About WFMU
WFMU-FM is a listener-supported, non-commercial radio station broadcasting at 91.1 Mhz FM in Jersey City, NJ, right across the Hudson from lower Manhattan. It is currently the longest running freeform radio station in the United States.
The station also broadcasts to the Hudson Valley and Lower Catskills in New York, Western New Jersey and Eastern Pennsylvania via it's 90.1 signal at WXHD in Mount Hope, NY. The station maintains an extensive online presence at WFMU.ORG which includes live audio streaming in several formats, over 8 years of audio archives, podcasts and a popular blog.
Rolling Stone Magazine, The Village Voice, CMJ and the New York Press have all at one time or another called WFMU "the best radio station in the country" and the station has also been the subject of feature stories in The New York Times and on the BBC. In recent years the station has gained a large international following due it's online operations and counts Simpson's creator Matt Groening, film director Jim Jarmusch and Velvet Underground founder Lou Reed, among others, as devoted fans of the station.
WFMU's programming ranges from flat-out uncategorizable strangeness to rock and roll, experimental music, 78 RPM Records, jazz, psychedelia, hip-hop, electronica, hand-cranked wax cylinders, punk rock, gospel, exotica, R&B, radio improvisation, cooking instructions, classic radio airchecks, found sound, dopey call-in shows, interviews with obscure radio personalities and notable science-world luminaries, spoken word collages, Andrew Lloyd Webber soundtracks in languages other than English as well as Country and western music.
All of the station's programming is controlled by individual DJs and is not beholden to any type of station-wide playlist or rotation schedule. Experimentation, spontaneity and humor are among the station's most frequently noted distinguishing traits. WFMU does not belong to any existing public radio network, and close to 100% of its programming originates at the station.
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Featured Collection
WFMU Fest 2009
WFMU Fest took place October 1st, 2nd, and 3rd 2009 at the Music Hall of Williamsburg. It was the station's first ever big-scale multi-day curated concert event. Hot damn.
Check out this lineup:
Thursday October 1st: Krautrock pioneers Faust, with…
WFMU Featured Mix
WFMU's Free Music Archive Sampler Vol. 2
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Rob Weisberg on 03/09/2010 at 05:45PM
2010 Golden Festival Mix/Collection
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For a quarter of a century, NY Balkan music scene pioneers the Zlatne Uste Balkan Brass Band have organized the annual Golden Festival. a massive two-night grassroots Balkan and East European music and dance festival at the Good Shepherd School, 620 Isham Street (near Broadway and 207 St.) in upper Manhattan. The festival is the biggest event of its kind in New York City: The second night (Saturday) is a marathon featuring 40-50 bands and artists performing on three stages from 6pm until 4 in the morning. See: http://www.goldenfest.zlatneuste.org/ With the help of co-host / tech guru Irene Trudel and our peerless crew, WFMU's Transpacific Sound Paradise broadcast all the music from the Golden Festival's Kafana stage from 6pm until midnight on Saturday January 16th. Kafana is Serbo-Croatian for "cafe"; the stage is located conveniently near the food! We are now proud to present a collection of recordings from the festival on the Free Music Archive. The full collection is here, while a mix of highlights is available at right (please click "i" for more info about each artist). |
>> 2010 Golden Festival photo gallery on Flickr
>> 2010 Golden Festival mp3 collection on the Free Music Archive
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Mark Iosifescu on 03/03/2010 at 03:30PM
Richness Comes for Free
The real wonder of WFMU, the nurturing freeform motherwolf to the Free Music Archive's enthusiastic internet pup (which loving parent happens to be, ahem, having its annual fundraising marathon at the moment), is that it offers listeners the opportunity to map his or her own constellations of musical reference points. It starts out acousmatically enough--you hear a completely off-the-wall track, and well, you just may love it but still, the connection to your musical world seems more or less nonexistent, and, well, you're not sure, the whole thing's sort of new, maybe a little nerveracking but wait--suddenly you hear another track, one which connects the referent-less one you just heard to one of your preexisting favorites, and behold: you've got a new beloved song, set in place like an armillary sphere's realm of the fixed stars, and drawn into your very own burgeoning network of celestial giants--a constellation of jams.
The Free Music Archive, in this conception, offers the listener a 21st century map of the skies as useful as any that's guided previous generations of humanity. If the genius of radio is that it can pinpoint a specific coordinate in the musical universe and cast it in brilliant light--a forgotten song streaking across the sky like a comet--well, then, the genius of the FMA is that it can refer you at a glance to the solar systems and galaxies of which each mysterious body is an indispensible component.
I've been thinking a lot about this while navigating the FMA of late--with all the content it's been building up over the last year, it's really taken on an astonishing complexity--and noticing that artists I've seen here before have reappeared in various guises, uploaded labels' worth of audio or otherwise tripled or quadrupled their presence here on the site. It's really inspiring to see the Archive--whose ravenous wolfcub dream is to be a reliably great depository for the varying currents at work in music today--beginning to really map out previously uncharted galaxies; looking at previous blog topics alone, we've Providence's Free Matter for the Blind, which, in addition to the extraordinary audio zines already mentioned, has presided over a label curatorship packed with full albums by the likes of Leif Goldberg and Area C and, well, just see for yourself. So too have the works of previously-spotlit Montrealers brought plenty of new work to the table--check out tapelabel Campaign for Infinity's steadily-growing list of great bands. Lots of incredible WFMU Fest sets from last fall are now up--including that of Talk Normal, about whom I wrote in November.
You get the point--as the site grows, so too do the complexities of the constellations on our trusty and ever-richening charts. As we listen, so we discover. Keep it up.