WKNC 88.1 FMWKNC DJs share their musical interests, personal anecdotes, etc.
WKNC’s daytime music directors spent their first week of the new year locked in a room with nothing but a typewriter and 4 cartons of Lucky Strikes. The result is the list published below of our picks for top albums of ‘08.
1. Bon Iver – For Emma, Forever Ago
4. Helio Sequence – Keep Your Eyes Ahead
5. TV on the Radio – Dear Science
7. Mr. Gnome – Deliver This Creature
8. Hot Chip – Made in the Dark
9. A Faulty Chromosome -as an ex-anorexic’s six sicks exit,…
Below is a list of what the WKNC Hip Hop DJs have come to an agreement to be the ten best hip hop albums of 2008. They are not ranked in anyway just listed. If you haven’t listened to one of these albums I strongly urge you to give them a listen.
Paper Trail by T.I.
Leave It All Behind by Foreign Exchange
The Carter 3 by Lil Wayne
Universal Mind Control by Common
Theater of Mind by Ludacris
The Renaissance by Q Tip
Emeritus by Scarface
Untitled by Nas
Rising Down by The Roots
Million Dollar Back Pack by Skillz
Happy New Year to all. As is necessary every semester here at NC State, WKNC must alter its schedule to fit the available times of all of our volunteers and DJs.
This spring semester is exciting in that we have established a new Weekend Program, the Post Rock Block. Every Sunday from 6-8pm you can hear your favorite 35 minute long, noise filled, post rock tunes, hosted by DJs Gray Matter, Bridges, Cabbage, Matticus Rex and May Day.
Also, our weekly sports show, Call of The Wolf, has been changed from Thursday evenings to Tuesday evenings from 7-8pm, and is now hosted by a couple new members.
Local Lunch introduces one new DJ, DJ Ray on Tuesdays, and welcomes back DJ Caid on Mondays. DJ Cabbage has switched to Wednesday, Murdoc to Thursdays, and Chelsey stays put for her normal Friday show.
Chainsaw has also moved up 2 hours to Thursday night starting at 10pm. This change may not be permanent, but we are happy to give our dedicated Chainsaw listeners some extra time to get their rock on.
For more shows and times visit our Schedule Page.
In an effort to reach out to our online community and encourage interaction with our listeners we have carved out an Internet outpost where WKNC listeners can come to find all of the newest and most up-to-date information about all of our music formats. The past semester we have been busy at WKNC creating this new and exciting addition to our website and radio station. Many members of our staff have given much of their time to the creation of this blog, and it is our hope that it thrives and excels as much as WKNC does.
On the blog, readers can expect to see music reviews, concert reviews, podcasts, and other generally cool and interesting stuff, posted entirely by WKNC staff members. Additionally the blog will give listeners a heads up when we’re doing on-air giveaways or having a live band in the studio.
We encourage each and every reader to contribute to posts by adding comments with their wordpress accounts. To subscribe to our full blog RSS feed please click the ‘Subscribe’ link at the top right of the blog main page, or subscribe to individual blog sections by clicking their titles on the blog main page.
All of us here at WKNC look forward to better serving our listening audience and the triangle music scene by providing a fresh, concise, and preeminent source for music and station news. With 2009 upon us, we hope to continue setting trends in the college radio community and wish you all a happy new year!
Signed,
WKNC Staff
John Morris, of popular local blog Goodnight, Raleigh! wrote up a fantastic piece on WKNC’s annual Afterhours Reunion Show hosted by Afterhours’ founders Rob Rousseau, Ben Thomas, and Steve Brown. read on:
On Monday night, three former WKNC DJs got together for an Afterhours reunion show lasting from 6PM until 1AM. Pictured above from left to right are Rob Rousseau, Ben Thomas, and Steve Brown. For the past ten years, Ben and Steve have got together shortly before the beginning of the new year for the show. Rob participated in the set for the first time this year, although he has made guest appearances on past shows.
The Roots of Electronic Music on WKNC
Afterhours officially got its start as a nightly format in early 1997. It was named for the initial time it started, 12AM. Not long after it began, the show as well as the electronic dance music scene in general started to gain in popularity. It then moved to the 8PM to midnight slot, where it has been ever since. Prior to the beginning of Afterhours, electronic music on the station consisted of a few scattered shows here and there, mostly without a slot title. Rob called in to one of these shows, hosted by Dave Brock, and began his stint shortly thereafter in 1996.
