Tag Archives: Capital Public Radio

Best events to go to this June in Sacramento 2018

Summer Jump Off! 10 Events to Kick Off An Epic Sacramento Summer

This summer is already shaping up to be a great one in Sacramento, and to kick things off, the month of June is stacked with rad events, outdoor concerts, night markets and block parties galore. Besides all the other great stuff featured throughout this issue, we wanted to be sure to highlight these 10 fun events happening this month around Sacramento to help jump start your kick-ass summer.

Local indie mainstays Sun Valley Gun Club are throwing an album release party at the Red Museum (212 15th St.) on Friday, June 8, celebrating the release of their third album, the water, the stars. Also on the bill is Bastards of Young and Ani Maul. This will be a banger, folks. All ages, 8 p.m., $8.

The popular THIS Midtown Second Saturday block party series returns June 9 with live music from Viceroy, Pink Skies, DJ Greg J and others. The party goes down on 20th Street between K and J streets from 4:30 to 11 p.m. and features local artists, vendors, beer garden, cocktails and tons of fun. Visit Facebook.com/this916 for more. Free, all ages welcome.

UPcyclePOP’s upcoming Fathers Summer event is a market and art lab happening at 7300 Folsom Blvd. on Saturday, June 9, where you can watch artists upcycle discarded items into works of art, fashion, furniture and other creative inventions. Sip on a drink, check out the live music jam, and pick up a unique Father’s Day gift. Noon to 6 p.m., no cover, family friendly event. Upcyclepop.com for more info.

June is pride month! Celebrate the LGBTQ community at the massive Sacramento Pride Parade March and Festival on Sunday, June 10. The free, all-ages parade march kicks off at 11 a.m. at 3rd and N street, and ends at 10th and N street. The festival is $10 (kids 10-and-under are free) and takes place on Capitol Mall between 3rd and 7th streets from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Visit Sacramentopride.org for more.

Keeping with the pride theme, don’t miss the next installment of the always awesome ArtMix series at Crocker Art Museum (216 O St.) on Thursday, June 14 from 6 to 9:30 p.m. Pride the Musical is the theme, and the 21-and-over event will feature performances from Britney Spares and Friends, Underground Theatre Company, Green Valley Theatre Company, DJ Lady Char, Sacramento Gay Men’s Chorus and many others. Free for Crocker members, or just $10 otherwise. Crockerart.org for tickets.

The inaugural Front Street Brewfest is Saturday, June 16 from noon to 5 p.m. and all proceeds benefit Friends of Front Street Animal Shelter. Expect 30-plus breweries, unlimited beer tastings, SactoMoFo food trucks, live entertainment and games, all in a block party environment. The fest takes place at 2127 Front St. Visit Frontstreetbrewfest.com for more info and to purchase tickets, which are $40, or $10 for non-drinkers.

Check out some high-energy, hard-hitting roller derby action at the Sacramento Roller Derby’s upcoming Double Header on Saturday, June 16 at The Rink (2900 Bradshaw Road). Doors open at 6 p.m., snag tickets in advance through Brownpapertickets.com.

Capital Public Radio is throwing a cool Tiny Desk Sacramento concert in the CapRadio Garden (7055 Folsom Blvd.) on Saturday, June 16 from 6 to 8 p.m. featuring performances from some of the station’s music guru Nick Brunner’s favorite regional Tiny Desk contest entries, like Lillian Frances from Davis, Stop Motion Poetry from Modesto, and Bobby Waller from Sacramento. Free event! Facebook.com/capradio for more.

Hometown heroes Dance Gavin Dance return to rock the Concerts in the Park stage on Friday, June 22 at Cesar Chavez Plaza (9th and J streets). Also performing is Nerv, VERNO and DJs from Emo Night Sacramento. CIP is always free, and always a good time. Runs from 5 to 9 p.m. Hit up Godowntownsac.com or Facebook.com/cipsacramento for more.

