Today I want to tell you about my favorite step-child: WAIF, Cincinnati. I’m for real about that. The for-real, legal name, of the organization is “WAIF, the real step-child radio of Cincinnati.” It is fitting for a station that can be considered to be part of Generation X to also be a step-child. The station was conceived in the early seventies, with organization taking place for it in 1973 and it first went on the air in 1975 (that’s what makes it Gen X). The only thing that would have made the name better is if it was the real red headed step-child. Sometimes, when you are involved in community radio, it feels like you are a red-headed stepchild.

I first remember tuning in to WAIF during the summer after the sixth grade. This would have been around 1991. I loved listening to the radio, but it was usually limited to WEBN at that time, as they played the hard stuff. Heavy metal was one of the first subcultural forms of music I flocked to. My older sister Margaret was into metal, as was my cousin Matt Frantz, who now makes post-industrial experimental music (https://mattfrantz.bandcamp.com/music). The older kids on the street I grew up on were mostly westside hoods and they listened to metal. But I start to drift into more alternative sounds whenever I heard them. That was often enough as just then the heyday of alternative music was getting underway. Janes Addiction was in the air, Nirvana was in the streets, and Radiohead was about to creep on in. And I’d heard rumors of something called punk here and there when I came across movies like Valley Girl being played on Star 64.

WAIF wasn’t beholden to corporate playlists, and back in those days, the summer was a fun time to tune in to the station, as it would be flooded with new shows, many of them of the most strident and strange variety. The summer show schedule was different each year and lasted all the way from the beginning of operation until 2012, because for those first few decades of its existence, it shared the frequency with a school.

When a radio station applies for a license it needs to have a probable frequency it will be able to sit on where it won’t interfere with other frequencies. Those can be few and far between in a crowded metro area. So rather sit on their behinds waiting for a miracle to happen and a frequency to open up, they partnered with a vocational school who had station WJVS that operated during school hours, nine months out of the year. WAIF would only come on the air after school was out for the day. This was sometime between three and five in the afternoon and it would stay on until somewhere between six and eight in the morning, except on weekends.

So before WAIF moved to 24 hour broadcasting, their was always a block of shows in the summer that would be temporal, giving people who wanted to have a go at making radio a chance to have a summer show. Tuning in during the summer in the nineties was like being out on the open range. It was a time of wild untamed broadcasts from twenty-something Gen Xers and a slew of weirdos who set upon the station to get their voice and music out on the air.

I remember the day clearly when I first latched on to the station. I was told to wash the dishes and I wanted to be entertained while I did so, so I plugged in the cheap GE boombox I had and tuned around, settling on something that sounded a little different at the far left of the dial. That’s when I hard the announcers read out the “Sensitive Materials” disclaimer warning listeners who might be offended to tune away. After that business was done they played the song “Cop Killer” by Body Count, the legendary heavy metal band fronted by rapper Ice-T. The song had been banned and copies of the record recalled, causing a stir in the media. Yet, it was still out there, and here I was hearing it, in all of its unedited, uncensored glory. Killing anyone is not something I advocate, being of a non-violent persuasion, but to hear such music grabbed my attention to say the least and I became glued to the set. Not the TV set, the radio set.

I wish I knew the name of many of those shows from the summers from throughout the nineties on WAIF, and it’s possible I still have cassette recordings of some of them. I taped what I could, but there was so much, and sometimes I taped over other things. I didn’t think that one day, having already listened to the tapes a bunch, I’d be craving to listen to them again. Maybe some of those shows still exist in the box of tapes in my closet. I hope to rediscover some of them when I make the time to go through those Memorex memories.
As the years went on I became more and more of a dedicated listener to WAIF, and started to discover some of the shows on the evening roster. Some of these are as follows.

