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Old Fashioned Radio Shows In A Digital Medium For The 21St Century As a teenager 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. I was not keen on playing music fed to me by Clearchannel and reading advertising copy. If I had access to WFMU at the time, things might have been different. But about
fifteen years later Realaudio made audio streaming
over the internet possible, and in 2001 I started
making radio shows again, initially streaming them
llive semi-regularly on wednesday nights, but since
56kb streams sounded like crap, and few friend’s
schedules let them listen live, I started burning the
radio 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 of the 147 programs produced were given away ,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.
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.
From 2011 to 2014 while dJ
Bake-n-Phat was abroad at 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.
These are currently offline to the public, but available
if you have shaken hands with dJ Bake-n-Phat. Not quite a radio show,
but a series of 32 “mix tapes” called “Mostly
Old Mostly Good” were produced and streamed 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 and offer new insight into the
music of the listener's parents. For many years, DJ Bake-n-Phat has 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. Efforts to establish a local community radio station in the Comox Valley prodded dJ Bake-n-Phat to produce a new program for it called “Random Stabs”, so called because the curatorial method for the programs was done through randomized selection of thrift store records. However, interest in producing the program 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. and doctorplasmatron.com websites, and currently the Patreon platform, have all been used to supply file storage and streaming bandwidth for the various programs, and allow listeners to download the files for free. 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 content is publicly accessible for streaming or download there. |