Check out the first-ever Our Street Night Market on Saturday, June 23 on R Street between 11th and 12th streets. This open-air party runs from 7 p.m. until late night (1 a.m.) and will feature a ton of vendors, street food, a beer garden, two bars, arcade games, a silent disco, salsa dancing and more. Free event, all ages welcome.

**This piece first appeared in print on page 8 of issue #267 (June 4 – 18, 2018)**

Science Friday Ira Flatow

Gotta Get Down on (Science) Friday: Ira Flatow Brings Public Radio’s Science Friday to UC Davis

Every Friday across America, those looking for coverage of the latest developments and discoveries in science turn to a decidedly less-than-cutting edge device: the radio. Now in its 25th year, Science Friday is a weekly call-in show covering science and technology heard by 1.5 million public radio listeners every week, with hundreds of thousands more tuning in via podcast.

Hosted by the inimitable Ira Flatow, Science Friday’s roster of past guests reads like a who’s who of modern mainstream science: Elon Musk, Neil Degrasse Tyson, Jane Goodall. The show is produced by Public Radio International and broadcast on more than 370 public radio stations across the United States, including Sacramento’s Capital Public Radio, which is partnering with the Mondavi Center to bring Flatow and Science Friday to the UC Davis campus Sept. 24, 2016 for a live taping of Science Friday.

Flatow has been the host of Science Friday since the program’s inception in 1991. Before that, he was the host of the Emmy-winning PBS show Newton’s Apple and a science reporter for CBS This Morning and NPR’s All Things Considered. But Flatow does more than just lend his instantly recognizable voice to the show; as founder and president of the Science Friday Initiative—the nonprofit behind both the radio show and it’s growing online presence—he’s also the driving force behind Science Friday’s long-term mission of increasing the public’s access to science and scientific information. Among other things, this means he gets to pick the locations for the handful of yearly tapings of Science Friday outside of the show’s usual New York City studio.

“About four times a year, we go on the road,” Flatow said by phone from New York, about the show’s upcoming event in Davis. “It’s very difficult to decide, a lot of people want us to come visit them so it’s a tough choice sometimes.”

During the course of a 30-minute question-and-answer session, Flatow still sounds genuinely excited about getting behind the microphone every week, even as Science Friday prepares to celebrate the program’s silver anniversary. Especially when it comes to taking Science Friday to new audiences through social media and podcasting, Flatow exudes an infectious curiosity for science and technology which has helped make the show into an institution.

Have you been out to Davis before?
We have. A few years ago we did the program from UC Davis and we took a tour of the campus and the special gardens they have there. California being such a special place, with so many natural events taking place, we thought it was time for another visit.

How is Science Friday different when you’re doing it from the road?
Our show on a normal week is from a studio where we do it all live. When we go on the road, we will pre-tape our show with a local audience of people coming in to view it live and we add extra, added attractions. We’ll do something where the audience participates and we’ll do about a 90-minute, live-audience program with audience participation. Then we’ll take the best part of that 90 minutes, cut it down and we’ll make that one hour of our Friday show. For the second hour, we’ll go to KQED in San Francisco and do a live radio show like we normally do every Friday, just from San Francisco instead of New York for that other hour.

I would imagine that having the live audience makes the show a little more interesting to put together.
It’s like old-time radio. Radio is certainly not done very much in front of a live audience anymore. It’s got elements of a stage production. It’s a feeling … as someone who’s been in front of audiences, having worked in lots of television and in radio and on stage, when we have an audience live, it’s such a different kind of vibe in the room. You always hear actors talking about doing theater and how much they can feel the audience there with them, and that’s very much true when I’m sitting on stage with my guests and there’s 1000 people out there. You can feel them there, they laugh, they react, they applaud. So I really love that feeling of being with the live crowd. It’s very organic.

