My career path after college was supposed to be in radio. I feel fortunate it was not, since the world of broadcast radio in the early 1990s probably would have chewed me up and spit me out. But my interest in pursuing something in the realm of broadcasting has stayed with me. Years ago I bought the WSBJ.com domain name, I think in 2000. I was surprised to find a 4-letter domain name such as WSBJ was even available, having read from seemingly reliable sources that every possible combination of 4 letters followed by .com had been taken. But I wanted a 4-letter name starting with a W to make me look like a real radio station with real call letters, and “SBJ” seemed appropriate for making it look like an abbreviated of sorabji.com.
I used WSBJ.com as a landing pad for a classical piano Shoutcast stream hosted on my home PC. I kept it going for a couple of years but had to pull the plug. It was getting more listeners than I could handle. I always kind of regretted letting it go but I also figured I’d be back in some form or other. As podcasting matured I stayed away, only going as far as posting a bunch of stuff to Soundcloud. I keep my stuff on my property as much as possible. I don’t think I would fit into any corner of the podcasting world as it looks to me these days.
Some of this stuff has been floating around my web world for a long time. Some of it has not.
Dream Radio
If I can remember what dreams I had I try to recount as clearly as possible. Sound on this radio all come from the minutes or moments after waking up.
Flâneur Radio
My mother once called me a flâneur, and others have also given me that designation. It’s true, I go for long, long walks, with double-digit mileage not uncommon. I often make recordings of my observations along the way. These are some of those.
LinkNYC Radio
It’s a range of what you might call streetside surveillance recordings of people standing at or passing by LinkNYC kiosks. I have hours more of this kind of stuff to put into the playlist but the raw recordings are prohibitively migraine-inducing to listen to. I’ve heard full conversations come in to these recordings, as well as sirens, honking horns, and people laughing. Call quality on these kiosks is pretty bad but here or there the loudest voices and the loudest noises come through.
Payphone Radio
This is meant to be the centerpiece of my radio stations. Since 2011 or maybe 2010 I’ve been making calls from payphones and talking into a voicemail box, commenting on experiences I may have had in the area of the phone or just rambling about other things. Occasionally I call from my cell phone, but that’s when I cannot find a working payphone and want to complete a thought from an earlier call. On that account you might call it a “phone blog” but since the overwhelming majority of calls come from payphones I’m sticking with “Payphone Radio”. I have recordings from as far back as 2011 but for now the calls are from April of this year to present. Any pursuit that relies on a working public telephone network is in trouble from the start. Many calls that sounded like they connected did not, static and line noise are frequent intruders, and so on. But by and large I think the sound quality of the traditional landline payphone beats the hell out of any cell phone or smart city kiosk. Still, sometimes this stuff is pretty hard to decipher.
Practice Room Radio
This radio was inspired by a couple of things. My sister, who lives in the house where we grew up, said that an elderly woman approached her to say that she used to stand outside the house and listen to me practice at the piano. I knew this sort of thing happened with passers-by but I almost never saw it and I don’t think I ever interacted with anyone who stopped to listen. It just felt like a nice memory, for me and for the woman who still remembers this over 30 years later.
The other inspiration for this radio comes from my neighbors in this building where I live now, who have frequently commented on how much they like hearing me play as they pass by in the halls, and that sometimes they stop to listen. It seems people like to hear this kind of stuff even when there might be times I’m just hacking at something or sightreading it and making a lot of mistakes.
Sleep Radio
This station came about after I woke up one day to find I had left my phone bedside and that it had been recording overnight. This happened after I was listening to and recording Joe Frank. WNYC plays the late Joe Frank’s programs on Sundays at 11pm. I got to tired to keep listening so I went to bed, with the recorder app on the phone still gathering sound. I dumped it into a sound editor and deleted almost all of it, leaving about 6 minutes of yawps and snorts and other grunts. If I sound like I’m being tortured it might be on account of a painful eye injury I endured a couple of days earlier. I don’t really sound like this normally.
Snore Radio
After the accidental recording that fills Sleep Radio I started sleeping with my phone every night, culling snoring or other seemingly inhuman noises that slither from my mouth in the overnight. At first I found the sounds appalling, even nauseating. But I got used to it quickly enough, and now I look at it as an opportunity to acquaint myself with that one-third of my life that passes me by.
