Listen to WOBC!

WOBC is the coolest radio station around, and this semester I have two super fun shows! "Remix Yr Life" (Sundays, 8-10 PM EST) is exactly what it sounds like: two hours of the illest beats and sickest remixes around town. My other show, "The Seventh Circle of Hell" (Fridays, 7-8 PM EST) is a death metal show, focusing on Scandinavian melodic death metal.

Here's how you listen!
www.wobc.org for the webcast
91.5 FM in Oberlin and surrounding area

WOBC Fall Preview

If you are like one of the 125 lucky recipients of a radio show on 91.5 FM WOBC, Oberlin Community and College Radio, congratulations! You can now put your hundreds upon hundreds of gigabytes of virtually unknown music to use, serenading friends, families, professors, stalkers, and mysterious international listeners 24 hours a day, seven days a week!

As the second largest student organization on campus, WOBC is a medium through which Oberlin students and community members can express themselves through whatever brand of strange music they’re into. Shows on WOBC really do run the full musical gamut. Everything from rock/pop to classical, from electronic to jazz, from metal to freeform…it’s all on the air, helping to make WOBC Princeton Review’s #6 college radio station.

This year in particular marks a few milestones for WOBC. Two of our staffers have started working with a newly added genre – R&B and soul, which has inspired a certain degree of divergence from old trends in programming, adding more from this genre to the mix. Programming Director Matt Friberg also commented that he has been surprised by the amount of shows focusing on blues this year in particular.

Fluctuations in programming like this could be due, in part, to the many eager first-year DJs. Although much of the selection process for shows is based on seniority within WOBC and past commitment to the station, the first-years play an important role, helping to make the station one of the few smaller college radio stations able to broadcast at all hours. So when you hear your roommate’s alarm going off for their show at 4 AM, roll over and go back to sleep, thinking of how noble they are in their efforts to play music for anyone who happens to want a radio fix in the middle of the night. Yes, children, there are people listening. In fact, I once got a call-in request for Depeche Mode at 5 AM.

This year, a main goal for the station is to “broaden exposure,” Friberg informed me, “so it’s not just DJs in a booth anymore. We want to interact and engage with the college and community.” One of the different ways WOBC plans on branching out is through WOBC nights at the ‘Sco. These will feature station DJs playing some of their favorite music on Friday nights once or twice a month, the first of these being Friday, October 3rd with R&B and soul night. Another exciting development is Studio B, which is a fully functioning space for bands to record reel-to-reels, perform live on air, and for WOBC DJs to interview speakers or bands that are stopping through.

Some of the most innovative and unique shows come from Oberlin community members. This year, on a show called “Heist School Musical” (Saturdays, 10 AM – noon), an Oberlin High School class plays some of their favorites, the tag line being, “We're gonna take WOBC back from all you college punks, and bring it to some high school-aged lovers of radio. We've listened to your shows for a long time now, so hear what we've got to say.” The Oberlin Unitarian Universalist Fellowship also has a show. This talk show, entitled “Connections” (Thursdays, 10-11 AM) brings in members of the fellowship as well as professors and other community members to “explore issues of local and global consequence in our post-modern world.” Another interesting addition this year is “Spirals of Everlasting Change” (Thursdays, 2-4 AM), which is a freeform show focusing on the roots of experimental and industrial music brought to us by Chang, who was involved with seminal 70s noise music, having been in an important noise group called Non. And these are just three of the approximately 125 shows you could tune into.

In order to get shows, students and community members have to propose a cohesive idea. This could be something enthralling that could bridge the gap between genres and make something avant garde or under-the-radar a little more accessible, something that throws you back in time, something thought-provoking, or maybe even something a little silly. Despite some common stigmas about the station, WOBC is not necessary a pretentious institution. As Friberg put it, “To be pretentious is not the goal of the WOBC DJ. To have the attitude that ‘Oh, I win. I’ve heard this song before and you haven’t’ is not the intent. You’ll hear a lot of pop shows that aren’t what you’re going to hear on top 40 radio. It’s a learning experience.”

So listen to your friends’ shows, wake up to some new music, or turn on the radio while you’re trying to finish up that essay late at night. Who knows, if you listen enough, you could maybe even start figuring out your friends’ Shakespeer nicknames. You can listen at 91.5 FM, or from the webcast at www.wobc.org.

Some Blogs You Should Know About...And Some that You Shouldn't

Useful Blogs

Music Blogs:

Do you have lots of free time and an external hard drive? Then get blogging. Congratulations, for you have clearly made this step by stumbling upon The Oberlin Tritone.

