Radio Survivor

I’ve known about this station for well over a decade now. As a metalhead living in Central Illinois I’d occasionally travel north to the Chicago area or Milwaukee to see concerts and encounter banners and fliers for an all heavy metal station on the AM band called Rebel Radio. However, I can only recall hearing the station once when on the highway between Milwaukee and Chicago.

Music radio on the AM dial is nearly an anachronism now, and most of the practitioners now are either ethnic stations or easy listening. Nevertheless there are a few hold outs–mostly mom and pop operations or stations owned by relatively small groups–that program niche formats on AM stations. Being on the air for about sixteen years certainly qualifies WPJX 1500 AM in Zion, IL as a true AM music veteran.

Unfortunately, WPJZ isn’t exactly a powerhouse when it comes to transmission strength. In fact, the station broadcasts with just 250 watts from the far northeastern Illinois town of Zion, a good 38 miles from the Chicago city limits. What that means for a city dweller for me is that I simply cannot tune it in, no matter how hard I’ve tried. The stations serves southeast Wisconsin about as well as Illinois, still missing most of the major north suburbs of Chicago. Adding to the frustration is the fact that Rebel Radio does not yet have a web stream, although its website currently promises one soon.

Then, today while perusing their website again I noticed a note saying Rebel Radio is simulcast on a co-owned station, WKTA 1330 AM in Evanston, the first suburb north of Chicago, on Sundays from 4 to 8 PM. So this afternoon I tuned in Rebel Radio for the first time, thanks to WKTA.

First off, this is truly a heavy metal station, playing many examples of the genre from the more mainstream–like Metallica–to the lesser known–like Armored Saint. At least during this four-hour window there’s a live DJ spinning the tunes and talking quite knowledgeably about the bands and songs, pointing out local concert dates as appropriate. That element alone is quite refreshing and rarely heard on commercial radio, even if it also includes a too-long inane phone call from a friend of the DJ calling in from a Renaissance Fair.

In terms of fidelity, I’m not terrifically impressed. Contemporary heavy metal has a pretty broad frequency range and often is not mastered to be optimized for radio like a lot of pop and mainstream rock music. That means there’s a fair amount of sound in the high and low frequency extremes that AM radio doesn’t cover well. I think it takes some pretty good EQing and signal processing to make metal work well on AM. On the whole the station doesn’t sound bad, but the midrange and high end sounds pretty crowded and compressed. A little strategic equalization might let the high end come through a little better and make the station a little more listenable. I acknowledge that the main station WPJX might sound better than the simulcast that I can tune in. And, to be fair, on a portable radio or boombox the sonic compromises are far less perceptible.

Listening to Rebel Radio I was reminded of the Z-Rock syndicated heavy metal format. I first listened to it when I lived in New Jersey in the late 80s and early 90s when it was broadcast on an AM station out of New York on 1480. It didn’t always come in well in Passaic County where my parents lived, but I did tune in occasionally when looking for something different on the radio dial. Even at the time I didn’t think the sonic quality of metal on AM was that great.

Nonetheless, Rebel Radio proves that there must be a very loyal audience for heavy metal on the radio willing to deal with the compromises inherent in music on AM.

On July 22, the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) issued a revised version of their Broadcasting and Regulatory Policy (PDF) as it applies to campus and community radio in Canada. Amid all of the policy changes (and a nice promise of funding), which for the most part are meant to simplify the ways that the CRTC looks at and regulates stations; there were also some interesting tidbits about the ways in which the Canadian government seeks to promote diversity and local artists on its airwaves.

The CRTC requires radio stations to play a certain percentage of spoken word programming, special interest music, music of Canadian origin, and asks that campus stations limit the number of “hit” songs that they play. The weekly percentages of material from each category vary by type of station and have changed over the years based on evolving needs of radio stations and revisions to the CRTC’s definitions of the different musical categories and sub-categories.

I was fascinated to see that the latest policy included references to experimental music and a discussion of where turntablism fit into that category. The CRTC even conducted an investigation into turntablism, with their Turntablism and Audio Art Study 2009 outlining not only the history of turntablism, but also delving into the challenges of attempting to categorize turntablism, DJ mixing, and audio art. According to the study:

“Turntablism and audio art are becoming more common forms of expression on  community and campus stations. Turntablism refers to the use of turntables as musical instruments, essentially to alter and manipulate the sound of recorded music. Audio art refers to the arrangement of excerpts of musical selections, fragments of recorded speech, and ‘found sounds’ in unusual and original ways…”

Stemming in part from this report, the July 22 policy change introduced a new experimental music sub-category of music for Canadian broadcasters, with its definition as follows:

“The unconventional and non-traditional uses of instruments and sound equipment to create new sounds and an orchestration of these sounds. This includes audio-art, turntablism, musique actuelle, electro acoustic and sound ecology. While it may involve the use of previously recorded sounds to create new sounds and orchestrations, it does not include spinning or beat mixing where the alterations of previously recorded tracks are limited to mixes between two or more pieces or samples.”