Some of the regular shows I listened to included Alien Transmissions a two-hour block of punk rock on between 10 PM and Midnight on Mondays. When the clock struck twelve, one of my all time favorite radio shows came on. This second show, the legendary Art Damage, has had profound influence on my life came on the air. It was hosted by founder Uncle Dave Lewis, but with a variety of rotating hosts that came in and out of the studio doors. A friend of mine had given me a tape of Art Damage before I ever tuned in, but after that I tuned in as often and as much as I could. The tape had been edited to remove all the talking, so for the longest time I had no idea who the bands that had been played were, or who the DJ was. Later, I ended up figuring some of it out, as I encountered those songs again in the wild. There had been pieces by Sun Ra, Nurse With Wound and many others who became staples of my later listening. But Art Damage played a lot of local music too by the bevy of experimental artists and misfits in Cincinnati and hard to find underground sounds from beyond. Every show was an avantgarde education. I had my first exposure to Charles Ives listening to Uncle Dave who rhapsodized about how Ives had been an early music collagist, only doing those audio collages in the idiom of classical music. The people involved in that show also organized a lot of gigs in different venues, and as soon as I could (towards the end of high school) I started going to these, but it took me a bit longer before I actually met any of the people who were involved. After I came back from my brief tenure at Antioch College, where I’d gotten my first taste of broadcasting, I found myself working with someone closely connected to the show and he got me on the air as part of the rotation, but that’s another story.
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One other show I remember clearly from that same time period of first discovering Art Damage, was another summer program and that I don’t remember the name of, had a profound impact on me and my desire to make cut-up tape music with cassettes. The host talked about how it was possible to plug in two different sound sources, one for each of the left and right jacks on stereo, to make a homemade, cheap, down and dirty two track recordings. Because of its nature, this method isolated each sound to one side of the stereo field.  The combined influence of Negativland, Art Damage and the instruction from this show convinced me I could make music with tape myself. I’d already been using the cassette recorder as instrument in my band The Astral Surf Gypsies, so it wasn’t much of a step to  proceeded to make some of my first tape cut-up albums, such as Mental Stirfry. These tapes too sit in my closet (I hope!) and long to be digitized.

Another favorite show on WAIF was Alien Soundtracks. It differed from Alien Transmissions by being more devoted to playing electronic, early industrial music, psychedelic and goth music. The show always opened up with the track “Forever Alien” by Spectrum (Sonic Boom).  Then it would slip into playing music by the likes of Chrome, Helios Creed, The Legendary Pink Dots, and Babylonian Tiles (who I got to see and meet before lead singer Brin sadly passed away). Alien Soundtracks was hosted by Chris Lockhart who had also spent time as an Art Damage host. He gave me my first taste of The Poppy Family and the song “Free From the City” which I’ve remained especially fond of.

Hometown-HiFi was my go to show on Wednesday evenings, on between ten and midnight. It did things that a lot of shows at WAIF did. Since this was community radio nobody was getting paid, and most people had day jobs. This could make it difficult to keep a show going as a solo host. What a few shows ended up doing was have rotating hosts, and different people would come in each week. Hometown HiFi took that to the next level with a different version of the show being on on the first wed., a second version on the second, and a third on the third. While I no longer remember the exact order, or even all of the shows, I do recall most. Poodlebites gave listeners an education in all things Frank Zappa. And while it didn’t turn me into a total Zappahead overnight it was always wild. These days I’d say I’m a Zappa fan lite. I like so much of it and have my favorite Zappa albums, but I haven’t become a totally converted disciple. Another Hometown HiFi flavor was Mekon Country Radio, which I always enjoyed. This was hosted by Michael Riley, a local record store worker, music promoter, and all around hero in the scene. I never got to know him personally but I did enjoy this show which was on once a month, and was devoted to the music of the Mekons, the punk band from Leeds, England. After their initial splash and dash with punk they drifted over into alternative country and roots music, while never losing their taste for DIY or their punk edge. Riley played a lot of other similar stuff from other bands who were mining and making the alternative country sound back then in the nineties. He also worked at the little record store inside the late Buzz Coffeehouse, and back then I barely had enough money for the coffee required to hang out inside, let alone records. If their was a fifth Wednesday in the month it was always devoted to Electric Church, two hours of music by Jimi Hendrix. These were fewer between, but always worth catching. The show is still on, but they’ve moved away from that rotation, now having settled into a format that is still heavy on the Zappa but veers into other rock and roll with large doses of comedy.

Back on the local culture front, the long running Kindred Sanction was always the place to hear all manner of music from the many fine bands in town. Most of it was in the indie genre, but they branched out to play other styles as long as it was from an artist who had a Cincinnati connection.

Weird Trips was a late overnight show I heard only a few times, but boy was it weird. It was similar to Art Damage in some respects, but as if the people involved in Art Damage had gotten taken to a few Dead shows and Rainbow Gatherings. In other words, it was highly psychedelic and very hippie. It featured sound collages, but these were aimed at people who liked jam bands and tie-dies and things with bears on them, more than the art school types who congregated around Dave Lewis and his show.

