“The station’s in a bit a flux,” WBRS co-General Manager Ella Thanik said apologetically, after enthusiastically greeting me at the Brandeis University college radio station around lunchtime on a Thursday in early October. The student-run station had recently been painted and various items still hadn’t returned to their proper homes. A large dry erase board at the WBRS entrance had an alert scrawled on it: “Attention WBRS Users! Please excuse our appearance temporarily. We are in the midst of a studio refresh!”
In spite of these warnings, WBRS felt not only tidy, but cheerful. Sun streamed in the windows of the space, which is located on the third floor of the Shapiro Campus Center. On the day of my visit, the lobby of the building was quite lively, with students checking out vendors who were taking part in an Indigenous Peoples’ Day event.
As Thanik and Programming Director Lily Fasciano began to lead me around WBRS, a group of folks arrived for their radio show, which was produced as part of a Hebrew class. During their hour in the on-air studio, we toured the rest of the station, taking a look at the record library, production studios, office spaces, and gathering areas.
Huge Record Library is Full of Vinyl, CDs and Cassettes
A large room labeled “storage” is home to the WBRS record library/archives, full of high density rolling shelves packed with vinyl records and CDs. Thanik said that at one point it was purportedly the largest record collection in the northeast, but she conceded that it is no longer the case. Cassettes of old WBRS recordings are contained in stacked boxes in the same room. Many of them are from long-running shows The Joint and WBRS Coffeehouse, and document live performances recorded for on-air broadcast.
While surveying the room, Thanik and Fasciano told me that there’s interest in creating a dedicated space to record live music for broadcast, along the lines of NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert. The music library is one contender and they imagined having the shelves of records as a backdrop. This “archive room” also contains a turntable and I was told that there is also hope for this space to become a listening room as well, allowing DJs to come through and preview physical media from the vast WBRS collection.
Tech Challenges and Projects at WBRS
A class D FM station, WBRS broadcasts at 100.1 FM to a small radius near the Brandeis University campus in Waltham, Massachusetts, west of Boston. The station also streams online, although its full website was down at the time of my visit. Thanik and Fasciano explained that WBRS has had a variety of technical issues and tasks recently, including tower maintenance over the summer. It was hoped that the website would soon be fully operational again.
Other projects in the works at WBRS include creating a dedicated recording studio in a small studio (labeled “live engineering studio”) along the same hallway as the on-air studio. Currently filled with a nearly complete drum set, the space is envisioned to serve as a satellite location for an already-operational live recording set-up at the campus library called SIMS (Sound and Image Media Studios). In addition to offering studio spaces, SIMS also loans out audio-visual equipment. A subgroup within the station, The WBRS Student Music Committee, is working on the live recording studio and other music projects. It also has an office/closet at the radio station, where it houses even more music and sound equipment.
Touring WBRS: Funky Decor and Surprises Behind Every Door
Right next to the Student Music Committee office are large windows, which help to flood light into a small seating area. A life-size cardboard cut-out of film character Ron Burgundy (a promotional item that I’ve oddly seen at multiple college radio stations) stands by the door to the office. He’s been decorated with a straw hat, WBRS T-shirt and sunglasses. A large mixing board is set up on a stand in that corner, with Burgundy looking over it.
Other station spaces include a manager office, which is mainly used for storage. And next to the on-air studio is a room labeled “recording studio,” that is typically a place where people do live DJ mixing. Across the hall is a door labeled Radio Tech/Tech Closet 1, serving as both storage and office space. Industrial desks are on one side of the room, with file cabinets on the other. We took a little treasure hunt through the drawers and found many gems, including paper playlists, flyers, station newsletters, and equipment manuals.
A funny thing about the offices and studios throughout WBRS is that they have very official door signs on them with titles that don’t necessarily match the current use of the spaces. An example of that is that the tech room has a handmade paper sign on it that reads “Welcome to the Music Office. Welcome to the Tech. Office. Uhhhh……Welcome to THE OFFICE!” In typical college radio style, that door is also covered with band and music-related stickers, miscellaneous notes, and other artifacts, including a tiny plastic alien.
Fall 2025 Schedule with Range of Shows
WBRS is led by 15 student managers who serve on the executive board of the station. Around 45 DJs/hosts are on the schedule this semester, with the vast majority students. The handful of community DJs include a DJ who has been at WBRS since 1977. Andy Nagy has been hosting “Black Jack Davy” all this time. Focused on folk and roots music, the program is rumored to be “one of the longest running folk radio programs in the country, if not the world!”
The wide range of shows on WBRS this semester include “I am the Arm: A David Lynch Radio Show” and miscellaneous music shows covering jazz, soul, blues, rock, pop, house, indie, R&B and more. Talk programming includes a local news show on Thursday mornings.
Checking out the On-Air Studio
Hosts and DJs broadcast from the on-air studio. A nicely appointed room, the studio is decorated with throw rugs, a bust sculpture, a funky floor lamp and two couches (one black leather and another of the dorm-issued variety with wooden framing). Sort of a glass box, the on-air studio is visible to everyone walking through the station. Large windows overlook the hallway, another window provides a glimpse of outside, while another looks into the DJ mixing studio. The on-air studio is outfitted with a mixing board, microphones, turntables, headphones, CD players and a computer.
Even though WBRS is still rethinking studio spaces and getting items back on the walls, creative energy still oozes out of the space. Posters and framed vintage t-shirts are propped outside the studio, providing a snapshot of some of the enviable shows that WBRS helped to present, including performances by Black Flag and Live Skull. A very DIY zine is atop a pile of ephemera by the station door, a souvenir of a recent semesterly “zine night” in which station members come together to collaborate in making a zine using paper, scissors, markers and other craft supplies.
Brief History of WBRS
A long-time radio station, WBRS is the descendant of a 1950s student radio club and carrier current station at Brandeis originally known as WLDB. After renaming itself WBRS (for Brandeis Radio Service) the club launched a campus-only carrier current station circa 1961. In 1968, the group was granted a class D FM license and began broadcasts over 91.7 FM. WBRS moved up the dial to 100.1 FM in 1984 and continues to broadcast with a class D license. Reflecting on that history, WBRS co-General Manager Ella Thanik shared, “I love being able to continue such a long standing legacy! We are one of the oldest clubs at Brandeis, and being able to carry on something that has been important to so many people in our community is such a cool experience.”
Thanks to WBRS + Radio Station Tour Archive
Thanks to Ella Thanik and Lily Fasciano for showing me around WBRS! This is my 179th radio station tour report and my 121st college radio station tour. Please take a look at the entire collection of my radio station visits in numerical order or by station type in our archives.
