1, 2, Free, Form (#112)

A happy Earth Day to our audience. This week's show source file found here. Originally broadcast on June 11th, 1998.

A grubby and unthemed little show. It starts off vocal and voice-based, gets progressively harsher and muddier, ends abruptly, and then starts again. It is well-worn, and thick with dense, chewy layers.

My cohort of helpers always preferred to have a thematic guide for the shows, but I tended to not plan very far in advance, so more often than not, this kind of thing is what we got. In my opinion, this is a good example of when it worked.

I also can't tell if the two sides of the tape got swapped, or this is a combination recording of a couple of different shows. The break near the middle where our show ends and the hip-hop deejay is baffled by the wall of noise he is following comes at exactly the right time. But that's free form college radio for you—a kind of audio whiplash that is an acquired taste, but can be oh-so-tasty.

1. WHANH WHANH!/Wash ray
2. Abracadabra to you, boss
3. Bells and frothing
4. Epic kung fu battle in crystal bamboo forest
5. Wailing and foam
6. A trick ending
7. Appliance-percussion jazz
8. One big fat hoax
9. Machine breathing/feeling so good
10. Wake up now, the satellite's singing
11. A glitch-beat with tacky synth
12. Japanese Vader
13. Mandarin disco Strauss/abrupt end

"May Contain Some of the Following Ingredients..."

I wanted to chime in and mention that I've added flowsheet links to all currently posted shows, and I'll continue this as new shows get updated. Since Jason is posting the show itself, I'll add the flowsheet links to his posts as they appear. They are also collected into a Flickr set.

Flowsheets were the station's method of tracking which songs get aired when. This included "playlist" or recommended tracks as well as local artists and some genre variations. In earlier shows, I was solo and required to include playlist songs. Later, the show was designated specialty (exempt from playlist requirements), we sometimes had show themes, and I recruited friends into helping me. This meant I couldn't know what musics other people were adding, sometimes from another room, and I was just busier throughout the show.

From the early flowsheets, you can see these music and collage segments pretty clearly. I'd play a cluster of playlist tracks (marked in the margin with "I", "II", or "G"), and then I'd switch to audio-collage with various and random collected materials. Six playlist tracks were required each hour. I liked the playlist music, but for solo collage I often used thrift-store finds or non-musical audio to layer into "figure vs. ground" or "conversation" mixes. Of course, I was never able to write down every piece of sound that made it to the air. Some shows have only the barest notes on the corresponding flowsheet, due to the difficulty in reporting what we had specifically played.

The earlier shows are also "Excerpts" tapes, which means I was only stopping and starting the tape to record the collages as well as music I particularly liked. This means (almost) everything in the recording would be on the flowsheet, but not everything on the sheet was recorded.

In any case, between Jason's subjective "Notes" lists and the (more?) objective flowsheet documents, you might get a textual sense of what is contained in each show's audio. We were usually laughing out loud at the juxtapositions which occurred during the shows; for me, the point was to enjoy the absurdity and un-realism. Hopefully you the reader might also find the audio enjoyable to hear now, as time removes the recordings further and further from the current musical sound culture.