Chicago Beatdown – Behind the scenes at the Chicago Independent Radio Project

There’s a new sound streaming out of Chicago – or really, a variety of sounds, from rollicking indie rock to infectious jazz to trippy electronica and earthy folk. There’s even room for Hall & Oates in the mix. That’s all thanks to CHIRP – acronym for the Chicago Independent Radio Project. CHIRP’s been chirping away for a couple of years now, most prominently with its presence at the Pitchfork Music Festival. But as of January 17^th, CHIRP officially hit the airwaves in the form of an all-volunteer, almost anything goes non-profit radio station. Barely a week old, it’s a breath of fresh air, and already one of the most intoxicating and unpredictable radio stations emitting sound waves from Chicago, thanks to its eclectic, intoxicating mix of music handpicked by personable and versatile DJs.

CHIRP president Shawn Campbell and music director Billy Kalb talked to Chicago Beat about the station’s mission, why it’s brand of radio matters in the iPod/Pandora era, and what CHIRP will mean for Chicago’s music scene.

Chicago Beat: So how did CHIRP finally get to the point where it’s finally a radio station?

Shawn Campbell: Well the organization, the Chicago Independent Radio Project, was founded in July 2007. During those two and a half years, we were working to raise awareness and raise money. The idea was we were working to start a truly independent arts and culture-focused radio station. And so in March 2009, we found a location and we started physically building a station a month or two after that, all throughout the spring and summer. And we got all the pieces in place, in terms of volunteers doing everything from building the walls to laying the carpet to putting into place the policies and auditioning DJs. We had volunteers working to build this really amazing tech infrastructure that we have, the organizational Web site and the station Web site. So after two and a half years of planning and building, we launched the station on January 17th.

CB: So how are you guys funding this exactly?

SC: Well what we’ve done is we had an assortment of funding forums. We have individual giving. We’ve gotten some foundation support from the Crossroads Fund here in Chicago and also from the MacArthur Fund for Arts and Culture at the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation. The biggest part of our fundraising is special events. We do two big record events every year – a freestanding one in April and one as part of the Pitchfork Music Festival in July – and a series of smaller events as well, benefit shows, DJ nights, things like that.

CB: And as far as your DJs go and the team in general, are you all just volunteering your time to the cause?

Billy Kalb: That’s how it works yeah. Being able to DJ on a radio station of any kind is a rare privilege and to be on one like CHIRP is definitely worth the commitment. No one is doing this to get rich. I tell people about what CHIRP is doing, and the response I get often enough is, ‘Oh, maybe it will take off and you’ll get rich.’ Well that’s not really the idea. It’s very much a labor of love. It’s because we believe in this that we want to see it grow as a central part in Chicago and its culture and its music scene. That, in and of itself, is worth it.

CB: When I was listening, I didn’t hear any commercials. Is that a conscious decision to make this a fund-by-donations-only radio station?

SC: Well we’re a non-profit organization. We’re also working toward securing a broadcast license down the road. The whole other piece of the puzzle that we’re involved in is reforming low power FM broadcast law. The fact is when and if we end up with a low broadcast FM signal those are non-commercial licenses. So we want everyone to be in the habit of understanding the whole world of non-commercial broadcasting. So from the start, because we are a non-profit and we hope to have a broadcast license at some point, we’re operating as a non-commercial radio station under the same rules we’d be operating on if we had a broadcast signal.

CB: Given that you guys are online, and launching the stream online is very easy to do, why is it still important to fight to get the radio signal itself?

SC: Well, I think that a big part of radio listening still happens in people’s vehicles for one thing. I can’t tell you how many times since we started Beta testing I get in my car and go, ‘Oh, I’ll listen to CHIRP,” and then suddenly realize that I can’t. Now if you have a smartphone you can rig it up in your car and listen, but it’s not as easy as hitting the on button on your radio. Now five years down the road, all new cars are going to have the Web in their car, so 10 years down the road most cars on the road will have it. But you know we’re still a ways away from that. So we’re definitely losing out on people being able to listen in their cars. And more important [from a societal perspective], there are people who can’t listen on their computers. It’s really easy for us to assume that everybody’s got a computer and its new enough and not dial-up and you can listen to audio on your computer. But that’s not the case for everybody. Most everybody has a radio, not everybody has a computer where they can listen to music or have the time to. So there’s the portability issue and the accessibility issue when it comes to the broadcast signal.

BK: We do really intend to be a station for all Chicagoans, not just the tech-savvy set. The cost difference between a full-blown, Internet-equipped personal computer or an iPhone or whatever, and a Walkman or what have you, it’s really an issue of accessibility.