Around the same time, Steve had been getting more and more interested in bringing electronica to the station. After hearing a show syndicated via newsgroups and cassette tape titled “The Digital Dream” out of Bath, England, he was inspired to start a program on WKNC that focused exclusively on this relatively new form of music.
During the first reunion show in 1998, Ben (above) called in and was invited to the studio. He then pursued an interest in being a DJ. His first slot was referred to as the PSA shift, as it was at 4AM and the first 30 minutes consisted of playing a recorded program before he got to select some of his own tracks for airplay. Shortly thereafter, he continued the show in the more primetime hours for a while after graduation.
The Reunion Show and the Future
Ben and Steve prepare for the show for almost a year prior to it. It’s always between Christmas and the New Year, which is more convenient when juggling a family and a full time job.
Lasting between six and seven hours, there is a lot of music to play. The sets are arranged and selected ahead of time, so they can concentrate on discussing the music amongst themselves and listeners of the show. They had 10 copies of the entire set to give away during the show, and several of the people calling in have been listening to the reunion show for the past few years.
They plan to continue on with the tradition and host the show again next year at around the same time. You can enjoy the legacy they started by tuning in to 88.1 or the web stream Monday – Thursday from 8PM until 12AM.
If you’d like to be a part of their mailing list to be informed of news and information on future shows and electronic music, contact us and we will forward your information to them.
Deep in the realm of interesting but somewhat useless information is a list of the correct names for groups of animals. Google it some time. The images these names bring to the mind’s eye makes the time wasted well worth it. A group of barracudas is a battery, a group of ferrets a business, and a group of weasels a gang. Most important to us is a group of roaches: an intrusion.
An intrusion. Perfect. For decades, these songs have been lurking behind pop rock’s radio facade, out of sight and out of mind. Now, on Saturday mornings, the Mystery Roaches intrude. They crawl up your walls. They sample your scraps. These songs hide under your wall hangings and swing on your nose hairs while you sleep. There might be one sucking on your toothbrush at this very moment.
This entry marks the first of what will be a weekly post about Mystery Roach, WKNC’s weekly look at progressive, fusion, psychedelic, and garage rock from the 1960s and 1970s. Posts will be short, and they won’t follow any particular format; they might contain thoughts on a song, album or artist I found or became obsessed with that week. They might contain the text with comments of a call or email from a listener that week. They might contain a story of how I almost spilled split pea soup on my computer as I was putting the show together (which just happened as I was typing this, a cautionary tale to anyone who tries to be thrifty with a ham bone).
You just never know.
Listen to Mystery Roach Saturday mornings from 8:00 to 10:00 am, and check the WKNC blog weekly for posts about the show.
Cheers.
-La Barba Rossa
Just a special thanks to David Menconi, who helped promote the Afterhours Reunion Show on his N&O blog, On The Beat. And just in case you were wondering, the show is tonight from 6pm-midnight. Be sure to tune in to WKNC and kick back to the best Afterhours reunion show yet!
Tonight on the Local Beat DJ Stevo and the Local Beat crew will be joined in studio by Chapel Hill indie group The Butterflies. The Butterflies are set to release their brand new debut album, Nothing’s Personal, off of Chapel Hill based Trekky Records, tonight at the Duke Coffeehouse with Durham band, The Physics of Meaning. As always at the Duke Coffeehouse, doors open at 8:30 and the show starts at 9:30.
Listen in to the Local Beat every Friday from 5-8pm!
The fine folks at Goodnight Raleigh sat down with WKNC’s DJ Kyle. Besides his duties as a program host, Kyle is the station’s fearless leader (aka general manager) and regularly contributes to our 88.1 WKNC Pick of the Week feature in the Technician.
The best way to visualize the Dance Dance Revolution (Sundays at 8:00 P.M.) is to use an analogy Kyle mentioned when describing his show:
If indie rock were fire and electro were ice, DDR would be the lukewarm water between the two…
Read more at Goodnight Raleigh.