 Other shows are the stuff of legend. The shows that were on before I heard them myself, and had already gone off the air by the time I tuned into WAIF. Michael Riley’s Danceable Solution explored a wide selection of underground music. Hippies in the late seventies had a late night broadcast called Nocturnal Emissions. Others I heard people talk about and forgot, even as the transmission itself was gone.
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I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the show I spent the most time on the air for at WAIF, On the Way to the Peak of Normal. This program was started by John Cadwallader and Craig Kelley, with Kelley taking over the reigns for many-many years. He was joined by Carrie Nation at times. When my friend Andrew Hissett started filling in for this show, he pulled me in and I became part of the rotation. When Craig wanted to retire from doing the show (he’d done it for close to twenty years since the early to mid-eighties) he handed the reigns over to me, and I kept the show on for a few more years until early 2014. On the Way to the Peak of Normal played an eclectic mix of krautrock, alternative rock, post-rock, electronica and everything in-between. Listening or being on the air for the show, I always felt musically at home.

There were a number of reasons why I ended the show and “quit” radio, but one of them was to focus on writing. I have done that, and have started to achieve some of what I set out to do with my writing. But at the same time, I didn’t leave radio behind for long. In 2015 I got my ham radio technician license, and the following year upgraded to general. I became an active member in the Oh-Ky-In Amateur Radio Society. In 2016, Ken Katkin, the host of another WAIF radio show I love, started asking me to fill in for the first time on his wonderful program of underground rock music, Trash Flow Radio. All these years after I “quit” radio, I’ve been getting on the air with my ham station, filling in at WAIF for Trash Flow sometimes just a few times a year and sometimes more. One of the first things I started writing a series of articles about was radio, and now those articles have become my first book, The Radio Phonics Laboratory. And I haven’t even mentioned getting hooked up with Pete Polyank and DJ Frederick, and the journey taken onto the shortwaves, creating segments for the shows Free Radio Skybird and Imaginary Stations. For those who’ve tasted radio, it’s something really hard to give up. But why would you want to?

WAIF, of course, isn’t the only station I listened to. Stay tuned to this frequency for the next installment of Radio Shows From All Over the Freaking Place That I’ve Known And Loved.

John Michael Greer recently wrote a post on Music as a Magical Language. Towards the end of the essay he wrote that “it wouldn’t be too hard to work out classic rock numbers for every planet and element.”
To that end I posted a list of musical pieces as they related to each element last week. Again, there is classic rock that I enjoy, but in the spirit of dissensus my list was very heavy on the ambient, jazz and contemporary classical as those are some of my favorite genres. For this list of songs used to invoke the energies of each of the nine planets I tried to actually try to be a bit more eclectic.

We start by following the actual rules for once, picking a classic rock song, and setting our controls for the heart of the sun. This song is unique in the Pink Floyd catalog for featuring all five band members on the recording, with both Syd Barrett and David Gilmour playing guitars. Roger Waters meanwhile took some of the lyrics from a poem by Li He, a sickly Tang Dynasty poet. The poem was titled in English, “Don’t Go Out of That Door,” but we’re not going to follow that advice today. Instead we are going to knock on the door.

The sun is the planet of the self, of personal identity, of the individual and their will. As such a great solar song comes from no other than Moondog, and his song “Do Your Thing.”

“Do your thing! / Be fancy-free to call the tune you sing / Don't give up! / That's not the way to win a loving-cup / Do your best / And Opportunity will do the rest / Don't give in! / Capitulation is the greatest sin / Do what's right / What's right for you, to do with all your might / Don't regret! / What might have been, you might as well forget.”

Moondog certainly lived up to his own ethos. In Robert Scottos` biography of Moondog he writes about the musicians life as true American original and “one of the most improbable lives of the twentieth century: a blind and homeless street musician becomes a legendary eccentric in New York City and rises to prominence as a major-label recording artist and internationally respected composer. He became an honorary member of the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall in the late 1940s. His unique, melodic compositions were released by the Prestige jazz label, and the late 1960s Viking-garbed Moondog became a pop music sensation on Columbia Records.”

​Moondog had become blind when at age sixteen he found a dynamite cap in a field, and not knowing what it was, it blew up in his face. He lost his sight, but his older sister Ruth enriched his life by reading to him every day for many years. She read to him philosophy, science and myth and he took all of this deep into his central core. When she read him The First Violin by Jessie Fothergill, he found his mission and embarked on the path of becoming a composer.

he dulcimer and guitar playing songwriter Pantaleimon offers a mystical take on the sun, with her track “I Am (Solar Dust)” It’s from her wondrous 2008 album Heart of the Sun.


One way to listen to this piece is as a way of tapping into the “I Am” concept used so often in New Thought. “I Am the Stars and the Seas I Am” she recites in the background as a kind of affirmation or mantra -and its not a bad one at all to use and sing along with.

