I always say that the amount of music I find and listen to during downtime is immense. All these weeks in quarantine gave me many opportunities to keep up with all the saved posts and daily bookmarks. Sometimes it feels overwhelming because it’s so much but in the end it’s the only way how Omega WUSB and personal mixtapes are made. And you, of all people, ask: how so? We never asked for questions but thanks anyway. Read on:
You’ll notice that many of our Omega WUSB playlists posted here drastically change every broadcast. We’re never the ones to stand still and do one thing. We do a great many. So many that we had to divide our shows into two types. One type is our deluxe broadcasts / volumes on our normal Saturday night slot. That slot is where we showcase all new, current, and relevant sounds from any given genre. It’s the A-game slot when we spin the wheel on indie, post-punk / d.i.y., shoegaze, veteran hip-hop, hardcore, metalcore, electronic, urban, and even darkness. The other type is our bonus broadcasts. Independent radio allows us to go off-the-board and play whatever we like, and other genres we enjoy playing that don’t exactly fit the deluxe bill get showcased when they can. That’s noise, other types of punk and hardcore, jungle, breakbeats, classic industrial, jazz / fusion, and hip-hop (golden-era, white-label, and old-school). This is everything I truly enjoy that’s brought back to the station. It’s because my threshold for getting into something is extremely low. It’s also great to have an open-mind. I highly suggest having one.
You can imagine how daunting it is keeping up with what’s released every day. The only way is the simplest way and that’s following every music news outlet in sight. It’s a lot for the type of show we want to broadcast and for an endless insurmountable influx of music we discover. We get other ideas from various labels, groups, YouTube channels, Bandcamp, and even artist pages. From the minute I wake up through mid-day breaks, everything is saved before I forget and it’s gone forever. Now how much gets auditioned? It could be anywhere from 10-100 songs a day. If we find something we like about it, we’ll fully listen and chances are we keep it in consideration. Veterans with new projects (say, Human Impact), noise artists we love (Pharmakon) whose sisters have collaborations with other artists (Safe Word, Appetite), and artists we followed for years (JK Flesh, Alchemist) go right in. And there’s the opposite. Any qualities that irk us gets tossed immediately. Your hardcore growling and pissing contest goes in the red and gets distorted so I can’t hear what you’re screaming about. You’re an indie outfit who thinks it’s still 2002 and uses xylophones. Your bedroom Nazi power-noise project truly makes you sound like a quarter-mensch. Target-core like Saint Pepsi or Fun. You are Garden Centre, Anklepants, or a Soundcloud rapper who thinks “$$$you won’t be disappointed!$$$GO HIT THAT LIKE BUTTON$$$” (please, don’t). You’ll quickly be forgotten about.
Tons of auditions endlessly pile up so there’s no shortage of finds for us to get our hands on. That’s not all. We have lots of reserves in the form personal music libraries, stacks of cassette dubs, and CDr’s we can reach back for as well. Everything is considered and all that’s good is utilized in some way. Some stuff we ultimately don’t end up playing on-air could give us some other ideas. Bonus riot-grrl showcases? Late-Seventies / early-Eighties Bay Area punk? African bazaar tapes? Sure. It could all happen one day. Sometimes we find so much of one genre that there’s no one way of leveling it out to zero. We currently have 20 hours of jazz / fusion waiting to be played for all the samplists and crate-diggers and there’s no end of it in sight. The same with underground white-label hip-hop. There’s ten hours of speed-core and breakbeat that we could call it a night once and for all but do we feel like playing it? Everything gets sorted out on our iPad Pro where we decide what goes in Omega WUSB and what gets reserved for future use. At times when these finds get so numerous that some end up on the iPhone so the auditioning process gets taken on daily walks to the veteran’s park or train rides to New York City.
The same can also be said for personal seasonal mixtapes. Before the turn of the millennium I had to rely on physical purchases (discs and cassettes) and dubs off the radio to make them. I tried putting everything I could onto a 120-minute Maxell. By the end of the Oughts I stopped making cassettes because the process was too cumbersome. For a while I did mix CDs for the same purpose up until the early Tens. Everything is now kept track in iTunes. Even auditions on those walks and train rides that make the difference end up on these personal mixtapes. It’s too simple now. Though, imagine having cassette decks and other things wired into it for me to be creative in making 2020 post-punk, witch house, indie, and urban sounds on Nineties’ technology. 120 minutes of splices of Zola Jesus, Antwon, Nnamdi Ogbonnaya, Ho99o9, and Breakfast Muff on a cassette? Negative Gemini, The Holydrug Couple, and Ta-Ra, too? That’s fucking wild.
It’s never been this intense sifting through this amount of music. It’s fun discovering new sounds and possibilities for a fun cause. The whole process is exhaustive and time-consuming. It’s anxiety inducing because it waits for us to be finished, but when we’re on top of it, the cuts work out for us and everything works out in the end.