You’ve been doing Science Friday for 25 years. What’s changed over the years?
When we first started 25 years ago, first of all, there was really no internet. I mean, there was an internet but there was no world wide web, there was no web browsing or anything like that. In fact, we did a show in 1993 called “What’s This Thing Called the Internet?” and we actually broadcast it on the internet. We did the program from New York and sent it out to Xerox PARC in Palo Alto. They digitized and sent it out on the internet for those few people in laboratories that could listen to it in those days.

We were the first show to podcast on public radio. We were basically the first national show to ever be carried on the internet. We’re a science show, so we figure that because we report on cutting-edge news, we should do cutting-edge things. Whenever there’s an opportunity to do something new, like social media, we do that. We also were in a virtual reality called Second Life. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with that?

Definitely.
We had a whole presence in Second Life. We broadcast a show in Second Life, and we had all these avatars that would come in their garb and sit in a circular, made-up virtual reality place in Second Life and actually ask questions. Then we moved to Facebook; we have Twitter. We have, if not the largest, one of the largest social media communities of any public radio show.

Has that been a challenge for you, to stay on the leading edge of all these new social media technologies?
Well I have a staff that does that now [laughs]. But in the early days, I helped write HTML code for our website. So did our director, Charles Bergquist; he actually created our first, very crude website. But now we have dedicated people working on it. We have a couple of social media people who are Tweeting and Facebooking and keeping our social media efforts going all day long. If you join up and follow us on Twitter or Facebook, you’ll see new things happening almost every minute, new content.

Is it hard, especially on social media, to distill some of the complicated subject matter that you cover on Science Friday?
It’s a challenge, but I’ve been in this business of science reporting for over 40 years. And I’ve worked at all the media: I’ve worked in radio, TV, and online. It is a challenge, and I enjoy the challenge, of finding ways to describe in layman’s terms some of the complex ideas that we deal with sometimes. And It’s really a lot of fun to do that, to find a way to do that, finding ways to do that and finding experts who are skilled in boiling down concepts. What’s very surprising, we have social media running while we’re on the air—we’re Tweeting at the same time the program is going—and sometimes we think that some topic we take, maybe it’s physics, maybe it’s quantum mechanics, we think that we’re getting too much into the weeds on some of these things and getting into so much detail. But it’s amazing to see the spike in the audience. You can literally, in real-time, see the spike in the social media audience that’s eating this stuff up. They love that kind of detail. They love to hear about how the world works and the more detail we can give them, the more they love it. We realize that not everybody is a geek and not everybody is into social media as much as some of these people, so we try to find a balance.

Do you find that, in general, people are more interested in or knowledgeable about science now than they were maybe 30 years ago?
That’s a good question. I think it’s a myth that the public doesn’t like science. I think it’s true that they don’t understand how science really works, they don’t understand the process. They don’t understand that science is a method that’s built on failure, that there are more failures than there are successes … They’ve probably never seen a scientist their whole life, never met one. They don’t know what scientists are like. They have an idea that science is this giant book of facts that sits on your desk and that you look it up and get an answer to it, when actually it’s a process; it changes all the time, what we know, and knowledge is obsolete after a while.
So, they’re not quite sure how science works and what scientists do, but they love to talk about it. They love to hear about it. When you can give it to them in a way that they understand it, and understand the implications of it, they love to discuss it. Because really, science is talking about the big issues in our lives. Science is talking about the same things that theologians and philosophers have been talking about for centuries and that is where did we come from and where are we going? And science has a way of using data, experimentation and critical thinking to answer those questions.

Photo by Michael Yarish

Photo by Michael Yarish

Be part of a live taping of Science Friday hosted by Ira Flatow Sept. 24, 2016 at 8 p.m. at the Mondavi Center, located at 1 Shields Ave. in Davis on the UC Davis campus. Tickets range from $12.50–$55 and can be purchased online at Mondaviarts.org. Learn more about Science Friday and the Science Friday Initiative at Sciencefriday.com.