They further found that if a turntablist or sound artist is Canadian, then the piece of experimental music will also meet the requirement for music of Canadian origin (known as the MAPL designation). More details about these programming requirements are outlined in the previous Campus Radio Policy document from 2000 and in the related policy document Revised Content Categories and Sub-Categories for Radio.

It’s encouraging to see that Canada works to encourage musical diversity on radio and I would imagine that the Canadian broadcast system is unlikely to see the ever-shrinking playlists that have become so commonplace in the United States. Yet at the same time, the complexities in categorizing music and determining what constitutes a piece of Canadian music under the MAPL system must be time-consuming projects for radio stations. I’d be interested to hear if DJs and stations (particularly those on college campuses) feel that these policies help to support their missions to expose unheard music and local artists, or if they feel that the rules hamper their creative freedom.

It was 1975. I was 20 years old. I had just left home. I worked and went to college in Manhattan, and lived with my girlfriend in the Bronx.

Meanwhile, Kool and the Gang’s hit tune “Jungle Boogie” jumped to one of the most requested songs on the radio. Transcriptions of the lyrics to this enduring hit don’t really do it justice, but here goes:

“Get down, Get down, get down, get down, get down, get down . . . .
Ahhhhhhhhhhh !
Jungle Boogie
Jungle Boogie
Get It On
Jungle Boogie
Jungle Boogie
Get It On”

I did not experience the lines as such. Here’s my version of the chorus:

JUNGLE BOOGIE
(deedly-up! deedly-up!)
JUNGLE BOOGIE
(squawk! squawk!)
JUNGLE BOOGIE
(deedly-up! deedly-up!)
JUNGLE BOOGIE
(squawk! squawk!)

Anyway, you get the idea. I saw Jungle Boogie as the archetypal Disco song with the archetypal Disco message. Forget the Sixties. Forget all that Woodstock crap. Just dance, wiggle, screw, then dance some more. Be yourself. Be your identity, no matter what it really is. Don’t be afraid. Just be.

Most political types I knew in college strongly disapproved of Disco. They thought it wasn’t radical enough or something. Gay people, black/Latino people, and women loved it—especially if they fit into all of those categories. As for me, I did not have the New Left sophistication to resist Disco’s charm, although I more often listened to classical music at the time.

Back in those days, to get to a train into Manhattan, I took a bus that ran from the northern Little Italy area where I lived through the South Bronx. This was quite an experience. The latter region was falling apart. Landlords and tenants took turns torching their residences. Drug use skyrocketed. The place was a mess. (more…)

For me, mix tapes and radio shows have a lot in common; as they both make an attempt to compile a collection of pieces of music in order to share a particular mood, highlight a specific genre, or communicate a special message to listeners (or to the object of one’s desire).

I used to do thematic radio shows, often with hidden messages (intended for my crush) and it was very much like a public mix tape for me. After my show I would dub a cassette copy, craft case art and jot down track names and titles before presenting the mix to the one who I was trying to impress.

A few years later I took my mix-making to the online world, penning playlists for a start-up called Uplister. What made that site unique was that our playlists had room for liner notes built in next to each track. Although we only had 30 second sound clips for each piece of music, what really brought the lists to life were the accompanying narrative written by each playlist-maker. Suddenly mix tapes compiled after a break-up took on new meaning, when the story was shared along with the music selections.

At the time (2000-2001) we had big plans for Uplister, with our founders boldly proclaiming that the playlist was the “next unit of global music consumption.” I’m not sure that’s happened, but playlists have become a common method for people to understand and group music from their collections.

Brown University graduate student Ben Nicholson takes a look at the modern day mix tape in his paper, Playlist: 21st Century Mix Tape, published in a recent issue of Technomusicology: A Sandbox Journal. Ben writes about how music collecting and sharing has changed since the advent of digital music, arguing that:

“Music has largely moved from the shelf to the hard drive in the 21^st century. Digitally-encoded mp3s have made the storage and transportation of music more efficient and, once one has acquired a computer, less expensive than ever before…Ten years ago, a CD collector might sort their music collection by hand, organizing their CDs into an alphabetized archive located either on a shelf or in a CD tower. The acquisition of a new CD could require a reorganization of the entire collection in order for the CD to physically fit into its proper place…For an mp3 collector, however, these organizational headaches are remedied by software; iTunes will sort all of your music for you.”

