I’ll be returning to the WCDB airwaves on the morning of Sunday, May 20. My new timeslot: 10am-noon Sundays! I hope you’ll join me… I love sharing music, even when I didn’t write it.

Still no word on whether the radio station will be open for overnight broadcasting. This is such a cowardly move by the UAlbany administration, and its timing is so suspect… handing down this “punishment” right before summer break is the equivalent of announcing bad news on a Friday. If these “Student Success” clowns think people are just going to forget and get over it, they’re as stupid as they are out of touch.

To their credit, the station staff has kept up the pressure and a ruling is supposedly forthcoming. Let’s watch closely.

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I want to thank the folks who bought Sevendys merch this past week to help with Chuck Rainey’s medical bills – very cool and generous of you guys. I’ve forwarded the proceeds right on to Chuck with my match, and I’ll keep the program going until further notice.

Again, if you would like to donate to Chuck directly, you can do so here.

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My next album is on track for a July release; I hope to make it available on CD and vinyl at that time. It’s twelve songs and seven are mixed. All but one are with the mix engineer, Pete deBoer, and he’s wrapping them up very efficiently.

It’s a weird record. The upbeat songs are very upbeat and the sad songs are very sad. I previewed the rough album for a friend and she cried at the end. Like real tears and everything. I thought it was maybe because she couldn’t stand to listen anymore – which was okay at that point because the record was over – but she said it was because the last two songs were that upsetting.

So I apologize in advance for whatever this album does to you.

Eschatone’s distributor requires a few months to properly set up an album, so while I’ll make it available here in all formats July, I would assume it won’t be in stores (if there still are actual record stores) until the fall. Not that this matters to you since you’ll be getting it the day I put it up on my site, right?

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I got Eschatone Records a PO box in Albany today. We’ll be closing down the New York City address and preparing our next round of releases as a bonafide 518 operation. I’m excited to be back with the company; I withdrew from the partnership in 2009 and returned late last year.

We have a plan and some really crazy stuff lined up to release this fall and winter. We’ll be experimenting with formats. We’ll be working with artists whose music will shock you. And we’ll be working with artists whose names will shock you, because you’ll be like How the fuck did they get that guy?

One genre into which I am excited to expand Eschatone is noise. I’ve been dabbling with Avi in our Space Toilets project… it’s fun and visceral, and the recordings, as abstract as they are, really do manage to say something. I think noise can be the ultimate musical metaphor – all feeling, no context, a direct emotional transmission. We’ll be putting out some stuff from Maryland’s Pregnant Spore; I am always surprised at how listenable his work is, and how much it communicates.

Thus even as Eschatone brings you new folk from Brian Dewan, it shall also put out staticky scrapey instrumental noise.

Come to think of it… there is an artist – a guitarist – whose work has long bridged the gap between the two; we’ve got him also. To be announced.

To whom it may concern:
I’m a UAlbany alum and local resident with strong ties to WCDB Albany. I was a station member as a student in the 1990s, and I have served as a community member DJ since mid-2010.

I also worked for UAlbany’s University Auxiliary Services in 2010, as assistant director of communications; during my stint, I helped to implement a number of well-received campuswide student involvement campaigns. Quite a bit of that UAS programming – and this remains the case, I’m told – relied on the WCDB staff for technical a/v assistance, equipment, promotion and manpower.

I’ve heard that a DJ recently broke station policy and let seven non-station-staff UAlbany students into the WCDB offices, where they were caught smoking marijuana. This is unfortunate; I can say from experience that student DJs take their responsibilities very seriously, and this sort of thing is not and has never been part of the WCDB culture. It’s music that intoxicates us… we’ve always left the drinking and drugging to fraternities, sororities, kegs-and-eggers, the SA board, and the UAlbany students who inevitably imbibe at every Dippikill retreat, Fountain Day, Fallfest and Parkfest. Anyway, I’m glad this one student has been permanently removed from the radio station roster, and that he and his friends are now in the process of being duly punished by the proper authorities.