In astrology the Moon is considered as a planet, and it rules the changing tides of our emotions and the astral plane. Considering that dreams are a part of astral plane phenomena, “The Dreamer Is Still Asleep” by Coil seems an appropriate song to invoke the energies of the moon. This song comes from their 1999 album Musick to Play in the Dark. This record signified yet another change in Coil’s amorphous discography. In this case it was a change from being a “solar” oriented music project to a “moon” oriented music project, and the songs were meant to be listened to as “moon music.”

An alternate choice might be “Lunar Phase” by the Heavenly Music Corporation. This album had been a commission for the St. Giga ambient music satellite in Japan that broadcast its programs according to a tide table.

Speaking of satellites, Mercury is the ruler of communications, writing, radio, transportation, and thieves, among other things. As such, this classic 1962 hit by The Tornados and produced by Joe Meek is a fitting song to invoke the energies of communication.

Telstar 1 was the first of a new breed of communications satellites, launched on top of a Thor-Delta rocket on July 10, 1962. It lived up to the star in its name via the successful transmission through the vacuum of space the first television pictures, telephone calls, and telegraph images, and provided the first live transatlantic television feed.

In the spirit of communication Project Telstar was also part of a multi-national agreement. It is reminiscent of the way ham radio encourages cooperation and communication between nations. AT&T, Bell Labs and NASA were all part of the U.S. team working to get it into orbit, while in the General Post Office in the U.K. and the National Postes, Télégraphes et Téléphone in France tackled the experimental satellite communications across the pond.

Any project of this size needs a team to see it birthed from the dream and into reality. Headquartered in Bell Labs, John R. Pierce helmed the project and Rudy Kompfner invented the special traveling-wave tube transponder while James M. Early designed the transistors and the solar panels. Those panels drank in the sunlight to keep the bird alive and capable of generating 14 watts of electrical power. Pierce was an early proponent of computer music and collaborated with the likes of Max Mathews, as talked about in my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory.

The instrumental was launched on the radio waves and in the record shops in December of 1962, just as the satellite it was named after was experiencing its technical difficulties due to all the bombs the superpowers were exploding in the atmosphere. Telstar soared to number one in the US Billboard Hot 100 that month and also number one in Meek’s home country on the UK singles chart. It remained in the US charts for sixteen weeks and in the UK for 25. It is still heard with fondness or even religious zeal by Meek devotees to this day.
What gave Telstar some of its unusual appeal and staying power as a still weird song, was the use of a Clavioline or Univox. It’s hard to know which is which as the two were possibly overdubbed together in the mix on this piece. That’s the lead keyboard instrument carrying the thrilling melody. Invented by the French engineer Constant Martin the Clavioline consisted of a keyboard and a separate amplifier and speaker unit. The keyboard usually covered three octaves, and it had a number of switches to alter the tone, add vibrato, and other effects. The Clavioline used a vacuum tube oscillator to produce a solid buzzing waveform, almost a square wave. Using high and low-pass filtering, as well as the vibrato, it could be made to sound very unique. Its amplifier also lent to its signature tone with deliberate distortion, something Joe would have loved.

Many people would think of the planet Venus as a woman, and they wouldn’t be wrong. It is the ruler of females, their causes and issues, as well as being the planet of art and beauty. A beautiful woman such as Bjork, however, can think of "Venus as a Boy". This song is an embodiment of Venus as a male lover out to please and pleasure the woman he is with.

Another Bjork song that could be used to invoke the powers of Venus is her number, Big Time Sensuality, recalling the halcyon days of clubbing in the nineteen nineties, loaded up on the love drug, MDMA. This song is more about the hook up. “I don’t know what is going to happen after this weekend / and I don’t want to.” Use with caution.

Perhaps her best invocation with regards to Venus is that of love itself in “All is Full of Love.” This bright and powerful song can be put to all around use. From her third studio album Homogenic, it still speaks to all of those who’ve had their hearts broken, which is to say all of us. Beyond it is healing and the love that streams from the universe itself.

​As I write this, I began to think that Bjork herself might very well be an avatar of the planet. And while that may not be exactly the case, I do feel she is a transmitter of its energies.

It seems to me the martial energies might best be stirred by the varieties of hard rock, metal and punk. These genres have typically been favored by men, not that there aren’t women musicians and fans who can throw down like a Valkyrie. Mars as a girl, in other words.

To that end we will start with something from doom duo Year of the Cobra. Their track “Into the Fray,” which I got to hear live last summer at the Southgate House Revival, is the kind of thing you’ll want to listen to as you put on your armor and head into battle.

"Woodpecker from Mars", is another to listen as you prepare to engage. This hard alternative rock instrumental still sears after all these years. I had this on a cassette tape not long after it came out in 1989. It was an album that shaped my leaning into sounds that were just a little bit different. Faith No More provided a wide array of songs on that classic record.