There are hundreds if not thousands of good music blogs out there (some started by your very own peers!). Once you have found one that suits your listenng pleasure, similar pages are typically linked for you. DJs love to release digital-only tracks and remixes, so as a result, blogs are simply overflowing with downloads and sometimes-useful criticism and commentary on electronic music. Sites like RCRD LBL and, to an extent, Hypemachine, double as online record labels, legally supplying free downloads from indie artists from nearly all genres. Some sites have the occasional interview along with highly bloggable music videos. This is a basic list of sites to know and love, especially if you like electronic music.

Fuck You On Friday
Brooklyn Vegan
Panda Toes
Missing Toof
Electro Rash
Fluokids
Mochi & Beats

The WOBLOG:

This is 91.5 WOBC, Oberlin Community and College Radio’s very own blog! That’s right! You can now hear, see, and with permission from WOBC DJ’s, touch, smell, and taste the essence of WOBC. Each genre has its own division on the blog, or you can view by chronological post. Music downloads, cool videos, WOBC news, and various other splendors are just the tip of the iceberg on the WOBLOG.

Nightlilfe Photography:

Isn’t it a little weird when that person you hardly know snaps pictures of you at parties and then tags you on Facebook? “Party Pixxx” blogs take that creepy aesthetic to a whole new level, because now you can spend hours looking at people you probably don’t know, taken by someone who doesn’t know them either. The new wave of commercial photography is neigh, bringing strangers with cameras to parties around the world. If the routine of the same Oberlin house parties every weekend starts getting to you, check out one of these sites to see what’s been going down in San Francisco, Brooklyn, London, etc. The charm comes from the level of enthusiasm these partiers have for being photographed, sometimes in very strange circumstances (often in bathrooms). Maybe we should start an Oberlin chapter?

The Cobrasnake
Glam Canyon
As Cool as it Gets
We Made Out Once


Hipster Runoff:

Claiming to “blog about pretty much anything,” Hipster Runoff both parodies and defines this social demographic, so don’t let the title scare you away. If you’re still shaky on what exactly a hipster is, HRO is a good place to start. If you are a hipster and want to post comments about how the Ed Banger trend is so passé, this blog is for you. And if you hate all this stuff, the satire spilling from blogger Carles’s vowel-dropped words and pathetically self-conscious narrative might just make your day. HRO makes available the occasional free music download (usually remixes of Cut Copy or anything by The Teenagers) as well as copious amounts of linkage to both useful and useless blogs. Topics covered in the past include women with back tattoos and their antics, anti-emo gang violence in Mexico, DJ Mom Jeans, fellow blogger Perez Hilton, and the baby with two faces and its pseudo-hip parents. Below is a highly estimated breakdown of Hipster Runoff's appeal to various sub-demographics, made by Carles himself.

Relatively Useless, but Highly Entertaining Blogs

The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks: Do misused quotation marks “irk” you, or do they blow “your” mind? Either way, check out this blog. It combines tongue-in-cheek commentary with photographs sent in from observers of this needless quotation mark phenomenon.

Passive Aggressive Notes: Submitted from those who have been on the receiving end of over-the-top passive aggressives in action. Includes letters to corporations, rainbow-colored notes from disapproving roommates, and angry arts and crafts.

Boing Boing: Everything you would ever need concerning media, art, or pop culture in order to waste your time most effectively. Read this all day and you can impress anyone with your knowledge of chocolate Jesus performance art and backpack TV transmitters from 1951. Boing Boing TV makes available interesting videos such as this one, entitled "Tokyology," which explores various subcultures and popular social hubs within Tokyo.

LOL Porn: Do you love LOLing at porn? So do they! Includes weight room threesomes, dudes with tanlines, interesting piercings, and other material sent in by fans of the blog.

The Pen is Mightier: You can thank Oberlin senior Nick Mayor for this outstandingly delightful blog about various neon “Power Penz.” I never had any cool pens as a ten-year-old, and reading this makes me seriously question the resultant fun I had in my youth without them. Pens featured include the Air Attack, Jet Flyer, FM Radio Rocker, and the Glamour Girl Kit, among others.

The Cigarette Smoking Blog: “Conservatism, Catholicism, Yale, film and music, one cigarette at a time.” The concept is that every time writer Helen Rittelmeyer has a cigarette, she writes something ridiculous, confusing, or cigarette-related.

