No Pigeonholes Wow Cool Special

Don Campau and John Hayden at KKUP 91.5 FM

I was invited to be a special guest on Don Campau‘s excellent No Pigeonholes show at KKUP 91.5 FM’s new studios in San Jose on Sunday, December 13th, 2009. We breezed through 20 years of the Wow Cool label in two hours; and, featured at least a dozen tracks: from the first Wow Cool cassette release “Left Hand of the Nursery Man” (AKA Steven Cerio and Alexander Ross, 1989) up to demos for 2010’s dubstep (ish) debut release(s) by gritboy. In the middle was a healthy selection of tracks by Jason Martin (solo, and with Brown Cuts Neighbors and Evolution Revolution), evidence, nickname: Rebel and the legendary Frank Budgen. We even busted out an early Brown Cuts Neighbors track from when Jason and Colleen (AKA Lady Starlight) recorded tapes in their basement in Schenectady and weren’t even aged to double digits yet.

We covered a lot of ground (can’t remember exactly what now, will sit down to listen to it again after I write this!), and were joined in the studio by David Heymann the creator of the Spirit of Brazil podcast (36 episodes already). If you have any interest in the various areas and eras of Brazilian music (a serious passion of everyone in nickname: Rebel), you will definitely want to give these a listen. I also got to meet community radio pioneer John Hayden, who was a fellow alumnus of Don’s at Los Gatos’ KTAO Radio.

No Pigeonholes is the longest running program of underground, independent and home recorded music in the world. No Pigeonholes is presented on several different stations. Radio Marabu hosts the European Edition, KKUP broadcasts the show to the San Francisco and Monterey Bay Areas, and The Luver.com plays the show every Tuesday night at 8 PM Pacific Time.

I previously wrote about Don and his Living Archive of Underground Music project back in August. Don is seriously America’s own underground John Peel, having been broadcasting home-made and other underground music for forty years, and his Archive is well worth your time to explore.