I was also interested in Ben’s discussion about technologies that attempt to replicate personalized mix tapes, including Apple’s Genius Mixes. He writes that an evaluation of software that attempted to group playlists thematically found that:

“Listeners preferred playlists with an organizing principle, playlists that were more like mix tapes…Though it is unlikely that automated mix software and corporately sponsored playlists will replace manual/amateur mix construction, the fact that software developers are attempting to perfect their playlist algorithms and that iTunes is opening a playlist market indicates that the concept of the personalized mix is important to digital music distributors.”

What do you think? Do computer-generated mix tapes hold the same allure as a mix tape passed from person to person? Is it the one-to-one connection from sender to receiver that makes for the power of the mix or is the collection of songs enough? And how do services like Pandora fit into the equation? Or hand-curated radio shows for that matter?

Although it makes sense that music recommendation services would attempt to replicate hand-made mixes, I can’t imagine that people will be wooing potential mates with Genius Mixes or Pandora playlists or that those lists will end up in shoe boxes along with old love letters. But then again, in decades to come the artifacts of a courtship may all be housed in digital files or on remote servers. Yesterday’s ticket stubs, photographs, and saucy letters written in cursive will probably be replaced by files full of racy text messages, You Tube videos chronicling first dates, and romantic blog posts.

I was listening to Regina Spektor’s very sad song “On the Radio,” which I’ve never actually heard on the radio. The tune includes the following lyrics:

“On the radio
We heard November Rain
That solo’s really long
But it’s a pretty song
We listened to it twice
‘Cause the DJ was asleep”

Guns ‘N Roses’ November Rain is also a pretty song—although I’ve never heard it on the radio either, come to think of it. Anyway, I was listening to both of these pieces on Youtube.com, and thinking how great it would be if there were a music radio station in my vicinity where the DJ actually fell asleep and accidentally played the same piece twice.

Does anybody ever do that on the radio (deliberately or accidentally)? With the widespread use of programming software, is it even possible any more?

Hot on the heels of AT&T’s new data pricing plans, Slacker Radio released the new version 2.0 of their app which will permit listeners to cache their stations while on a wifi network. Then the stations can be listened to without using up precious data from the 3G network.

On the surface this may sound like a great alternative to Pandora or last.fm. But it must be noted that the caching feature is only available with a paid Slacker Radio Plus subscription. Users of the free service can take advantage of a 14-day trial of caching.

Under the monthly paid subscription model Slacker Radio caching seems a whole lot more like the Rhapsody service, which provides access to unlimited music for $10 a month. Rhapsody also lets you download as much music as you like to your smartphone to listen to without using a wifi or cellular data connection. Now, it’s true that Rhapsody is less radio-like than Slacker, in that you choose the artists and albums. However, the service also features Rhapsody Radio, although it isn’t cacheable and isn’t based upon user preferences.

Overall Slacker caching looks like a middle ground between listening to streaming Slacker (or Pandora or last.fm) and listening to a playlist or music podcast stored on your smartphone. That might be worth the $3.99 – $4.99 a month for some folks, especially since it’s cheaper than the data overage charge.

It seems like I can barely go a fortnight without mentioning New Jersey’s greatest radio station. But here I am again posting about freeform music station, WFMU. This time it’s because the record collector magazine Goldmine has produced a short video all about the station’s amazing record library.

I’m a vinyl enthusiast myself, having never given up on the format since buying my first record some thirty years ago. Whenever I fill in a music shift on WNUR I make a point to spin some vinyl from the station’s library. Unfortunately, space constraints prevent ‘NUR from maintaining a library as expansive as WFMU’s. Nevertheless I’m quite happy to have an impressive array of great albums to choose from.

Fellow Radio Survivor Jennifer Waits always checks out the record collections at the college stations she tours on her own blog Spinning Indie in addition to writing about vinyl’s continued use in radio here at Radio Survivor. I find that the college student DJs at WNUR are very enthusiastic about playing LPs. It seems like any hour I walk into the station I’ll find at least one turntable spinning or ready to start. Hitting play on a CD or MP3 will never have the visceral experience like cueing up a record and hitting start on a Technics 1200.

One night last week I was tuning around the AM dial here in Chicago before going to sleep when I happened upon a station playing a nice, but unusual mix of vocal jazz standards. The music set was long, interrupted only by an ID for “950 the Avenue.”