However, I’ve also heard that something called an office of “Student Success” (did this even exist in the ’90s?) has begun investigating WCDB’s FCC license terms and organizational status. This is troubling. An awful lot of people are being penalized – the current station staff, which includes about 100 students (well, about 99 students now); WCDB’s base of local listeners; and the sizable contingent of UAlbany alumni (34 years’ worth) who maintain a keen interest in the station’s well-being – for the actions of one UAlbany student who happened to be a DJ, and seven others who were not.

In the past year, I’ve proudly watched the current WCDB staff grow to include enough students to broadcast around the clock, as we did in the 1990s, and as generations of DJs did for almost two decades before us. A radio station is to an extent a public trust, and this year’s administration has been an exceptional group of custodians. But now I’m hearing that WCDB DJs will not be allowed into the Campus Center to broadcast overnight (2:00am-7:30am Monday through Saturday and 10pm-7:30am Sunday) for perhaps the first time in the station’s history. That seems more than a bit draconian.

Is this really to be the case? And on what basis?

I hope someone from the university administration will respond here, allay my worries and tell me this is just procedural, due diligence to cover UAlbany as the University answers questions about the criminal behavior of eight of its students (who, I’m sure, could just as easily have been caught smoking weed in the dorms, or frankly just about anyplace on campus day or night), and everything will be back to normal soon.

Or is this development something that should concern the community and our alumni?

Luv,
JD

I spent a lot of time at WCDB Albany in the ’90s. That was college radio’s moment. Listenership may have peaked in the late ’80s, but the rewards were our generation’s to reap.

I fondly remember representing CDB at the 1996 Gavin radio conference in Atlanta, GA – driving all the way down there with Alex Dubovoy, Adam Monaco and Rob Babecki, no cash in my pockets, hauling a sack of dirty laundry because the Rebellion had played the night before we left and I was too preoccupied with gig prep to do a wash. My trip fund was a Ziploc bag of quarters, most of which I blew at a 24-hour laundromat when we pulled into town at 4am. We were in Atlanta for four days and I didn’t have to spend a dime on food or entertainment – if you had a badge with college radio call-letters on it, labels would just sort of take care of you. The promotions folks didn’t care if you broadcasted at 10 watts from a bathroom stall. They wanted your spins!

CMJ was the most important magazine in the universe back then. That seems really funny now.

I was not a WCDB DJ. I did the training, but it never occurred to me to take the tests and get a timeslot. All of my friends had shows, and most of them had musical tastes which at least overlapped with mine, so I was comfortable just hanging out. You don’t have to DJ to be a station member… I went to all the meetings and was assistant music director one year. 1995, maybe?

When I moved back to Albany, my friend Joe Schepis introduced me to a couple of the current DJs. Joe has been the station’s patron saint since the early ’90s. He graduated from UAlbany before I did, but his passion for radio, spectrum of technological skills, and generosity have kept him in the mix all these years – the students know who to call when things get really fucked up. And his voice can be heard on WCDB almost every hour; most of the station IDs and promos Joe recorded almost two decades ago remain in regular use.

Through Joe I met Andrew White and Eric Michelson, two awesome 2010-vintage DJs who convinced me to return to the station. I was working on campus anyway, so I figured why not? I finally got my DJ clearance and weekly slot that fall, 17 years after I started training.

Being at WCDB is so much fun… I love the current group of station members, and I’m actually glad I waited this long to become a DJ. With the collapse of the format, much of the pomp and pretense has drained out of college radio. Now we’re free to spin what we like, stretch out and be ourselves. Ragged and raw is a lot more acceptable than it was back in the day – some DJs still do a superpro job, but it’s because that’s their way, not because we’re mandated to an arbitrary standard. The overall result is content that’s much more personal, genuine and endearing than college radio could afford to be back when everyone was up its ass.

I’m on the air every Monday morning from 10am until noon Eastern time. The stuff I spin is as eclectic as the stuff I write, and if you enjoy my music at all (that is why you’re visiting this website, right?) you’ll probably like my radio show. You can listen in Albany at 90.9 on the FM dial; WCDB also has a live webstream, which you can access from any computer OR your smartphone’s music player. So you don’t have to be in Albany to listen. My show is called I Fix Mondays, and even if you’re stuck at a desk in a dreary office I will do my best to help kickstart your shit.