The State of the Station, So Far

New Harmony Radio – Nobody said it would be easy…..Oh Yes, They Did!

The last year has been a wonderful, frustrating, joyful, despairing, exciting and moribund

journey into the unknown.

In the early days someone, on hearing we were planning to set up a radio station, chortled and said “Nothing to it! Rent some cloud, throw up some music, hit autoplay, rinse….and repeat”

I remember feeling downcast. Perhaps they were right. Certainly, that was kind of what I had done in that first month.

There had been a lot of discussion of great things we COULD do but stretching away into the distance was a world of unknowns, technically, financially and, in most cases, way outside our wheelhouse of expertise.

I was right to be concerned. The technical issues alone were overwhelming. Over the next nine months we encountered countless setbacks. Although the principles were easy the

combination of different bits of hardware, recalcitrant, inconsistent software and the almost

total opacity and inaccuracy of ‘advice’ from the internet made the process gruelling.

I confess that, on occasions, bad language was used and a number of fatalities occurred. Even now it is too painful for me to recall the incident involving an attempted show called Nearly Dan, a piece of software appropriately named BUTT and a lost week attempting to broadcast live. Suffice it to say, I never did kick BUTT!

The drivers to create a radio station vary wildly for everyone, I guess. Some want to give to their community, some want to play the music they like, some want to be on the radio to impress grandma, and some want to make money. The last one is probably the most puzzling to me. The only way to really make money on a radio station is to find a mass market and force it to listen to lots of adverts it doesn’t want to hear. Content is an afterthought. As the great songwriter Paddy McAloon once said when describing what the music industry wanted its customers to do: “ So chew on the safest, the blandest of food and ignore the specifics that might ruin the mood”

For us it was the magic of New Harmony that gave birth to the station. Anyone who has ever

seen the 1990’s show Northern Exposure will instantly understand. The similarities are many and the idea of a radio station that puts out wildly eclectic programming ranging from the intellectual to the kitsch seemed a natural necessity for a town brimming with talent from all walks of life with a total absence of snobbery.

The very birth of New Harmony came from a place of searching for the truth. First the Rappites searched for spiritual fulfillment but became wildly successful entrepreneurs. Then the Owenites sought intellectual and social truth only to fail as wildly as the Rappites succeeded. Neither found what they were looking for but instead found something else.

That feeling of searching and curiosity has never left New Harmony, and we sensed it from the first time we visited. It’s in the architecture that raises more questions than answers, the people who study the works of Jung on a Tuesday and have a hoedown on Friday, and the staggering cross section of musicians, poets, potters, painters, weavers etc. One suspects that even the dogs have a side hustle translating Ulysses into Doglish

Anyway, back to the radio station. In many ways it didn’t seem like an auspicious time to start such a project. The arts seem to be in decline with generations force fed on iHeart radio, streaming and social media. There is also a demographic shift away from traditional radio to podcasts and on demand content and yet….

The overall number of people listening to the radio has remained remarkably

consistent. The biggest shift is that now about 50% of the radio audience listen online via

desktop or phone rather than through an AM/FM receiver.

AM and FM are technically straightforward to set up but can be costly to reach a large audience.  For that reason, we chose to launch New Harmony Radio over the internet using a cloud provider to host our library and provide all the radio scheduling tools.

Initially, I confess I loaded whole albums in order to provide content the station the auto DJ

could play. Then I moved to choosing genres of material to be played but very quickly found this unsatisfying. Music has a natural flow and feeling and just playing tracks randomly, however good they are, can cause sequences that jarred on my sensitive ears. The albums were largely removed and instead each track was chosen based on its own merits as one of the best in its. own class.

We started producing curated playlists, where every track was chosen to complement the one before and after it. We started to enjoy hearing the programming and creating different themed shows. Creating idents and sweepers was another new trick. These identify the station or show and involved recording a script over a sound snippet or jingle. This is easy in a studio with an engineer but in our antechamber, sandwiched between the kitchen and the loo with aircon echoes, dogs and the occasional itinerant lawnmower it was hell. The vocal sounded muffled and fuzzy and I despaired once more that such things were beyond us. My old friends ‘Perseverance, Trial and Error’ came to the rescue, and, after some early failings, we were able to start peppering the station with idents.

Doing interviews was, again, a minefield. Setting levels, remembering to fade up and down, hit record, pause, start, cue tracks. A bad recording meant a lot of post-production and an inferior result. The stress to try and get it to a professional standard was intense with each failure feeling like a deep wound.

Introducing live performance into a show was another hazard, although, by then, we knew more and it actually went pretty well!

So now we have a radio station playing good music and are building a roster of

professional level content. Over Christmas we recorded a version of Dylan Thomas’ A Child’s Christmas in Wales set to music which was judged a success and have plans for a lot more shows presented by DJ’s who will talk knowledgeably about the music being played and add another dimension.

And so, sitting here contemplating the next year for New Harmony Radio we cannot help but be hugely excited. We are now able to operate as a non-profit which we hope will encourage donations and enable us to receive grants. Local businesses can sponsor us to create shows for them and if our content is good enough, we will be able to syndicate some of it.

All this means nothing without the amazing people of New Harmony listening and contributing to what we do. This is our station, by New Harmony, for New Harmony, and it’s just the beginning.