Academic Airwaves: KSSU

KSSU: Back Alley Radio

White, floor-to-nearly-ceiling CD-formatted shelves wrap around the half of the 15-foot long by 6-foot wide studio not filled with soundboards and wires. Little more decoration is needed than the hundreds of multi-colored cases.

Among the “Electronica” and “Alt/Indie” with “Local” and various genres in between, pictures of antennae-d robot mascot “Sparky” hang high on the wall, watching over volunteer DJs, talkers and broadcasters.

Located in the alley between University Union and Santa Clara Hall, Sacramento State’s student-run radio station, KSSU, was streaming live the first week of the fall semester.

With the hope of “forging the way for E-music,” KSSU has been recognized for their programming.

In 2009, the mtvU College Radio Woodie Awards ranked KSSU in the Top 10 of U.S. and Canadian college radio stations. Earning “Station of the Year” and “Best Student-Run Station” from College Music Journal were two of the five big wins in 2009, with 12 nominations in total.

Broadcasting at 1580 AM on the dial and Kssu.com online, KSSU provides local and international listeners with college radio year-round. KSSU accepts and trains volunteers fall, spring and summer. Some KSSU alumni are allowed to return, but most volunteers at KSSU are students.

“KSSU is reserved to be the voice of the students,” said Susie Kuo, station advisor and former longtime KSSU volunteer.

After a rigorous broadcasting training boot camp, volunteers complete at least 15 hours of service a semester by hosting a live show, working at on-campus events, contributing to KSSU’s “blogazine” or screening submitted music to adhere to FCC regulations.

Film production junior Tyler Wyckoff, aka “Cadaver the Rapper,” didn’t slip while rapping live on his first broadcast of The Cap City Collective, incurring no potential fee from the FCC.

As it was his first show, and first live KSSU flow, backup was in-studio. Directing sound level changes and offering tech support, Kuo and station manager/history senior/ resident metal head Brian Bautista sat in the adjoining office to Wyckoff with a window view into the studio.

While Wyckoff played his song lineup, Kuo and Bautista attempted to clear up the station’s wavering history, admittedly convoluted with muddled-at-best documentation, Bautista said.

Beginning as KEDG in 1989, the Associated Broadcasting Club was the jump-off point for Sacramento State’s student-run radio. The following years shaped the student club into a ratified student radio station.


The process of establishing a college radio station at Sacramento State was nebulous, much like the process through which first-time parents rear a child. With such tricky changes, setbacks and encounters of the administrative kind, turning a club into a legitimately ratified radio station took cultivation. Co-founders Jim Bolt and Chris Prosio–both Sacramento State 1991 graduates–consider KSSU their baby, as stated in a letter to KSSU DJs and staff in May 2009, provided by Kuo.

They wrote how two years of sorting things out with administration and setting actions in motion to establish and cement a student-run radio station “certainly felt like a birthing process.”

The student-run station officially became known as KSSU at 89.7 FM in 1991. And Prosio and Bolt’s baby was born.

Frequency changes took place, as did management and semester volunteers.

“Since 1979, the various FM frequencies belonging to Sacramento State were consistently allocated to news and jazz programming by NPR on Capital Public Radio, instead of being the voice of the students,” Kuo said.

Since space on FM is very limited and Sacramento State already owned two frequencies received after applying with the FCC, KSSU found a home at 530 AM in 1991 before transitioning to 1580.

With a past of receiving coveted FM frequencies, there must have been times when feelings weren’t friendly. But KSSU and Capital Public Radio have been bridging the gap for years and are now broadcasting buddies. “I think they like how cute we are,” Kuo admitted.

The “Capital” has just recently made bigger moves in streaming live on the Internet, but the “cute” has been sending e-waves out in the world for some time.

The current KSSU AM frequency is essentially null and void, powered by 3 watts (or 3000 miliwatts, which Bautista said he thought sounded more robust), functioning off of Sacramento State’s carrier current. An electric toothbrush charger requires 10 watts and that laptop used to listen to your MP3s requires 50. No wonder the frequency can’t even be picked up at many locations on campus, or even near the alley-hidden studio.

