Old Rave Radio Shows

[Matt Drown]

Figured a little self-promotion wasn't bad. Many moons ago I DJ'd on college radio, and only a few moons ago I converted the whole lot of audio-cassette's I had to digital format. I uploaded them all to mixcloud for historic purposes. If you want to hear some classic 90's rave, feel free to check out - https://www.mixcloud.com/TechnoTerrorists/

And if you want to hear some newer DJ mixes I've done, you can check out here - https://soundcloud.com/mattdrown - I put the past couple years of a 20 minute mix competition submissions online, and a more laid back hour long mix. Hope to put some more stuff online in the next months.

[SignOfZeta]

I love this.

88.3, same frequency as WCBN and Crush Collision which has been going here in Ann Arbor since around the time you guys got started. Nobody keeps track of anything properly in student radio so I’m not sure anyone actually knows when CC got started (they say 1987) or when it became a continuous mix show (maybe 91?) which it wasn’t originally. I wasn’t involved until 2011 or so and haven’t done a lot of airtime since my kid was born but I love doing radio and Crush Collision in particular.

Interest in the program comes and goes. Sometimes there are no DJs on the schedule who really can do it so they play an archive or an CD or something and sometimes there is a waiting list for a show. What’s even more amazing is that the hip hop show, The Prop Shop, has also been going since 1987…but with the same DJ!

[moving_target]

Oh perfect I needed some new driving mixes

[Matt Drown]

The radio shows are all from WRCT 88.3fm Pittsburgh. Carnegie Mellon's free form radio station. Earliest recordings were scheduled recordings from radio->VHS tape for 4-6 hours (length of the show). Later recordings were done on 90 minute hi-bias cassette tapes manually flipped when we remembered to flip them, and usually maxes out at 3 hours 'cuz we were cheap college students doing the radio show.

Somewhere I even have playlists from all these shows. If you have any questions, feel free to ask.

[SignOfZeta]

Where did you buy your records?

[Matt Drown]

Where did you buy your records?

In the 90's from local shops, there were a couple "dj-centric" shops, and then also used record places where slightly more popular stuff ended up for cheap. Later, I bought and mixed on CD's, usually was able to find a good selection of stuff at the DJ-centric shops. This was all in Pittsburgh, PA. Didn't mail order anything.

[SignOfZeta]

Lucky for you. Importing 12”s one at a time is fantastically expensive.

In 90s SE Michigan the absolute place to be was Record Time. It was half normal record shop and half the “DJ room” which was huge and filled with more than you could ever listen to. Some of it was retail, some of it promos from labels, some of it white labels. There were decks set up with headphones so you could sample everything before buying. Nothing was expensive. It was so great…but I have never lived in Roseville so it was always a drive. I’d get a foot high stack every time I went. When they went out of business like 15 years ago I went for one last trip…then I went back again. I miss that place…the only drawback was that because it catered to local Detroit clubs the emphasis was heavily on techno and hip hop with reduced exposure to UK, continental, or even Chicago to be honest. During the peak of trance/progressive house there was almost none of it at Record Time…leading to the importations of fantastically expensive 12”s.

I have enormous amounts of dance music on CD but I could never afford two CDJs at home so I never went down that path. When I started doing Crush Collision I moved to using Traktor and I absolutely love it. I’ve had the exact same hardware for over a decade now and while I’m sure some tech nonsense will force a change on me I won’t be initiating it. I use their S4 controller so nothing ever needs to be mapped or remapped and it does everything.

[Matt Drown]

I did some mail order, but thankfully was able to mostly buy from places i could preview the vinyl or the cd. I picked up a denon dual CD unit (denon dn-2000f) in the 90s and used that until the radio station I was at got their own denon decks. In the 2000's I played with some different mp3 dj gear that I can't find anymore, then the m-audio TORQ stuff for a bit, and more recently have been using Serato and a controller. I've been looking at trying out traktor, and may pick up an X1/Z1 combo if there's some form black-friday sale on the gear.

Back in 2015 I liquidated half of my 1500 album collection, and in 2022 I sold pretty much my entire CD collection to a Rasputin records in Berkeley. They had been in boxes since about 2012, and I hadn't had a CD player hooked up to a stereo since 2015. I've gone to all digital, with vinyl more for nostalgia sake. The selling was painful, wheeling in almost 20 banker boxes of CD's and walking out with pennies added insult, but at a certain point it's just taking up space.

[SignOfZeta]

I highly recommend the S4 MkII (or MkIII?) since it more or less mirrors the entire four deck Traktor interface making it so that you configure almost nothing, rarely touch the mouse, and barely look at the screen.

I’m glad you at least sold your old discs to a huge store like that. Most of it has probably already been sold and traded back in again by now. When I was at that store the one time I visited I saw M.I.A. doing an in-store performance and bought a severely defective copy of The Jerk on laserdisc. Now that I think about it I went to Amoeba on the same day and I’m not sure what I did at which store…I was in the area to see Daft Punk so it would have been 2007. It was a good week.