CB: But given that technology is the way that it is, we seem to see traditional media transforming. I’d like to get some clarification about why you guys are so passionate about this project given that a lot of music lovers can program their own set lists on their iPods or listen to any radio station they please online, and of course as technology progresses there might be even more of this. So why do you think it’s important to devote your time to creating this station in Chicago?

BK: Well for one thing, you can program your own mixes all you want, but I think radio will continue to be relevant because there’s a personal connection. You’re listening to someone who is in a way curating your listening experience. It’s a way to hear things that you wouldn’t necessarily seek out yourself, to become exposed to new sounds that you don’t know about. So the personal connection is really important; that’s one of the things I like best about radio. As far as why it’s important to do something like this in Chicago as opposed to listening to KEXP or The Current up in Minneapolis, while there are listening options out there, localism is such a big part of what we do. We’re building a catalog of Chicago artists that we’re really proud to be in the same city as them, and we want to share these artists that might not be getting exposure outside the city or inside the city right now. There’s that local connection, this is part of your community, this is something you can lay claim to. And I think that’s part of that meaningful connection.

SC: I keep saying this when I talk to people this idea that people didn’t leave radio, radio left people. And I think it’s really true when we see the reaction in these first few days on the air. The response from the audience has been so enthusiastic and people are saying, ‘Finally there’s a radio station that I can listen to,’ and ‘This sounds like the radio station of my dreams,’ and ‘At last, Chicago has a station like a KEXP,’ or, ‘I used to listen to Pandora to get through my day, now I can listen to CHIRP.’ Like Billy said, people want to have that personal connection to their station. Even though a lot of that has gone away I don’t think people stopped wanting that. I think that there was so much commercialism in radio, and with the deregulation of ownership in 1996, when large corporations went to owning most of the radio stations in this country rather than local companies that were in the town wherever the station was, where the people you heard on the air were from that town and were talking about things that were going on in the city that day. Now, so much content is canned, the hosts who are on live are trying to make things as non-specific as possible when it comes to place; you have these syndicated morning hosts that are on in 40 different markets, so they can’t talk about what’s going on in Chicago because they may not even be in Chicago.

CB: But at the same time, the competition has got to be fierce in the city and beyond. I used to listen to a similar station, WOXY, and loved it, but they’ve had their financial troubles. And even in Chicago, there’s so much loyalty to some local stations like XRT. And of course there’s Pandora. So given these options out there, what do you think you have to do at CHIRP to make sure people will continue to listen, they’ll continue to support, and to have people realize there’s something special about CHIRP, given that there’s a lot of other stations out there – local, national, international – that are trying to get the attention of the radio listener?

SC: I think that our programming is different from what you’re talking about, the fact that we are playing a lot of local music, the fact that what we’re talking about has a very firm sense of place in Chicago right away sets us apart. And the fact that we’re out and about in the community at street fairs and put on these events, that gives us a chance to talk to people one on one. And we have so many great conversations with listeners and potential listeners when we’re out, and that’s really our opportunity to get people excited about things. But I think that what we’re doing is different enough from any existing station. It’s different than Pandora, it’s different from your iPod, because we’re trying to serve people who aren’t just looking to hear what they like. Your iPod will never surprise you completely; it’ll never introduce you to something that you’d never find otherwise. There’s not really any other radio station in Chicago that’s doing the same sort of thing we’re doing, in terms of the really broad mix of music in genres and eras, and really trying to present it in a consistent and pretty professional manner. We’re really considering ourselves to be a good step up from what you hear on college radio where there’s a lot of inconsistency and a real lack of professionalism. We’re not trying to be all glossy and B96 or anything, but we want to create a really listenable experience.

BK: I want CHIRP to sound like no other station.  Last night, I was playing some recent indie rock stuff, and I got a request call from someone requesting Sam Cooke just as I was about to play Sam Cooke. The timing was really on. She requested “Muddy Waters,” and I had “Muddy Waters” cued up next. I don’t think there are a lot of stations that can deliver that kind of experience. It’s not quite free form; there’s a method to it. But it’s totally all over the map. What I like to say is, ‘We want to be a source for under-heard, underrepresented music, but then having the history to back that up.’ A buzz band might play on WXRT for a while, but they’re going to play one or two songs, the standalone singles over and over again for months, and then it’s going to kind of drop off, and the band disappears from that station. We like to remember that things happen, that we have this sense of history, this back catalog, where we are pulling from all sorts of genres and eras and themes and places. So it’s really, I think, a special listening experience. Even when I tune in as the music director, I hear things I don’t expect to hear. And that’s really fun.

CB: What’s the grade you would give for the music selection at CHIRP, and will you change it all from this first week or do you think you’ve hit the nail on the head?