To be heard, the station had to reach listeners. In 2004, volunteer Melissa Maxwell initiated the process of putting KSSU online, so students could listen to music and miscellaneous streaming online from a computer. Kssu.com went live in 2005.

After very resourcefully sending KSSU into the digital age, Melissa Maxwell went on to work for Entercom with local commercial radio The Eagle, 98 Rock and KWOD (RIP) and is currently doing technical operations and promotions at 94.7 FM.

Maxwell is one of quite a few past KSSU volunteers to successfully capitalize on what they learned doing college radio. Some should-know names in the local spinning scene include DJ Rob Fatal, DJ Mike Colossal, DJ Rated R, Elliot Estes (who currently DJs at The Park), and DJ 671. During the late ‘90s, Marie VanAssendelft was a volunteer at KSSU and went on to work for McGathy Promotions, doing marketing and publicity for Elmo.

Since on-air streaming was jimmy-rigged for KSSU in 2005, tracking the number of listeners is impossible. Therefore, listenership is estimated by public interaction with KSSU through social networking followers, friends and posters, and listener calls. Although inaccurate for statistics, monitoring public involvement is a good way to see which shows listeners are paying attention to and tuning (or streaming) in to.

Sac State Sunset’s prime time slot from 8 to 10 p.m. on Thursdays was earned as reflection of the hip-hop and reggaeton-spinning show’s popularity.

Five years ago, DJ Vince Vicari aka “Dub V” aka “El Doble Frijole” (“V” is a difficult letter to pronounce in some languages, like Spanish, Vicari said) began his DJ-ship at KSSU with an a.m. show called Sac State Sunrise. With co-host Britney Rossman, aka “B-Unit,” the show caught listeners’ attentions and was re-situated on Thursday nights.

On hiatus during the summer, Vicari and Rossman reunited on-air Thursday, Sept. 2 to commence the last semester of their KSSU radio show.

Re-acclimating himself with the in-studio multi-tasking of interacting, storytelling, social networking, PSA-ing, logging, playing music and hopping out to the waiting area to jam down food, Vicari said it was a lot to do but has become second nature.

“It’s almost like we’ve been doing it our whole lives,” he said to Rossman on-air about their first show of the semester. “But we’ve been gone for a while.”

While discussing summer experiences, plans for the future and answering listener calls with “You’re on air, watch your mouth. Who is this?” the fire alarm went off. Bautista said, “Your show is too hot!” while Vicari reminded listeners as he has before: the show will continue until he graduates or the studio burns down. Luckily for listeners, it was a false alarm.


KSSU is one of only a few organizations under the Associated Students Inc. that generates revenue. Even so, their resources are limited, sometimes causing technical difficulties.

Although broadcasting on an insignificant frequency and with some “older” equipment and accoutrements, KSSU seems to make good use of what it has available.

“We’re known for being really scrappy,” Kuo and Bautista explained. “We do some MacGyver Stuff.”

Seems like they earned that “2009 Best Use of Limited Resources” award by CMJ, a Billboard for college radio.

With its 20th birthday approaching on May 14, 2011, KSSU has been pooling resources to spiff-ify its image and broaden its reach.

KSSU understandably markets itself as an online radio station, but it seems to like holding on to the past and look toward the future.

Looking to have an audible presence on the dial, KSSU is partnering with outstanding local radio station KYDS 91.5 from El Camino High School. Soft-rolling Oct. 1, KSSU will fill space and send waves of music daily from 4 p.m. to 2 a.m. Due to “immense technical issues,” KSSU programming on 91.5 will be pre-recorded content, although Bautista said they would love to go live.

In true studious collegiate fashion, KSSU has been planning to celebrate their 20th birthday the entire year before the real celebration begins.

