Old Fashioned Radio Shows Brought To You In A Digital Medium For The 21St Century As a youth I was given the opportunity to do some pirate radio on a 10watt FM transmitter, I enjoyed it and briefly entertained the idea of going into broadcasting, but soon came to my senses when realizing I didn’t like anything on the radio, and that was unlikely to change given the mediascape at the time. But about a decade later Realaudio made audio streaming over the internet possible and I started making radio shows again, initially streaming them live, but since 56kb streams sounded like crap, and few friend’s schedules let them listen, I started burning the programs to CDRs and handing them out to friends and strangers. Eventually bitrates improved and programs were also offered online as well as on CDR. The program was called “W(ith)” which rather pretentiously stood for With Intent To Hear, and the moniker of dJ Bake-n-Phat was born. Between 2001 and 2008 over 3000 CDRs were given away of the 147 programs produced, then the project was put to bed. Most of these are available at the previous link, though the first 40 or so programs are kind of lame, so I have left them buried in time and they can only be heard if you track down one of the original custom-packaged CDRs. For many years, DJ Bake-n-Phat also made mixed tapes/CDRs for friends, and though they were not microcast online, many were archived, or still exist in friends’ music collections on surviving cassettes. DJ Bake-n-Phat still continues to make mixes for friends on an irregular basis. From 2011 to 2014 while dJ Bake-n-Phat was abroad in school, another radio program was produced as a “college radio show”, used as audio letters to friends back home. This program was called “The Dribbler v6”, as it was the 6th iteration of a series of communications sent to personal friends. In order to be subscribed to The Dribbler a person has to have personally shaken the hand of dJ Bake-n-Phat. A few years later, a series of 32 “mix tapes” called “Mostly Old Mostly Good” were produced for the children of friends of dJ Bake-n-Phat, hoping to inform them of better music from the past often overlooked by popular media outlets. It was hoped that these mixes would bypass streaming service algorithmic limitations of exposure to offer new insight into the music of their parents. During the Covid-19 pandemic another radio show called “Freak Meet” was produced, this time in the format of “community radio”. 26 programs were produced before the project was abandoned at the end of the lockdown period. Shortly after, efforts to establish a local community radio station were launched and dJ Bake-n-Phat offered to produce a new program for it called “Random Stabs” whereby the curatorial method for the programs was handled through a randomized selection process of thrift store records obtained on Vancouver Island in the previous decade. However, interest was lost due to technological shortcomings. Nonetheless, a handful of pilot programs were produced. Over the years Live365, Soundcloud, Mixcloud, the Product Of Neglect Art Collective Ltd. website, and the Patreon platform have all been used to supply file storage and streaming bandwidth for the various programs, and currently content has been collected and archived to Patreon to allow listeners to download the files at will. Please do not feel a need to support any of the content financially, I only use the Patreon site as a free file server and all content is publicly accessible for streaming or download there. |