The next morning I googled the station and learned that it’s a relatively new one, debuting August 2009 in Chicago after starting on the FM dial in Osh Kosh, WI in January 2009. Since then I’ve tuned in a number of times intrigued both by the introduction of a new radio format and the fact that it’s a new music station on the AM, rather than FM dial. In particular my interest in piqued since this discovery came just a week after Jennifer’s post on the Aesthetics of AM.

When I initially encountered the station it was playing an Ella Fitzgerald number that I can’t recall. So at first I assumed it was an adult standards / nostalgia format station that I’d somehow never heard before or that was coming in from a more distant market due to the luck of nighttime AM propagation. But a couple of songs in they played Steely Dan, which might qualify as classic rock, but is way too recent and rocking for an adult standards playlist.

The Avenue bills itself as “timeless cool,” drawing on artists who seem to have classic jazz elements as a point of commonality, but otherwise might fall more solidly into rock or adult contemporary camps. The website’s masthead features pictures of Norah Jones Diana Krall, Ray Charles, John Mayer, Nina Simone and Harry Connick, Jr–a somewhat more eclectic array than I would normally expect from a commercial station. Even if all these artists have each sold millions of albums none of them are big radio mainstays.

At the same time, many of the artists heard on the Avenue, like Ray Charles, were once radio mainstays, especially during the heyday of AM popular music radio in the 1960s and 70s. So their music sounds quite at home in the restricted audio bandwidth of AM. Many of these other artists, however, came to prominence in the FM and CD era of high fidelity and low noise. I haven’t heard any John Mayer on the Avenue yet, but music from Norah Jones and Harry Connick sounds pretty well at home on this AM station.
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In case you haven’t noticed, last.fm has a cool new feature, a list of upcoming music festivals in your area.

“We know from experience that many of the best music memories happen when you’re rocking out in a field with thousands of other sunburnt/soaking wet compatriots,” Last’s Robin Lisle wrote in a recent blog post. So it looks like the application grabs your IP address and tells you about whatever’s happening in your region.

A lot going on in mine, actually, including the Health and Harmony Music and Arts Festival  at the Sonoma County (CA) Fairgrounds on June 11. Bands will include Lauryn Hill, Steel Pulse, Slightly Stoopid, and The Expendibles.

You can also search the app for events across the United States, North America, London, Paris, and even Helsinki.

“This is just the beginning,” Lisle promises. ”Over the next month we’ll be rolling out additional features to help you find up and coming artists you should check out (so you can say you saw them before they were big), find festival buddies and easily share your festival picks.”

When was the last time that you tuned in to AM radio to listen to music?

Although I’m a huge evangelist for the ongoing importance of terrestrial radio (especially non-commercial radio), the AM slice of the radio band is a place that I only turn when I’m in my car looking for news, weather, and traffic information. But back when I was a kid, AM radio was huge and was the home to some of my favorite DJs and music shows. So, what happened?

In a fascinating essay, “The Day the (AM) Music Died,” in the PopMatters “Retroactive Listening: Perspectives on Music and Technology” series, Jay Somerset provides some historical perspective about how and why AM radio moved away from music to talk programming. He also discusses how the mono sound of AM contrasts with FM stereo and why certain styles of music were more suited to AM. He writes:

“Welcome to 1982, the oldies endpoint; the year the music froze, on the AM dial at least. Nowadays it seems ridiculous, but there was a time, before the fragmented niches offered by Internet and satellite radio came along (third-wave psychobilly radio, anyone?), the music dial was divided into two camps: contemporary hit music — almost exclusively AM’s domain — and older, or classical, or college, or jazz on newfangled, niche FM.

If you wanted a hit single, you produced it to sound good on AM radio, which meant eschewing deep bass and the low end for something that would sound best on the treble-heavy, tinny sound of an AM receiver, such as Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound production… To sound good on mono AM, you needed a dense, reverberant, everything-at-once sound rather than a dynamic, stereo recording that only sounded good on FM, which the majority of people never even listened to.”

He goes on to make the point that when music programming left AM for the cooler realm of FM radio around 1982, AM radio became the home for talk radio, sports, weather, and news. Despite the dominance of talk radio today, there are some holdout AM oldies stations that are mostly playing hits from 1965 to 1982.

As he wraps up his essay Jay talks about the trend for some modern musicians to simulate lo-fi, AM-friendly sounds and he wonders if any of these artists will ever actually get played on AM radio. He speculates that with changes to the terrestrial radio landscape, AM music radio could transform into a place that embrace these indie artists (he mentions Kurt Vile, Best Coast, and Neon Indian) who now find their homes on satellite, Internet and college radio: (more…)