Jupiter is the planet of kings, queens, and benevolent rulers. It’s a planet of wisdom, law, and orderly growth and expansion.

The track “King” from Swiss folk metal band Eluveitie does a good job, through the lyrics, of invoking divine kingship. Listening to this and singing along should do a good job of tapping into Jovian energies. The fiddle and flute solos alongside pounding drum rhythms are enough in themselves to lift the spirits, something Jupiter is known to do.

​“I, high king, sovereign and servant / Holder of divine, regality bestowed in the Omphalos grove / My kingship, the song of the gods / Thou shalt know me by my fruits, the abundance in which we grew”

Music for Jupiter was harder for me to determine. “On Jupiter” by Sun Ra seems like another good choice, even though Sun Ra is from Saturn (though it seems clear to those who know his music that he has explored the solar system). Piano, synthesizer and lyrics in swing evoke a planet of royalty guiding their kingdoms in wisdom.

The planet Saturn, is among other things, the planet of melancholy. One of the saddest songs I know is “A Sadness Song” by Current 93. It evokes the spiritual dryness of that state.

​David Tibet sings about being “we're wrapped inside our troubles / And we're wrapped inside our pain / And wracked with fires with longing / And our eyes are blind with night / With our fingers clutching coins / And our thoughts burning with ‘I’ ” That notion of “burning with ‘I’” seems so true to depression, when our introspections turn morbidly on ourselves.

One way out of the grip of melancholy is to apply oneself to meaningful work. Saturn is also the planet of hard limits, hard work, dedication and discipline. Sun Ra was a Saturnalien who knew discipline. He rehearsed for hours and hours and hours every day with his Arkestra. Discipline was such an intrinsic part of his everyday life that he made an ongoing series of pieces called “Discipline.” So here is “Discipline 27-II parts I-IV” by Sun Ra.

​Uranus was one of our latter day planetary discoveries, coming to us only in the year 1781 as the world continued to be wracked by revolutionary waves, including the one that established America. Uranus is thus considered to be the planet of sudden switcheroo’s and the unexpected. Change in general is ushered in when Uranus comes into play. Uranus also deals with rules, freedom, and originality, as showcased by it’s discovery during the years of revolutionary fervor.
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David Bowie is a Uranian par excellence and his song “Changes” can be used when thinking on Uranian themes. Those changes might even be sex changes and reversals of gender.

Those changes might even be sex changes and reversals of gender. Uranus is the planet that rules the LGBTQ+ movement. Back in the day gay men were sometimes called Uranians. Before Uranus was discovered, homosexuality as such did not exist as a specific movement and subculture, but after its discovery, it has made inroad after inroad to being a part of our common experience. With this in mind, the song “Rebel Rebel” also by Bowie, can be used, as can the number by his friend Lou Reed, “Take a Walk on the Wild Side.”

Neptune was the next planet to be discovered by adventurous astronomers. The way the planets are named is interesting. The planet Neptune doesn’t really deal with the ocean, as you might expect it to when named after a god that does control the literal tides of the sea and rules over its life. Neptune does deal with another kind of ocean though, the ocean of our collective unconscious, and rules over things such as dreams and fantasy. As such, prog rock and its variants are particularly Neptunian, especially in the way that so many prog bands have used themes from fantasy literature as part of their music.
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There is a dark side to Neptune, though. In as much as it deals with fantasies, it also deals with the illusions of the drug user. In the same way that the discovery of Uranus initiated the beginnings of queer culture, Neptune initiated the beginnings of drug culture. Neptune was discovered in 1846. Morphine had been made from opium at the beginning of the 19th century and heroin came in the 1870s, all under the orbit of Neptunes dark side. The song par excellence, of this dark side of Neptunes energy, comes from the Velvet Underground, with “Heroin.”

On the positive side of Neptune, the famous track “Soothsayer” from guitarist Buckethead taps into the aspect of the planet that is visionary, prophetic and sees beyond the veil.

To top all this off I’ll give you my favorite pop song about astrology from grungy outfit Slothrust. This is off the album Parallel Timeline where Leah Wellbaum gives an introspective and relational suite of songs, this one being “Strange Astrology” about the topic many people want to know about with astrology, what’s your sign, and are we compatible. Here those themes are turned into a fine number. This song should have been in the top forty, but we all know that system is rigged.

The book is officially out next week on June 14th and this playlist was created to celebrate its release. Those in the UK and Europe can pick up the book directly from the publisher at Velocity Press, while those in the states can get it from Bookshop.org and fine bookstores everywhere.