This next academic year should see a solid lineup of events and programming, as well as improved streaming and a Kssu.com website revamp.

It’s all a warm up for the big shebang; A blast that will only get the e-waves crashing, rocking the streaming radio boat.

Don’t Touch That Dial!

Local online radio show turns 1 year old, looks forward to many more

Capital Public Radio’s Nick Brunner listens to a lot of music. As the host of Off Air: Smart Rock Radio, a 1-year-old cutting-edge, indie-rock show available weekly online, he is forced to sift through tons of submissions in order to cut through the BS and create play lists that he thinks his listeners will enjoy and appreciate. “It’s a great problem to have,” Brunner says of the plethora of material he has to choose from each week. “I try really hard to keep the public radio listener in mind. When I was originally pitching the idea to do Off Air to Capital Public Radio, I said, ‘Look, what we’re doing now is great but what I’d like to try and do for us is to get public radio in the minds of twenty-somethings and early thirty-somethings, so that when they’re done with college and they’ve settled down into the community they look back at public radio and say something like, ‘Oh yes, I listened to public radio a lot and it was a big part of my life.'”

If you listen to Capital Public Radio at all, even if you haven’t heard Brunner’s show, chances are you’ve heard his voice doing mid-day transitional material, underwriting messages, weather updates, show previews and more. He’s got the sort of voice and personality that are perfect for radio, a match made it heaven it seems; but it wasn’t something he always thought he’d be doing.

“I wanted to be an actor as a kid,” says Brunner. “I went to Illinois State University and my major eventually became communication, but it started off as musical theater. I swapped to communication to pursue radio after I found out I didn’t like anybody in the theater department.”

It was the discovery of National Public Radio during these college years that turned him onto the wonders of public radio. “I didn’t even know what NPR was until I got to college,” remembers Brunner. “They played cool music, there were no commercials and they talked about interesting things at length. So, I was like, ‘I want to make this my job forever.'”

And so he set out to do just that, applying to public radio stations all over the country, including Sacramento’s very own Capital Public Radio. “After a while I started a job-a-week campaign, where I was just applying for a job every week,” remembers Brunner. “Capital Public Radio was the third establishment that I applied to and they picked up on me and said, ‘Hey, let’s talk.'” That was about two and a half years ago. Now, in such a short period of time, Brunner and his show have become a major part of the Sacramento indie music scene, continuously shining a light on artists performing in our region and offering a place for them to play in-studio. The following interview between Submerge and Brunner took place recently in a popular Mexican restaurant near Capital Public Radio’s studio over a very informal lunch.

You have a perfect personality for hosting. The voice, the vibes, the humor and wit—who are your main influences?
I’m an unapologetic Ira Glass fan. I really like him. He’s one of the smartest guys in broadcasting. He certainly is one of the harder working and most dedicated voices out there, and he’s very honest and I really like that about public radio. You don’t hear a lot of false, exaggerated characterization of DJs and stuff. I also like Steve Inskeep, you know, in terms of public radio personalities I think he’s terrific. Also Kai Ryssdal from Marketplace. I never thought finances could be cool. I never thought half an hour of business news could be so entertaining and informative. They just have one of the smartest shows. So I really like all those guys, but going back to growing up, I used to listen to this terrible morning show duo. It’s like when you buy a CD and go, “This is great,” then 10 years later you go, “What in the hell? This is awful.” Yeah, I listened to a lot of those guys, because it’s all that was around on classic rock radio in the morning.

How often do you throw something in the play list for Off Air that you personally don’t like, but that you think others will enjoy?
It’s rare; I like to think I have a pretty wide scope. I have one fail safe at least, and that’s our volunteer for the show, Meg. Occasionally I will miss a record or go, “Eh, this wasn’t so good,” and have her listen to it, or she’ll just pick it up on her own and listen to it and go, “You’re nuts, listen to track two or seven.” Half the time we bicker back and forth, but it’s nice to have that sort of fail safe. Many times I’ve gone, “Oh man I did miss that completely.” The band The xx for example, I either didn’t listen to the record I thought I did, or I just didn’t listen to it at all, and I was like, “Yeah, here you go Meg. We sort of missed the deadline on this one.” They ended up being one of the biggest bands all year. So yeah, that was a lifesaver in that regard.

