The only alternative in the Valley since 1956
Hi all.
It’s been real. One week ago I graduated from Lawrence. When I started at WLFM in 2021 it was a mess, but thanks to lots of help from the amazing SOL/WLFM board, we got our shit together. I have confidence in Lee, the new station manager, to keep the legacy going. There’s still a lot of archiving and digitizing to do, so stay tuned at my Internet Archive page and my personal website to keep in the know.
Signing off,
Mattie
I am proud to announce the first podcast from WLFM Radio:
The concept is pretty low-key. Basically just talking into microphones. I plan to metaphorically spin some music submissions as well as host interviews.
Listen now! https://archive.org/details/wlfm-revival
All future episodes will be uploaded to this link as well.
Mattie
I have an important update. The new broadcast computer arrived over spring break. We still have work to do software wise but a LOT will be happening in SOL / WLFM Studios within the next couple of weeks. Stay tuned!
Mattie
I have ripped most of the fidelipac tapes. All that remain are a bunch of tapes with polka music on them, probably from WRJQ.
Here’s a list of the archive posts.
Mattie
Time for a behind-the-scenes look at what we’ve been doing. As we renovate all three studios in the SOL/WLFM basement, one of the greatest challenges was figuring out to do with all the CDs. Last term, people ate up the free LPs like candy but the same could not be said about the CDs, and unfortunately the latter were taking up more valuable space. This all changed when Amos Pitch, who runs a small record label in town, reached out to me and expressed interest in taking the CDs and the shelves they sat on. I kept anything that didn’t look mass-produced to chuck on archive.org
Many thanks to Amos, Ridley, Julia, Chloe, Henry, Lee, Kate, Cassidy, and Isaac for their help loading and hauling stuff.
Here are some photos of the progress!
Mattie
Mattie here, writing the first blog post on this site in over three years.
I’ve been preserving the legacy of WLFM by digitizing physical media that was once essential in broadcast. For many years, those cassette tapes sat untouched until one day when the club folded and it was time to clean them all up, along with all the other physical media. I saved them from the dumpster and turned them into 44.1 kHz FLAC files. Click here to listen (archive.org)
Funny story: I joined WLFM in 2021 in hopes of having a radio show where I would DJ only using physical media, the Nightfly Retro Hour, taking name inspiration from Donald Fagen’s 1982 album The Nightfly. Instead I found the studio in great disarray after being effectively abandoned once everyone was kicked off campus in March 2020. The rest of the academic year, I tried my best to get the studio functional again, but I didn’t get much help. The only thing I ever got to broadcast on WLFM was a few tests, usually consisting of me saying “balls “over and over. I became the station manager by default once Zoe Adler graduated in fall 2021, and I made an executive decision to not re-apply for LUCC re-recognition and merge with another student organization, SOL Studios, who had been gaining traction since its inception while WLFM was fading in popularity, as evidenced by putting the term “WLFM” in Google Trends.
I am currently working on digitizing the surviving fidelipac tapes, an odd format that looks similar to 8-tracks that was once the standard of radio station IDs and announcements. Stay tuned!
Mattie