01: A new career in a new town
Hola amigos,
April marks the one-year anniversary of my return to radio and the beginning of my volunteer stint with Freeform Portland. I started my show Nobody Wants a Lonely Heart last spring, and this spring I'm super excited to switch over to a weekly program. You can find me on Wednesdays from 10 pm to midnight, at 90.3 FM in N. Portland or streaming live at freeformportland.org. After my show airs, I will send an update that has links to an archive of our stream, and you can listen to it at your leisure and even download an MP3 if you so desire. You can even pretend it's a podcast if you hate music radio that much! A warning--because my show airs after 10 pm, it falls within the FCC guidelines for "safe harbor," meaning that I am allowed to play music that is "indecent and/or profane." I play music with coarse language (sorry Mom & Grandma!), so if you have kids or co-workers within earshot, you might consider using headphones or listening at a later time. I also substitute for DJs in all sorts of time slots, so I'll be sure to let you know if a program is safe for all-ages listening.
This week, my friend Brian Massey will join me in the studio to school you all up on the great music of Tucson, Arizona. I'll also be playing music featuring the production of Alias (a.k.a. Brendon Whitney of the Anticon Hip-Hop collective), in memory of his death over the weekend. This one hit me for sure, especially knowing that we was only a few years older than me and learning that he was a family man that left behind a wife and two young daughters. I donated to the fundraiser for his family here, and at the very end of this letter, I'll post a review of his Eyes Closed ep that I wrote in 2003 and never published.
THE WINTER ARCHIVE
Since this is the first newsletter I'm sending out, I thought I would recap what I've been up to this winter into spring. Freeform is volunteer-run, low-power FM radio station that puts no boundaries on what DJs play. One of my favorite things about the station is that we keep an archive of shows (archive.freeformportland.org) active for the most recent 3-6 months of programming. All you need to input is the date & time of the show when it aired, and you can listen to it anytime you like. If you access the archive from your computer's browser (Chrome seems to work best), you can even download MP3s of previously aired shows. They are broken into one hour chunks of time, so each show is composed of (at least) two separate hourlong files. In the following list, I will include the digital "flier" that I created for the show, links to each individual hour of broadcast, and a link to the playlist (when applicable). To find the playlist, scroll through the page to find the corresponding date of the when the show aired. In some cases, the playlist has been deleted from the Freeform website.
SMILING FACE // EARLY SUN
03.26.2018
FIRST HOUR
SECOND HOUR
PLAYLIST
COMMENTS: I covered for DJ Hanimal, who has a rad funk/R&B/soul on Monday mornings, 6 - 8 AM, that I've learned is now called Algorithm and Blues. This show contains no bad language.
THE WAY YOU MAKE ME FEEL
03.21.2018
1ST HOUR
2ND HOUR
PLAYLIST
COMMENTS: I couldn't get the brass line from the Casinos' "Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye" out of my head, so I leaned into it. The Sugar Pie DeSanto song is my new favorite, and that new Snail Mail single is great. I played more new indie rock than I usually get around to.
HOLD ON MAGNOLIA
03.14.2018
1ST HOUR
2ND HOUR
PLAYLIST
COMMENTS: I played all of my favorite Jason Molina songs, in remembrance of the five-year anniversary of his death. I also wrote a piece for the Freeform blog (that was republished by Static + Distance) on my thoughts about Molina's life and legacy, with an interview with fellow Freeform DJ Joshua Justice.
SUCH A CRAZY WORLD TO SEE
02.28.2018
1ST HOUR
2ND HOUR
PLAYLIST
COMMENTS: I cannot get enough of Frank Ocean's cover of "Moon River," no matter how hard I try. Also feeling a bit foolish for being so late to the Curtis Mayfield & Nina Simone parties. I'll see what I can do to make up for lost time.
TEAR THE STARS DOWN FROM THE SKY FOR YOU
02.24.0218
1ST HOUR
2ND HOUR
PLAYLIST
COMMENTS: One of my favorite things about Freeform is getting the opportunity to cover other folks' shows and play music that has a different focus than my typical show. This one was in honor of Black History Month, and I played some of my favorite jazz artists. No curse words.
WINTERY MIX
02.20.2018
1ST HOUR
2ND HOUR
PLAYLIST
COMMENTS: I love that the station has no "preview rack" or quota of new music to play, and I try to take advantage of that freedom by largely ignoring new releases. This show was an exception--I played almost all new indie rock//Hip-Hop//R&B songs.
OKAY LADIES, LET'S GET IN FORMATION
02.16.2018
FIRST HOUR
2ND HOUR
PLAYLIST
COMMENTS: A few times a year, I'm honored by the presence of Ronda (who goes by DJ Dr. Mom on Freeform) and the girls in the studio with me. This was not one of their finer moments--there was lots of toddler shrieking into the mic, which is NOT GOOD radio. Still, they picked songs, and it's 100% clean!
A MANY SPLENDORED THING
02.14.2018
FIRST HOUR
2ND HOUR
PLAYLIST
COMMENTS: I got in late this Valentine's episode because the Doc & I were watching the Blazers beat up on the helpless Warriors, so my first appearance is just after 32 minutes in the first hour. I tried to play a spectrum of songs to cover the many different versions of love.
