Friday WPRB DJ Pinup: Julia Factorial!

Years on air: 2002-2006: Mixtape Maker/Heartbreaker. 2006-2014: Clean Yr Room (w/ Art Andrews) and Born Inflamed.

Favorite bands: Modern Lovers, Dead Moon, The Replacements, Arthur Russell, Kate Bush, Screaming Females, Beat Happening. Favorite bands I found through WPRB: Half Man Half Biscuit, Red Krayola, The Mekons, Television Personalities, The Soft Boys, Desperate Bicycles, Silkworm, Meredith Monk, that crazy closed-loop record that has 500 tracks on it.

Memorable on-air moment: The time I tried to explain to Wilbo that I self-identified with the cover of Blurt’s In Berlin LP in deep deep ways. It was, needless to say, a confusing moment for both of us.

Advice for current WPRB DJs: Keep it weird, and DON’T DRINK THE BLEACH. Outside of the WPRB studios and on the rest of the dial, life can get pretty bland and bleached out. Your show can be a portal or it can be par-for-the-course. In the style of Hawkwind’s weirdly delivered monologues: “CHOOSE WISELY, MORTAL BEING.”*

*Not an actual endorsement of Hawkwind.

Bonus audio! Here’s Julia providing a non-verbal impression of the drum fill from Big Star’s “September Gurls” in WPRB’s infamous “Fish Fingers” station ID.

Dan Ruccia says:

August 7, 2015 at 12:33 pm

Here’s how the “Fish Fingers” ID went down. I had cut that glorious Orson Welles outtake reel into the ID, and I might have had the weird electronics, but the ID needed something else. Julia was in the studio doing her show(?) and volunteers that she did a pretty mean beat boxed version of that drum fill (which I thought she said was from a song by the Fall, but I can’t for the life of me remember which one?). I put a microphone in front of her, and it was perfect, and hilarious, and absurd, like all good WPRB station IDs.

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