerely hope I befuddled a sports fan or two.

Reverend Andrew
First Church of the Atlantic (de-hydrated)
Eternal Pope of the Western Lands

• quadda-gadda-da-vida.mp3
• wcbn-2008-01-24-120001-EST.mp3
• wcbn-2008-01-24-130001-EST.mp3
• wcbn-2008-01-24-140001-EST.mp3

My first show in the new time slot. What a luxury. Wide eyed and fully alert, no coffee spilling on the turntables, no worries about staying awake through the day’s classes. All the fun of morning radio, plus more fun.

I was surprised to find myself nervous on my first Thursday. Which is ridiculous of course, sitting down to do some college radio isn’t like getting scrubbed for brain surgery. But still, there it was. And there I was, blustering and sputtering through stage nerves. Good grief. Good thing I’m not a brain surgeon doing my first Thursday operation.

I ended up with 4 1/2 hours of material to play in a 3 hour slot. All those 7 and 12 minute Fillmore East jams didn’t hurt. Next week: part 2 of this week. Plus some other stuff.

Oh yeah, somehow I managed to never actually say that the Fillmore East Auditorium was a club in the East Village of New York that was open from 1968 to 1971, and in those short years racked up one of the most amazing list of players the world has ever known.

Ah shoot, I just remembered I forgot to play the live Hendrix. Next week.

Here’s the playlist for the songs I remembered to play this week.

And here’s the audio:

:

Part one (download):

Part two (download):

Part three (download):

:
:

(Incidentally, I’ve been playing around with different options for setting up a real podcast for the show and have so far succeeded in completely breaking all the feeds for the website, including some I didn’t even know existed. And yes, some people do subscribe to the site, although I have no idea why. So check back in a week or two and with any luck I will have erased the entire website and started a fire in the server room at my web host.)

• wcbn-2008-01-17-120001-EST.mp3
• wcbn-2008-01-17-130001-EST.mp3
• wcbn-2008-01-17-140001-EST.mp3

I’ve just signed my name on my new slot on the big schedule in the lobby, and it’s every Thursday noon till 3pm. Solid. Moving into the world of radio in my right mind. I instantly feel less edgy than an off-hours dj but that loss is more than made up for by the addition of a full day of functional mental space every week (I never ever slept Sunday nights, and that cascaded through the rest of the work week). Also I think it means a bigger audience. (I’ll miss my Monday morning people.) And I know the phone is a lot more active in the afternoon. Request requests. Bring ’em.

So keep it locked and we’ll keep it rocked.