BK: As far as grading it? I’m pretty happy with it. As far as a letter grade, I don’t know. We have so many different DJs with different areas of expertise, and one thing we ask of them is to not have specialty shows. We want everyone to play a really broad mix, but they do have their own style, their own favorite artists. So I’ve been tremendously impressed with what I’ve heard so far. I try to stay on top of things, but I’m being introduced to new music by my DJs, which is really exciting. As time goes on, it will grow, it will cross-pollinate, the DJs will be turning each other to new things. It’ll be really exciting to see where it’s going to go.

CB: I’ve heard all sorts of genres on CHIRP already, so is there a way to label it? If someone wants to listen to CHIRP, what would you tell him or her that they are going to get basically? Or should they just expect the unexpected?

SC: They’re going to get great music.

BK: It’s tough to say. Shawn and I were talking about this. Ym365 wants you to categorize what music you play; that’s the streaming service we’re working through. And they give you up to three terms to define who you are as a station, and we kind of agonized over it. There’s no good easy way to sum up what we do. You are going to hear rock and pop, but you are going to hear electronic music and jazz, folk and old school country music. Last week I heard someone play Hall & Oates; it totally went with everything else that DJ was playing. We have really knowledgeable DJs who know their stuff, who know how to put together a good set. You never really know what you’re going to get, and you might not like everything you hear, but you can trust you’re going to have a good time.

SC: We don’t believe in only two kinds of music. Even a little bit today, but especially the heyday of Top 40 radio and back in the ‘60s, you see The Beatles next to Aretha Franklin next to Jimi Hendrix next to The Archies. There was room for all different types of music, and really from the ‘80s forward you see really serious segmentation of genres. We feel that all of this music has cross-pollinated over history, so it makes sense as you move through popular music history that you play all the pieces that made everything that there is today.

Another thing we say a lot is we want to be your friend with the coolest music collection in the world, the person that you go to that you trust to introduce you to great music new and old, somebody that’s got something that you haven’t really experienced before, or if you have experienced it before, you can think about it and hear it in a new way. Even that example of having Hall & Oates in a set, you hear that in a different way on CHIRP than if you were to hear it on 100.3, it makes you think about it in a different way.

BK: I think music is at a really neat place right now, and there’s this evolution over the past 10 years especially where you see Missy Elliott getting rave reviews on Pitchfork and you have a guy named Girl Talk which is streaming everything ever recorded together into a cohesive mix, and you kind of realize that it’s all the same stuff. And I think independent radio for a long time like Shawn said was very segmented. ‘We’re going to play this indie rock, whether its punk or twee or whatever.’ It all kind of fit in the same zone for lack of a better word, and now the doors have just been blown open, and you can drop a disco track next to Sonic Youth, and we’ve been mistaken a few times as a free form station and we’re not. But we’re eclectic enough and it works so well that you can’t be blamed for thinking that. We really do want to be this complete picture of good music as far as it possibly can.

CB: So do you take offense to the idea of being a free form station?

BK: I don’t take offense to it. I think free form is a really neat thing. I think it can get off track when it’s not done well. But we do have a format in place which encourages a lot of new music from a lot of different styles and genres. We want to have this local focus that a lot of stations in the area aren’t quite delivering on. When you just say, ‘Ok, it’s free form. DJs can play whatever they want,’ maybe they’ll play new music, maybe they’ll play local stuff, but they don’t have to. And those things are so important to us as a station that we would never want to be free form.

SC: It’s not that we find anything objectionable about free form, its just inaccurate to describe us as free form. The other thing with free form is you can do whatever you want, so if you want to play two hours of Britney Spears at a free form station, no one’s going to tell you necessarily that you can’t. It’s really got to be anything goes to truly be free form. And also, free form means you can super specialize your show as well, and that’s something that we’ve really gone away from. We don’t want specialty shows. We don’t want block programming where its an hour of punk followed by an hour of country followed by an hour of electronic music followed by an hour of hip hop, because we don’t really think people listen to music that way. We think people listen to a wide mix of music, and it makes more sense to put it all together rather than to ghettoize each genre of music into its own little hour or three-hour block.

CB: You guys mentioned throughout the conversation the importance of the local scene and local music. How do you hope to progress the station forward in finding the balance in playing good indie stuff, good hip hop or good jazz that isn’t necessarily local, but also finding room to promote those local bands?

BK: DJs are expected to play two local tracks per hour, and I think it’s really important to define a few categories of local artists. I think it’s different to play Wilco or The Sea and Cake or The Jesus Lizard, a band that has a reputation, a history, a fan base. That’s different from playing the band that formed eight months ago and played the Empty Bottle. We want to make sure we’re bringing attention to the Chicago scene as it develops. A lot of stations, even if they have somewhat a commitment to local music, miss out on that stuff. We have ongoing events like a monthly benefit night at the Whistler, where we book upcoming local acts that we think are really neat and want to share them with our listeners, introduce our audience to what they do, and form that partnership all over town.

