20 Years of Surgery Radio

Coming up on 300 episodes of the long running mutation of radio show to podcast and hobby to... serious hobby?

As September creeps up one of the questions many adult shoppers ask me at the record store is, “you're probably excited for the students to be getting back?” The truth of the matter is that once that meant a rush of new customers all keen on filling up on classic party jams or introspective music for study or late night negotiating. The response I give to the question is jokingly how thirty years ago they showed up with a stereo and four cases of beer ready to party, not they show up with a laptop and a baggie of weed.

I was part of the stereo and beer generation. My first years of university were spent living in a residence where stereos and beer abounded. Searching the sounds blasting from rooms on a Friday afternoon made for a quick pre-conversation indication of someone you'd probably get along with given their musical choices. Friendships followed.

Freshman double rooms in my residence sat at the four corners of each floor, and the double directly across the hallway from mine housed a stereo fanatic named Shawn Jackson. We both showed up with healthy record collections that featured a core of fairly typical classic rock but with a few peculiarities that indicated an openness to new music. We bonded over things like The Smiths, The Cure, and The The and spent hours at the record store trying to one up each other.

One of the sources of inspiration was listening to the campus radio station, CHSR, hearing what the more advanced new music adepts were spinning. After Xmas of that first term Shawn and I decided we would join the station and do our own show, thereby touching the source of all that wonder. I honestly forget what we called that first show, though I do remember we used aliases instead of our real names. Shawn used some literary character that has also faded and I for equally evaporated reasons went by “The Captain.”

By the second year Shawn's studies kept him from committing as much time to the show, so I rebranded it as the Hanging Garden Party and continued it, bouncing around from afternoon to early evening slots, through the rest of my undergrad. A few years later, when I returned to school for a graduate degree I was working at the record store, editing literary magazines, and was drafted into stage managing theatre productions, so time and energy was too stretched to consider more radio work.

Fast forward to 1999 and Alan Wong, a friend from graduate studies, had started work as the Program Director at the campus station. Knowing that I had put time in before, and faced with a fairly lethargic drive to attract new hosts, he wore me down until I agreed to do a ninety minute slot on Friday mornings. I called the show The Y2K-Mart. That was only funny until December, so I then called the show perMUTATIONS. I was just beginning my exposure to more experimental music, so the show featured a blend of avant garde rock and whatever other outer limits things I could scrounge from the record library.

I was soon hitting the wall, especially when it came to truly new music. I would spent time compiling lists of artists and labels from websites that were little more than recommendation aggregators, and brought these to the station Music Director. As the people who handled intake were largely unpaid volunteers the prospect of spending extra time and energy sourcing fringe releases for just one of the dozens of shows in programming wasn't ever undertaken. Instead I set up the perMUTATIONS@Yahoo.com email that I, unfortunately, still use to this day for all things Surgery, and reached out to these artists and labels myself, with fairly amazing results.

With these periodic mail outs from far flung weirdos, play copies trickling in through the record store, and review copies from Exclaim! where I'd been writing for a few years, I had a good regular rotation of new music to feature on the show. Though the one big breakthrough came when one label I'd emailed asking for playcopies of their new releases referred me to the American distributor / mail order service Forced Exposure. When I contacted their press and promo rep about that label’s titles their response was “sure I can get you that, what else do you need?” Miraculously I'd get weekly lists of available promos from them and a couple times a month find boxes of wonder in the mail.

Early in the 00s I'd taken on an evening job in a media lab at the university. Coupled with the record store day job the long weeks left little less and less leftover time to commit to a radio show, so after five years I wrapped up perMUTATIONS in 2004. But! I was certainly addicted to the influx of promo material from all my sources. But... why would they continue to send these care packages if I wasn't giving them airplay?

Through exploring internet channels at work I became aware of some new ideas for streaming content. Under the auspice of doing some research into the world of RSS feeds and the like I pitched the idea of doing a podcast, though I don't remember if people were calling them podcasts at that point. The university computing department allotted me some bandwidth to play with and I started figuring out how all of this would work. The first order of business was renaming the show Surgery Radio.

I set up the surgeryradio.blogspot.com page as home base and started featuring new shows and album reviews midway through 2005. At some point the first twenty-one shows were swallowed by some internet sinkhole, and though I have the .mp3 files for them and all the shows since, the track listings are lost making them quite mysterious. I continued posting shows from 2006-2010 on the university servers, but the problem arose that cumulatively these were starting to take up too much space.

The person then in charge of computing services, who wasn't the same person who helped me start up the thing, and who had no idea why this weird show that had long outlived it's initial purposes of experimenting with a new technology, informed me the shows were now exceeding the bandwidth requirements of everything else on campus. So I was booted. The ninety-two shows hosted there have been archived and serve as occasional “vintage” posts on the current feed when time prevents compiling a new show.

Luckily by that point a good number of podcast hosting services had sprung up on the internet, so the transition from the Blogspot page to surgeryradio.podbean.com was fairly seamless. The show's format stayed fairly consistent, gradually streamlining to focus almost exclusively on the more ambient spectrum of experimental and pop music. Scheduling was less consistent, and here is a minor confession about the show's assemblage: it mostly was and is still achieved without any internet at home. Aside from brief periods when roommates who “needed” internet access were in the picture, I've managed to conduct all of my online business either at work or, eventually, with smart phone assistance.

The slight hurdle of sporadic internet availability meant that most years because the university job went on hiatus each summer, for the most part so did the output of episodes. It really wasn't until around 2018 / 2019 where the “every two weeks without fail” schedule was committed to and held up. The trend of physical playcopies had by then pretty much dried up, so the show began relying on digital services and Bandcamp to source music. But the rise of the boutique labels made this pursuit both easy and quite rewarding with its possibilities for new discoveries week after week.

Looking back over the roughly twenty years of the show in its podcast form has been rewarding. I've noted a consistency of sound that was able to embrace trends as they came and went over the years and fold them into the flow in a way so that shows from the early 00s don't sound out of place sitting alongside the ones from 2023. A number of artists, like Mark Nelson, Christian Fennesz, Markus Popp, Scott Morgan, and labels like kranky, Thrill Jockey, Constellation, have remained both a constant presence in the show and favourites in my day to day, while others have risen and then vaporized like phantoms in the show's ether.

With the 300^th episode at hand I've chosen two ways to mark the occasion. First I've assembled a very lengthy Spotify playlist, just under 21 hours long, with tracks from across all the extant episodes of the show. It can be listened to chronologically or put on shuffle to create a kind of perpetual Surgery Radio channel, for those who might enjoy such a thing. Secondly, one of the groups who've been instrumental (no pun intended) in luring me into the world of experimental music, and one whose career has paralleled the show from it's radio beginnings til its podcast present is Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Despite their omnipresence in the background they've rarely been featured in the show itself, mostly because their music is difficult to incorporate within a more ambient structure, so celebrating both them and the milestone 300^th with a retrospective of their work seemed to make sense.

You can listen to the 20 Years of Surgery playlist here, and check out Episode 300 of Surgery when it drops on September 3rd, and all the other episodes, here at Podbean.

Enjoy.