Michael Linder

The LMU Lions basketball broadcast is running late so Demolisten won’t make its 6pm Friday start time. The engineer’s MIA, the server room locked so video can’t stream. But singer-songwriter Nathan Payne is in the house and the fridge is full of free Red Bull. The show will go on from Loyola Marymount University’s KXLU, its 2,900-watt FM signal beaming across L.A.’s west side from a tower atop the student union.

Producer-host Fred Kiko is off tonight so Octavius [left] is hosting solo and opens with tunes from The Blank Tapes and Paris Hilton Motherfuckers. I’m a studio guest for the episode which is archived here, digging the music through the only functioning headphones around. Octavius’ ear buds are plugged into a tiny transistor radio in his shirt pocket.

Much all of KXLU is pretty beat — college radio gear that’s seen better days, fully upholstered in band stickers. Yet these studios are a magnet for SoCal art bands, garage bands and now bands including The Soft Hands from Long Beach, The Spires of Ventura, L.A.’s Faux for Real and Daphne the Painted Lady — to name a few of scores of performers lighting up L.A.’s vibrant new music scene.

The Soft Hands

Tonight’s show features cuts from the Inland Empire’s Halloween Swim Team, L.A.’s Eagle and Talon, and Emma and the Ghosts. Never heard of ‘em? That’s cool. That’s why you’re here.

Demolisten is the half-life echo of FM’s progressive days when local bands were nurtured by local stations — before Big Media injected satellite-fed Muzak and focus-grouped playlists into the airways, mummifying radio’s sad young corpse. [See: Bruce Springsteen's "Radio Nowhere."]

Demolisten is one of the last broadcast venues devoted to demo tracks from unsigned bands. Fred and Octavius get ‘em in the mail every day — hand-made CDs in lovingly hand-crafted jackets — one-off expressions of hope, dreams and creativity from young artists with technology in their hands and music on their minds, the soundtrack of Tomorrow bubbling up fresh and pure.

Nathan Payne blew into the studio after a major criss-cross trek across America, playing gigs wherever, selling copies of his “American Infidel” album and personally silk-screened T-shirts from the back of his car.

The webcam’s working now. Chelsea Clitton, writer and sometimes performance artist also known as Curious Kite, streams Payne’s session live on Stikam.com. The video’s archived here.

Payne previews his Sunday night appearance at Good Hurt on Venice Boulevard where he’ll sing tales of lust, desire, hypocrisy — and scathing indictments of George W. Bush. Yeah, a genuine protest singer in the Woody Guthrie-Bob Dylan tradition, a voice of dissent in a world of fat-’n-happy consumerism. Go figure.

Paris Hilton Motherfuckers

Octavius is busy updating the show’s online playlist, logging transmitter readings and taking calls, IMs and email from listeners. (“Hey man, I don’t have a computer. Can you mail the concert calendar to me?”)

Demolisten is raw, it is art. It is perhaps the most crucial two-hour show on Los Angeles radio. Really.

Would any of us be here if it not for unsigned protozoans down deep in the ocean? If undiscovered krill weren’t surfacing, ready to give their all to a humpback?

Pull the plug on essential lifeforms at the roots of any food chain — the new growth that assures preservation of the species — and reality implodes.

Years-past hopefuls sending tracks to Demolisten have included Jane’s Addiction, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Guns N’ Roses and Faith No More. Write off tonight’s bands at your peril. I bet God tunes in to Demolisten, just to see how his musical offspring are doin’.

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One Response to...
KXLU’s Demolisten: The splat is where it’s at

1. Project Rabbit wrote on November 23rd, 2007 at 2:35 pm

   Thanks for the link man! really appreciate it!

   
   
   

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