How does it feel to have one year’s worth of shows under your belt? Did it drag on or did it fly by?
It flew, couldn’t believe 52 weeks went by when it had. I like to think there’s been some growth in terms of how I present the show. I’ve got a lot of people at CPR who are trying to help me out with slowing down while talking and making sure I make sense when I say the things I do. It’s been a growth process. I’ve been in radio almost 10 years now, but this is like a whole new thing. A sense of accomplishment for sure, but we’re thinking about how to grow it from here on out. Not a lot of looking back, just what can we do better than we did last week.

Where do you see Off Air in another year?
I really want to do more in-studio performances, and I would really like to see the show move into the community a bit more, start holding events downtown, just one or two, nothing crazy at like ARCO Arena. But, you know, partnering with a place like Luigi’s Fungarden would be a completely symbiotic relationship. And, you know, partnering with other organizations in Midtown especially, because that’s the crowd we’re looking at, the twenty- and thirty-somethings in Midtown who are interested and have the time to care about up and coming bands and have the patience for that. Definitely more presence on the Web, also I’d really like to have Capital Public Radio start popping up more and more on the NPR music page as a contributing station. I’d like to see more of what we do pop up there, even if it’s jazz or blues or what have you and have Off Air help start that ball rolling.

You mentioned to me in an e-mail that your 30-second promos for Off Air are slowly going to be pulled from the airwaves on CPR. Why is that?
NPR stations are looking to do more and more online-only programs, so that would mean less and less on-air life. If it takes on a life of its own online, that should be its home territory, so make it work there without having to use the crutch of on-air. That said, there’s a lot of ways of doing that: Facebook advertisements to getting on fans’ Web sites, cross promotions, etc. We’re still, as I’m being told, “Writing the book on how to do this.” We’re sort of in the Wild Wild West. We’re not cutting through the jungle exactly, there’s a town already, there’s just no sheriff and we’re just trying to not get shot.

So while there may be less of those on-air promo spots, the promotion on Insight will still happen, I’ll show up there once or twice a month and talk about what’s on the show.

Are you nervous that will limit your ability to pull new listeners in?
That was actually one of my big concerns, and I just talked to our station manager about it. He didn’t seem to be so worried about it. There are other avenues we can take to make sure that doesn’t happen. We’re still going to put resources into the show to create it and make it go. Things like buying advertisements online and cross-promotional stuff and sharing resources and stuff.

Are you happy with where the show is currently?
I’m happy currently because we get to do it, yes. Capital Public Radio said, “Yeah we think this is something that’s worth spending some resources and some of your time in doing.” From that vantage point, that’s like been my only career goal: work in public radio before I’m 30 and start up an indie rock music show. That’s already happened, so I need to think of some good goals. On-air would be cool, but I’m really 65-35 on that, because everybody gets so bent out of shape with FCC regulations; well mainly the FCC gets bent out of shape about FCC regulations. You know, everyone’s so scared of the F word.

Yeah, what happens when you want to play the band Starfucker?
[Laughs] Exactly! Well, they changed their name; they’re called Pyramiddd now. So now we need to bring them back into the studio. It’s nice to have the avenue of the Internet. While you may not immediately get as much recognition, you’re still building a solid program and a solid audience. People who tune in are going to be tuning in because they want to. I’d like Off Air to be honest and to be true to itself, and I’m worried that we’d get more pressure to tighten up the play list perhaps if we were on-air. So yeah, right now I’m very happy with the way the show is going.

For more information about Off Air: Smart Rock Radio, or to tune in every Thursday, check out www.smartrockradio.org.