DESTROY ALL LINES PT. II
02.10.2018
FIRST HOUR
2ND HOUR
PLAYLIST
COMMENTS: This is the second show I had organized around the loose concept of Hip-Hop songs I loved in different stages of my life. This one covers my adult life, from when Ronda & I first got married and I was teaching high school until our move to Portland.
DESTROY ALL LINES PT. I
02.08.2018
FIRST HOUR
2ND HOUR
PLAYLIST
COMMENTS: This is the first show of the two-part series about my stages of love for Hip-Hop, starting with childhood and moving toward my time in college radio.
WHEN I FEEL MY STRENGTH
02.06.2018
HOUR ONE
HOUR TWO
PLAYLIST
COMMENTS: My love letter to Motown in honor of Black History Month. Very much safe for work.
DROWNING IN THE SEA OF LOVE
01.31.2018
HOUR ONE
HOUR TWO
PLAYLIST
COMMENTS: For years, I've been planning to fade from Biggie's "Gimme to Loot" into Tony! Toni! Toné!'s "If I Had No Loot," and this was the week I finally got the chance. Lots of great new Portland Hip-Hop on this show.
FLOWER OF LIFE // BIRD OF SPRING
01.29.2018
HOUR ONE
HOUR TWO
PLAYLIST
COMMENTS: I am hugely influenced by the ethos of the show INSTEAD OF WHITE MEN, where Adam played electronic music made by ladies // non-white folx // LGBTQ folx. In keeping with that tradition, I played some of my favorite feminist rock & roll (esp. 90s) from lady-fronted bands.
WE DIG REPETITION IN THE MUSIC
01.27.2018
HOUR ONE
HOUR TWO
PLAYLIST
COMMENTS: Two hours of the music of Mark E. Smith & the Fall in honor of his death.
PEOPLE GET READY
01.17.2018
HOUR ONE
HOUR TWO
HOUR THREE
PLAYLIST
COMMENTS: Jeez, I have tried so hard to retain a positive/optimistic outlook lately, and really sometimes it feels like the only thing that works is listening to/playing the music from the Civil Rights era.
ANY TIME THERE'S MOTION
01.03.2018
HOUR ONE
HOUR TWO
PLAYLIST
COMMENTS: I was definitely stuck in the depths of the winter head cold for this show, so it was pretty much cough syrup and languid guitar jams.
These shows will remain in the archive until it fills up, so I would recommend listening to them sooner than later if you want to hear them.
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HOME LIFE
Our family moved to Portland just before the 2016 election (THE HORROR), and it feels like we are settled into a groove of late. Ronda really likes her job, especially because it gets her home in the afternoon to hang out with the girls. Jos will be heading to kindergarten this fall, and Esmé is doing preschool twice a week with Jos. We are beginning that most painful Portland ritual, the house search. Two offers in, both blown out of the water by some overachievers with bids way over asking price.
Esmé wakes up from her nap with a hairdid.
Josephine at Zoo Lights
Papa Cockle, as shot by Josephine
DJ'ing Beech Street Parlor as a part of a Mark E. Smith + Fall retrospective
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Back in 2003, my pal Kevin O'Connor and I daydreamed about starting a music review website. Obviously (thankfully?) it never came to fruition, and even though I've dabbled in music journalism over the years, I've never felt confident in my music writing. I did unearth this gem, an unpublished review that I wrote about Alias' Eyes Closed ep that I felt was worth dusting off.
artist: Alias
record: Eyes Closed ep
label: anticon
year: 2003
In these days of a world gone wrong, Oakland-based and Maine-born M.C. and producer Alias reminds us that madness is never far from reach. His newest effort, an instrumental EP called Eyes Closed, is filled with a post-millennium dread and tension heightened by samples of talking heads expounding on the ills of modern life. A dense aural fog of disquiet and letdown sticks to this album, and the instrumental Hip-Hop short-player abounds with skittery beats and jittery nerves. Spin this record and feast your ears on the beats keenly crafted by Alias that snake out through the speakers and graft themselves on your gray matter.
Eyes Closed is a timely reminder of what a bunch of [expletives] our politicians are and how completely ridiculous and menacing our government and society appear to sane humans everywhere. The claustrophobic shudder of “Must Consume” accompanies that lurch you get in your stomach when you spend time at the grocery store and you are faced with the dizzying variety of consumer goods and foodstuffs. The song a Hip-Hop rejoinder to the Clash’s “Lost in the Supermarket.” Have you strolled through the cereal aisle lately? It’s a chaotic explosion of sugar, colorful packaging and cross-merchandised toys! It’s no wonder that nobody under thirty can sit still. Darkness and grief, the boom-bap blues, come looking for you on “Things Got a Little Ugly,” perhaps the sound of the long night and the sad, slow shaking of heads in disbelief as we watch the lights go out all over the world, as we fumble towards extinction.
Take note, Danny Boyle and George C. Romero--this is the music of zombie films that act as parables, warning against the emptiness of the consumer culture and the cult of personality. This is the ghost sound of dead-eyed suburbanites, roaming the land in their gas-guzzling utility vehicles, trampling nature and leaving pavement in their wake. This is the soundtrack to the evening news.
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Thanks for reading! Next time, I'll post the links to the show that airs tonight.
Andy Cockle // DJ Mr. Mom
Portland, OR
04.04.2018