The KDHX History Project: Eric Hall
We'll Call The Experimental Show Recapped Here (Redacted)
Even a community radio station has to have rules. In protecting the other guilty parties, I’m not going to give the name of the show or the host whose name was officially attached to it, but I will tell how we sure broke a few rules.
In the mid-’90s, my friend and co-pizza deliveryman got a show on KDHX during the least desirable hours of the least desirable day of the week. As a couch-surfing teen, I was too young to be an official co-host, but I helped with selection, engineering, and some rare mic duties, though was moreso a partner in developing the ongoing abstract performance art series the show became, for lack of a better term. Originally, the programming frequently included Skinny Puppy, Kate Bush, Negativland, Foetus, etc., but also lots and lots of “weird old records,” which was the section of the show where we featured all the novelty albums, sound effects, kids stories, field recordings, sex education lessons, and obscure finds we’d culled from thrift stores and dollar bins.
We weren’t the only people with weird old records, so we began encouraging listeners to call in with their own records playing into the phone so we could broadcast it. Caller participation became a reoccurring attraction for the show. Folks played records to us, performed songs, and just rambled about drugs from their homes to the whole listening audience. The host and I also did abstract sound collage pieces at his house, but we were real short on equipment. We quickly got more comfortable at the station and realized we could use some of their gear to do more robust collages.
It started in the Pagoda, the off-air studio at KDHX’s former Magnolia home. That studio had multiple reel-to-reels, CD decks, tape decks, turntables, a 24-hour feed from BBC News, and phone lines wired into the board. We’d use every button and knob in that studio and, for several hours most every week, slowly got skilled at tape loops, tape echoes, turntable manipulation, and very clever misuses of the gear to get wild results. Besides collaging weird old records, we’d fold in personal recordings, looping racket, EQed tonal feedback, and every sort of sound we could make without the burden of ever learning music.
As things progressed, we had a lot of fun performing these improvised sound collages on the air, often with listeners calling in and adding their own sounds to the mix.
We also prank called a lot of businesses on the air, but in ways that aimed to even entertain the person that answered a bit, like recording their voice onto tape loops and having their own voice play back at them immediately in response to themselves – “Hello, Denny’s.” “Hello, Denny’s” “Hello?” “Hello?” “What’s going on?” “What’s going on?” “Who is this?” “Who is this who is this who is this who is this…” This would happen against swirls of cluttered and echoed found sound manipulation. Callers also started expanding the participation network by using three way calling to put other unsuspecting folks in the middle of this mess. We had a blast with all of it. It was musique concrète meets Jerky Boys meets Scanner.
Besides all the rules you can imagine being broken with all that, the last straw was when a caller, without our knowledge (wink wink) fed the on-air DJ from 105.7 The Point’s request line into a live sound collage on KDHX, which apparently had the power to upset a lot of people at The Point and FCC, so the plug was pulled on our show and our access to the Pagoda, which ended our project.
Along the way, we sure thought we’d really pushed the boundaries of music, community, and good-natured mischief, but I’m not a bit surprised that the opinion was not unanimous.
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