23/6: A highly entertaining site claiming to be “Some of the News, Most of the Time,” with contributions from alumni David Bernstein and Drew Grant.

Zac Efron Please Stop Tanning: Dedicated solely to preventing this Disney Channel icon from hitting the tanning beds. A truly noble effort.

“Dreams People Have Had About Hillary and/or Barack and/or McCain”: This project really is exactly what the title suggests; many people have sent in dreams they have had concerning the various presidential candidates. To make it even simpler, you can designate exactly which one you would like to read dreams about on the sidebar. Dreams range from the absurd to the politically poignant. One of my favorites is this stirring tour-de-force sent in from one Sheila Heti:

“There was a shootout in my home. It was like the wild west, with the women all upstairs hiding and all the men downstairs shooting. I don't know who was fighting whom, or why. Barack Obama was there. He sat next to me on the couch but sat on my glasses so I could not see.”

Busting WOBC Myths Easier than You Think

When I was a prospie, my host told me to stay away from the college radio station, WOBC. According to her, it was impossible to attain a show, and once you accomplished this feat, you were destined to confine yourself to a world of pretension, beyond-skinny jeans, ‘80s-style windbreakers, and a computer bogged down with a couple hundred gigabytes of music no one has heard of. Needless to say, I was not about to let one strikingly superficial evaluation of WOBC to abolish the dreams I had had of hosting a college radio show since listening to decades of college radio in my hometown. Admittedly, the irresistible combination of curiosity and competition drove me to attend the first all-station meeting in September.

I confess that I was intimidated, but for different reasons than I had anticipated. By talking to some of the DJs around me, I realized that these were not image-obsessed elitists with holier-than-thou tastes in music, despite certain aesthetic patterns. Each station member had a different talent or set of interests to benefit WOBC. Some had special training in contemporary classical music, some had DJ-ed at clubs or at parties, some had graphic arts experience to help with WOBC promotions, some had engineering experience…I could go on for hours. I knew then that I was sitting amongst some of the most dedicated and talented students at Oberlin, all cooperating to maintain the second largest student-run organization on campus.

I could tell it was a competitive environment, but I could respect and understand the source. Who can spin the coolest retro album or the hottest new track first? Who can land the prime time spots? Will you even get your show idea approved? These are prime subjects for contention, if you ask me. The constant struggle to have the best show possible is what makes a radio station tick.

The caliber of quality programming is almost impossible to contest. True: sometimes I turn on the radio and promptly regret the decision based on my own personal tastes (especially during Wednesday afternoons with Bluegrass Irwin). However, the concept behind the station is that of a freeform radio. This means that programming spans literally every genre. Thanks to the easy-to-navigate website, you can find show descriptions for all the shows matching your genre preferences.

It is true that most of the music played on WOBC is rather atypical of what is on your typical college radio station. A lot of it is independently released, local, in acquired taste, or simply obscure. For this reason, some students avoid listening to WOBC altogether. However, popular music is not completely ignored on WOBC; it is just approached in a different way. Instead of repeating what the media continuously nails into our eardrums, DJs are conscious to educate the listeners about new bands or albums that may correlate to their respective taste. In addition, this spring features a diverse conglomeration of talk and public affairs shows, spanning from sports news to sex advice to political discourse.

There is always the issue of social perspective. WOBC has become, to many, synonymous with raucous dance parties complete with 40 oz bottles of beer, live bands and DJs, and marathon-type dancing (who knew you could get your groove on for hours while wearing such tight pants?). Sure – I would be remiss to not discuss the hipster stereotype. The fashionable nihilism combined with ersatz retrospective, pseudo-ridiculously ironic clothing turns off a substantial percentage of campus. This in and of itself prevents some from listening.

Despite the fact that my show is from four to six in the morning on Fridays this semester, I feel by no means disconnected from the station. In fact, I feel an immense sense of accomplishment being a part of this establishment. Walking to and from the station in the middle of the night is extremely surreal. I always look forward to my hours spinning albums in the on-air studio, knowing that there are at least a few people appreciating it. There is a pristine comfort triggered by the Oberlin campus late at night. Although I have hopes of a better time slot next year, I am sure that I will look back fondly on this "right of passage" first-year show.

Needless to say, there are a lot of myths surrounding WOBC. Most are unfair, some are ridiculous, and although a few of the social stereotypes are indeed perpetuated, the station is a warm and welcoming place for people who love music. And what is Oberlin if not that?

For a joyous sonic voyage, listen to the webcast.