I can’t say I’ve ever been much in the industrial noise camp so the
WREK Merzbow marathon is of academic interest to me. Some of
what I’ve heard is interesting and all, but I can’t say I’m clamoring
to buy the box set. It has achieved the primary goal, though, of
getting some attention for the station. One of the big problems I
found when we put in the unattended operation stuff last April was how
to publicize the fact that the station no longer leaves the air when
there is no manpower to run it. On the one hand, you want to let the
people who might have been turned off by that know that things are
different. On the other hand, it’s an admission of how bad things used
to be. You don’t get extra-credit for being on the air as a radio
station – that’s pretty much expected as baseline (unless of course
you are a sunup to sundown AM like KQNK 1530 Norton KS, the station I first
worked at.) So although the station has been on the air since April
with only minor outages for transmitter issues like lightning strikes,
that’s not really something that can be publicized. I’ve been urging
them to find other things to publicize, just to let it slowly seep
back into the consciousness that the station exists, and let the
listeners find out for themselves that things are much much better
now.

Since I’ve been typing this, they switched from CD #14 to #15, and
this one actually is pretty cool. It almost has a beat and a
melody. It sounds a little like some of the noisy bits of Dark
Side of the Moon.