It goes back to a local connection where if you’re in a band here in Chicago and you’re just starting out or toiling away for a few years but don’t have national success, but what you’re doing is really neat, and you want people to hear it, it’s good to have a station that will play it and take a risk on you, that’s not going to wait for commercial potential to present itself before it starts playing you. We definitely want to highlight interesting things going on in Chicago hopefully before anyone else. We get excited by these bands, and we’re not just throwing around local as a buzzword. These are bands that we generally like and we want people to hear them. And we’re super excited from the response we’ve received so far from these local bands. We had three amazing groups play our launch party at the Empty Bottle; we had The Yolks, Hollows and Rabble Rabble, and all those bands are just super excited for what we’re doing, and we’re super excited for what they’re doing, and it becomes a really natural partnership.

SC: We’re not waiting around for bands to have releases on major labels. We’re not even necessarily waiting around for bands to have releases on labels. If you’ve got something that’s self-released, we’re totally willing to consider it. And so much local radio, and I’m making finger quotes when I say local radio, maybe they have an hour a week devoted to local music, and anything else you hear them play in terms of local music is stuff that has gotten pretty successful. It’s not like these stations have gotten into playing this little band that’s playing at the Whistler or at the Hideout even. So we really see an opportunity to introduce people to all this great music here in Chicago.

CB: And what role do you see the CHIRP community playing in terms of the local music scene, in regards to promoting more shows, having bands play in studio, anything at all like that that you’re envisioning as better connecting you guys on the local level?

SC: We’ve got great relationships with most of the venues in town that are doing shows that makes sense for us, and we’ve got ticket giveaways where we’re welcoming shows to town. We’re going to be at a lot of shows, and also we are in the midst of finishing construction on our second studio, but we will be having bands play more stripped down sets live in the studio, and we’ll be working with local recording studios to do bigger full sessions that we record and edit down and play back. So definitely live music is what we want to do in terms of local bands and national and international acts, whom we’d definitely love to get in the studio too if we had an opportunity. But that’s something that’s certainly part of the plans for CHIRP.

CB: It’s only been a couple of days since CHIRP launched, but let’s go ahead and look 12 months from now or even further. At that point, what’s your vision in terms of what the station stands for, the music that it’s playing and its involvement in Chicago?

BK: I’m just hoping to build recognition. I think a lot of people are tuned in to what we’re doing at the moment, but we can always stand to have more, just to be recognized as a friend of Chicago, the Chicago scene, to have a reputation I guess. And I don’t mean that in any sort of egotistical way, but [we want] to be even more engrained in the city we call home, playing as large role as we possibly are able to. That’s really our goal.

SC: Yeah, I want us to be the shorthand go-to for the music community and people that are fans of music in Chicago. I think there are certain stations that are like that, where you can mention it to a person you meet at a show, and you don’t have to explain what it is, they know what it is. We’ve talked about KEXP here, and I think they’ve done a good job nationwide of establishing themselves as that brand for lack of a better word. And certainly in Chicago, we’ve seen a little bit of this already, and when it happens its really gratifying because we’re so young, but to have people to say, ‘Oh, I heard that on CHIRP radio,’ and not have to go on to explain what that it is, to be a part of people’s lives like that.

The one thing I really want to stress with the work that we’ve done is it’s been such a great effort on the part of the organization, the group. There have been around 100, 120 volunteers who have worked on this project, and a lot of people have been there from the beginning two and a half years ago, and others have come to us more recently. And I think your questions earlier about radio and its importance in this day and age, part of that can really be answered by the commitment of the volunteers. Everybody is a true believer in this thing. Anybody that’s been involved in CHIRP believed from the beginning that they were doing something that was important. Just the untold hours people have put in to make this thing a reality, and once it became a reality, just to make sure that everything continued to function smoothly and look great and work really well for listeners, I can’t say enough about the people that we work with. You have to be able to rely on all your volunteers when you’re an all-volunteer organization, but we absolutely have that with this organization and we’re really, really lucky.

BK: When I talked to people about starting a radio station, the reaction I get is, ‘Oh, is that something you’re setting up in your apartment?’ And I think, ‘Are you crazy?’ This is something that takes so much work, and I can’t stress enough how much we rely on each one of our volunteers. And when you asked me [prior to the interview] who’s calling the shots at CHIRP, there’s no real boss. It’s not like one person and 100 people doing their bidding, it’s really an organic, multifaceted community. And I think that’s part of what makes this thing so strong.

Launch the radio stream at chirpradio.org.