I used to love going in and guest DJing with my friends on their radio shows at Berkeley’s KALX. Once all my friends left Berkeley, I had a few years drought of not going onto the radio. Then my friend Melanie had a wonderful show called Little Wizard Hour on West Add Radio, a pirate radio station run first out of this guys house, and later out of some sort of weird office space. Eventually it went to an all-internet format before I guess disappearing altogether, after the FCC apparently caught him and he got in lots of trouble. There seems to be a proliferation of these things purporting to be radio stations, but are just web-streams. I guess breaking the law in such a public way is a hard thing to contain, but I can’t help but feel that something is lost. The upside, depending on how you view it, is that all of these shows are available for listening at any time.
My friend Ceci, who I used to guest DJ with all the time at 3 AM on KALX, now has a show called Radio Heart on New York’s East Village Radio. I got to guest DJ there this past weekend. We performed an opera, I played some music by some friends of mine, some baroque harpsichord music, and some British song. Aside from a mistake that had a piece of music play in the background for the entirety of the performance of the opera, the show was pretty fun. But, I have to admit that it felt a little less exciting knowing that the show was being broadcast through the airwaves. Doing it in a store front with tons of people walking by was pretty cool. Ceci’s show is pretty great. She frequently has guests who bring all sorts of different types of music on and she goes through her own phases of interest – minimal synth stuff, cold wave, prog rock…
San Francisco no longer has West Add Radio, a place that always felt like home to me even though I rarely went there because of all the Crass-like imagery that adorned the walls. Now they have something called Pirate Cat Radio, which plays with the idea of being a pirate radio station, even though it is web-only. They also have a café, which I find totally weird. I’ve never listened to any of the shows before, but I suppose it’s pretty likely something would be of interest to me on there.
