Xenakis Liner Notes of the Gods

By Narin Dickerson (above)

I started out listening to WPRB during my freshman year (1999), but I didn’t become involved as a DJ until, I think, 2001. One of my first recollections of WPRB was tuning in shortly after I’d moved into my dorm and hearing someone read from the Q section of the dictionary. I’d grown up with somewhat experimental radio theatre sneaking into the overnight hours of my now-all-too-tame local NPR affiliate, so this made me excited and curious for more. 

The fall of my freshman year, I took an experimental writing seminar with Professor Craig Dworkin. I can’t remember exactly when he started doing [the show called] “Difficult Listening”, or when I found out about it, but I remember listening each time I could do so to his show and the ones that followed it.

When I first started DJing, it was in a 4-6 a.m. timeslot during the middle of the week. I felt pretty free to experiment with playing music from all across genres; folk, country, punk, 20th century avant-garde composition. After all, I felt, if I weren’t doing my show, the station would probably just go to sleep earlier as it did on other evenings. (as a listener, and one often awake late at night, I often heard it do that) I’d usually go in and preview a bunch of material in the listening studio before each show, but part of doing each show was exploring through the vast amount of material in the station’s library.

I remember I would get appreciative calls during that graveyard timeslot, sometimes from truckers, expressing their thanks that I was a live, awake human on their radio dial. Occasionally, they would mention that they weren’t keen on everything I played, but they were usually still happy to be listening. In the more normal timeslots I later ended up in, I don’t remember ever fielding a call praising how I’d read liner notes; I think they had been from a Berio or Xenakis CD.

It was my friendship with Jannon Stein that finally drew me down to the basement of Holder to train for and do a show. I remember a summer spent working on campus. I think I was working at the [University’s] HelpDesk answering computer questions. Jannon Stein and Dan Ruccia were working for the station. Greg Lyon decided that he wanted to play bridge, and so we had a weekly ritual of going over to Greg’s house and listening to selections from his amazing record collection while he tried to teach us the game of bridge. I never got very skilled at bridge, but sharing music and friendship with fellow DJs was quite wonderful.