Observing Biola Radio

I thought the process of running a radio show--where you're live and broadcasting 100% of the time--would be an incredibly stressful, high-tension process. Instead, after being in the studio of Biola's on-campus, student-run radio station for a couple hours, I found that being a DJ could actually be an incredibly relaxing experience, especially in the low-pressure laboratory of Biola's student practicum. Although it was clear that getting a handle on the radio equipment could be pretty tricky for a first-timer, you can make significant progress in finding your voice as a DJ after just a couple weeks. But, however enjoyable it is to be in the Biola Radio studio, the station lacks both an audience and relevancy due to the stale music selection that does not line up at all with what students listen to today.

It's Not Just for Fruitcakes.

I understand what you are thinking: Andreas Vollenweider looks like a little bit like a fruitcake. You are thinking that because he pads around in his bare feet with his harp and names his band Andreas Vollenweider and Friends and names his albums things like Dancing With the Lion and White Winds and you are thinking that him, his fellow musicians, and the people who listen to his New Age music are all fruitcakes, are all hippies who sit cross-legged in circles in loose-fitting robes and discuss things like oneness and being vegans.

But that would be a severely misguided opinion. While my mother was pregnant with me, my parents bought a whole bundle of New Age albums in an attempt to have some calming music to play around the house. And so while many kids discovered The Beatles or some other classic rock band from their parents' record collection in their childhood, I instead discovered the lengthy discographies of New Age heavyweights Narada Records and Windham Hill Records, as well as other artists like Ray Lynch and Mars Lasar...but none of them look, at first glance, as tremendously fruity as Andreas Vollenweider. So maybe it is because this is the music that I heard as I went to sleep as a wee little babe and it has seeped so deep into my subconscious that I cannot help but associate it with some sort of blissful dreamlike state; but I still love this music nonetheless, even as I have personally grown to appreciate all sorts of hip-hop, indie rock, jazz, and dance music. It is especially Vollenweider's album Down to the Moon that stands out to me as an exemplary work of art, 30-35 minutes of celestial and otherworldly music, with all 12 songs segued together, a trademark of Vollenweider's style. I've listened to it, consciously and unconsciously, for all 18 years of my life, and it is always welcoming like comfort food or coming back home after a long journey is welcoming--in fact, no matter where I am or will be, I will suspect that this album will always feel like home.

In record stores, the New Age section is a little bit like the red-headed stepchild in the midst of a charismatic family consisting of other genres that are actually popular, with artists that people have actually heard of. In larger stores, this means they are marooned somewhere in a back room alongside jazz and classical, and in smaller stores, they can be not much more than a cardboard box of un-alphabetized records dropped on the ground underneath an actual display. But no matter the case, the albums are always dirt-cheap, and there is such a high standard of quality amongst the Narada and Windham Hill artists (and amongst other [relatively] big names like Vollenweider or Enya or Patrick O'Hearn) that one can buy for the sake of quantity and inevitably end up with a whole bunch of quality as well. So please don't call Andreas Vollenweider a fruitcake, because if you do not listen to more tranquil, quieter artists like him, so much popular music--however good it my be--just washes out into noise.