Around 2002, I lived close to the University of Chicago. I befriended some students that worked at the college radio station, WHPK 88.5, and ended up with a radio show of my own. Graveyard shift. At 3am, I would ride my bike through the dark, empty streets to the station. I was always alone, because the DJs from the previous shift were eager to get out and go to sleep.

There was a small studio booth, with equipment, a phone, a microphone, binders where I had to document what I played. There was also an adjacent room stuffed floor to cieling with LPs. The middle of the room was filled up with boxes of CDs. Most of these would have a little sticker label on them where someone had jotted down a sentence or two about the record with their favorite tracks.

If you climbed the ladder to explore the tops of those LP shelves, you could find a lot of mediocre, forgettable LPs from the early phases of 80’s “college rock”, but there was also a lot of strange, experimental music. There was also a fair bit of metal music. Dark, black, heavy, speed, thrash… genres that were basically new to me.

I was already, definitely an “exploratory” consumer of music (this was the era of file-sharing via Napster and other services), but it was a thrill to be set free in this room full of weird music with absolute license to play whatever. It was extremely solitary. I certainly didn’t feel like anyone was up listening, but at the same time, Chicago is a big city. It’s easy to imagine all kinds of night-owls turning the dial, hitting 88.5, and getting an unexpected earful.

I didn’t have much interest in talking. I kept that to the absolute minimum allowed by the station and the FCC. I don’t remember anyone ever calling me on the station phone.

Sometimes, I played classic indie or punk records that I was excited to find in the collection, like The Vaselines “Teenage Superstars”, or Richard Hell and the Voidoids “Blank Generation”, or just Void, the Dischord band. Other than that, I was broadcasting music I had never heard before, just stuff that looked weird or interesting. There were two turntables, and I would sometimes play things at the wrong speed, or two unrelated records at the same time. For instance, Gregory Isaacs “Cool Down the Pace” and Stars of The Lid “Requiem for Dying Mothers”, or some Charlemagne Palestine with Darkthrone “Transylvanian Hunger”. It’s easy to do this nowadays with 2 or more tabs on YouTube. Sometimes it was sublime, sometimes obnoxious.

I played and learned about a lot of great bands from this method. I remember Khanate “Things Viral” and Charalambides “Unknown Spin” and Dirty Projectors “The Glad Fact” (this last one had an especially big impact on my life). This track “3” by Pita is emblematic of what I liked to play as the show dragged on into the early morning: faceless, ecstatic, punishing. I really have no idea who or what Pita is.