Nostalgic radio experiences?

[NoxidKin]

Hey guys,

I remember lying on my floor listening to the radio on a pair of chunky headphones as a child.  I don't remember much of what was on, except the presenters were cheerful, and there was some good Bowie.  I lost two or three hours that night, lying in the dark, fully tuned in.

I played Natural Selection as a slightly older child.  The community had their own internet radio station, NSRadio.  It wasn't live but it had a bunch of bespoke clips and skits related to Natural Selection.  And a few NS parody songs, which are still in my head 25(ish) years later.

I listened to soma.fm radio channels.  Also not live, but introduced me to alot of music I wouldn't have heard otherwise, always seemed to hit the right vibe.

I listened to a live DJ set on Radio 1 for a couple of hours, while doing a jigsaw.  I was an adult by that point, 10 years ago.

I've always been drawn to the radio experience.  It's one of my favourite things about GTA5, or Control or Pacific Drive.  I missed any sort of local radio culture, with unique weird presenters.  I feel alot of nostalgia for "underground" radio, even if I can't exactly place my finger on it.

I know there have been projects that recreate it, or even archived recordings, but I really feel that it needs to be live-ish for me.  Like, I have to know that someone else is listening to the same thing, somewhere at the same time, even if they're not "present".

Anyway, hbu?  :)

[Dan Q]

When I was in college in the 1990s, my friends and I would hang out on IRC late into the night, chatting together while we listened to the same broadcast radio station.

The late show took requests, and it became a popular pastime of my circle of friends to phone-in to the radio station with song requests and dedicate them to one another, each concealing our voices as best we could so that we could get away with several call-ins in the same night and making dedications that encoded secret meanings to one another, both in the names/pet names and messages we'd ask the presenter to read out and in the choices of song that accompanied them.

One night, I'm pretty confident that every single request they played on that show came from me and my friends. In an age before music streaming, when the MP3 format was still so new (and hard drive space still so small) that those of us playing with it were just doing so experimentally - not yet to build music collections - our late nights were like a private party with own resident DJ playing tunes for us while we made in-jokes between ourselves.

I've long wanted to write a short story inspired by this experience, but I've never quite made it happen.

[TheFrugalGamer]

I had a lot of formative experiences around radio growing up, and I frequently feel nostalgic about it. When I was younger, I wasn't able to get a lot of my own music for a number of reasons (whole different story, and also it was just harder to get music back then), but I had an old beat up radio/cassette tape player by the side of my bed that was all mine. I would stay up late listening to the pop radio station and got to know a lot of music I wouldn't have otherwise heard. Since the box also had a cassette recorder, I would wait until my favorite hits came around, and record them on to a mix tape that I made myself. I lot of the songs I listened to on repeat had the beginnings cut of and the ends interrupted by announcers and commercials, and I got to know the skips and cuts by heart.

Another story that stuck with me was from one of the podcasts I listened to a year or so back, and they had a guest on talking about Coast to Coast with Art Bell (I think it was John Hodgeman? I listen to a lot of comedy podasts). He said he only ever caught it late at night when in the car, when you'd be driving late trying to find something to fill the silence on the highway. That eerie show (which featured call-ins about aliens, paranormal experiences, and other weird stuff), combined with the silence and darkness outside really made it feel like you were driving between universes and had caught yourself in a crazy pocket dimension. I think that sort of atmosphere is where the original meaning for the word "liminal" comes from.
   If you were driving really late, sometimes they'd stop playing for a bit, and would turn on a test tone to keep the broadcast open, and that was a REALLY strange feeling. The song would fade out, and there'd be silence for an uncomfortably long time, and then you'd hear this screeching *BEEP* and then maybe a mechanical voice or two. If you were lucky, they'd pick it back up after a few seconds, but sometimes it'd just go silent until the next announcer came in a while later.