ATSIC RADIO - AFTER THE SMOKE IS CLEAR

ATSIC Radio, or “After the Smoke is Clear,” is my twice weekly Hip Hop mix-show/podcast on CKXU (and now also on Edmonton based GRadio.ca). It airs on 88.3 FM broadcast from the UofL, Monday’s at 9pm, Thursdays at 11pm MT. You can stream the episodes for at Mixcloud.

I started the show in 2019 for a few reasons. I’d been working at Arches, a supervised consumption site here in Lethbridge, running a music program, when someone from the University came through for a tour. They told me that the station didn’t currently have any Hip Hop shows and said I should start one. Since we were recording raps every day in the daily meaningful activities programming I was running, I decided that it would be cool to at least try to make a few episodes. I figured I could play the Mic Club music (which you can check out here) as well as my own (which I didn’t end up doing very often..), and music from artists I met or discovered through my years moving around the Canadian Hip Hop scene.

I knew that having a radio show was a good way to contribute to the culture in a meaningful way. I’d seen guys I looked up to doing it in Edmonton. Here in Lethbridge, or in Alberta in general, it’s no secret that the mainstream culture isn’t very familiar with Hip Hop. It’s like the Land Before Rap or something. I knew I’d have to play at least 1/3 Canadian content to adhere to the federal broadcast rules, but I still figured I’d be able to get a lot of music on the air that never gets played out here since there are no dedicated Hip Hop stations on the terrestrial radio dial. I also thought that reaching out to artists offering to play their music would be a good way to network. It has been. They always tell you if you put the community first, the community will support back. It does, and I appreciate it.

I know everyone might be thinking “Radio? but its 2021, people can find whatever music they want online on Spotify or Youtube.” This is true. They can. But they typically don’t. Even before I started the show I knew that there was a huge amount of Hip Hop coming out that not enough people ever hear about. This is the era of the curator, but many instead are relying on algorithms to show them new content. Now that I’ve been doing the show for 80 odd episodes, I’ve found there’s too much to play. I can’t even keep up when I only focus on playing new Canadian rap I think deserves to be heard, never mind all the Americans I grew up on. Songs end up being played the week they come out and never again. There’s so much that drops every week that it’s tough to remind myself to go back to replay anything regardless of how much I like it. Someday, I’ll listen to these archives myself and be able to enjoy the music like it was still new, because while maintaining this pace I don’t get to soak in the music long enough for it to make much of an impact. There just aren’t enough hours in the day.

That’s another reason I felt like someone needed to do this. No one has enough hours in the day to keep up. Life is hectic enough without picking through 60 songs to choose the 15 you actually like every week. People are generally satisfied to stick to the songs they grew up with. New music is for kids. Typically. Except when it’s not. That’s what I look for. The music made by adults, for adults, regardless of the current climate or trend. Emcees who have something to say, opinions to offer, maybe sensibilities to offend or boundaries to push. The state of the world right now isn’t very peaceful or unified. I don’t know what a lot of these rappers are celebrating all the time, personally.

Helping artists find their audience is objective number one though. There are a lot of emcees who grew up listening to Hip Hop who still love traditional Hip Hop. That’s not to say everything I play is crunchy dusty oldschool stuff you can hear the vinyl pops on, but I tend to stay away from the crowd of robot singers with great studio engineers and trendy beats. I can’t tell those artists apart from one another, try as I might. On ATSIC, as long as at some point an emcee starts rapping bars, and I can distinguish their voice from the voice of other emcees, I’m cool with it.

I don’t really mean for this to be shitting on autotune rap either. That’s for one audience, ATSIC is for another. I play plenty of music that has autotune on parts of the song. I play plenty of ignorant music too, though typically I choose stuff that leans toward woke. There’s enough people in the world that we can all have what we like. The trick is finding those people who like that thing. They say be the change you wanna see.

With that intention, I started looking for the other shows across the map who play the music I play, hoping that it could help to cross promote, somehow, through a network of DJ’s who had already put in work to find their local audience of Hip Hop heads like I’ve been doing out here. I created the #CanadianCommunityHipHopShowSchedule, or the #CCHHSS. It’s got 49 different shows, I think, and websites to listen to them, along with contact info for the DJs, if I could find it. But that’s probably another post for another day.

This post is just to let people know about the show. You can find the archives on Mixcloud here. It’s a free app for phones too, and I’d recommend getting it cuz the version you get on a browser or without a free account doesn’t let you do some things like look at track lists and scrub play back and forth during a mix. The app also lets you download episodes/mixes by DJs who you subscribe to. Or follow or whatever they call it on this one. Anyways, I recommend the app.

You can live stream #ATSIC Monday’s at 9pm and Thursdays at 11pm (MT) at CKXU.com.

I’ve started doing “Making of ATSIC” videos on my Twitch channel. Come say hi, talk Hip Hop, hear the new music and more of my thoughts on it than I can share during the show itself.

Below is the Season 2 ATSIC Spotify Playlist. Click here to go over and subscribe, I update it often.

The episodes go up online for listening at your leisure over at Mixcloud.com/doobyis.

Grab the free app, subscribe to my channel for more free, and download the episodes to your cell so you don’t have to burn data to listen while you’re away from wifi.

Stay Up.