Radio

Background: Noise on KRUI

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A few words on my old radio show, so you know what I’m talking about when I refer to this stuff.

KRUI, 89.7 FM, is the University of Iowa’s student radio station where I hosted the weekly dance music show from Autumn 1992 – Spring 1997. For the first year it was called X-Static Radio, then Noise until Vince Woolums and Scott Stone took over as Noise Radio in the Summer of 1997 when I moved to Seattle for a bit.

I was extremely grateful to be able to continue the tradition of quality dance music on KRUI, pioneered by The Acid Club House, The Foundry and Dance Trax, which were all hugely influential on my musical development. Vince and I would schedule our lives around these shows when we were in high school. I’d often drive around in the car for three hours just so I could ensure uninterrupted signal, as my basement bedroom on the outskirts of town didn’t cut it.

This was my first experience as a DJ. I mostly bought CDs (quality dance music vinyl in Iowa City at the time was rather hard to come by) and pitch adjustable CD players didn’t hit the market until 1994, so most of the material is not beat-matched. I bought Denon CD players and a 3-channel, global 3-band EQ DJ mixer in 1994. I believe my first 1200 came in early 1995, so even the mixes in 1997 were towards the infancy of my beat mixing.

Towards the end of my time at KRUI I would often pre-record mixes to tape and play them on the air, as I was tired of not being able to mix properly in the studio (the decks were pre-1200, with the +/-6 dials that were nearly impossible to hold a mix on and radio mixers do some funny things with compressing low signals). I only explain this last bit so you understand why you won’t hear me talking on those mixes.

9 thoughts on “Background: Noise on KRUI”

  1. I listened to X-Static Radio my junior and senior year in HS (pretty sure we went to the same school but you were older than me) and would record them on cassette. On one, there is a song I always loved but in the nearly 30 years since, I have been unable to find out what the song is, who did it – Lyric searching is unhelpful – it’s almost as though my cassette tape is the only place that this song exists or ever existed. That I can’t find it anywhere has been driving me nuts since I rediscovered it while on a nostalgic journey through my teenage tapes. You, as the DJ of that show, may be my last hope of ever learning the name and artist. A needle in the haystack, a shot in the dark, but I must ask you:

    The lyrics are a mix of English and Spanish. I don’t speak Spanish, so much of that is unintelligible to me but she sings what sounds to me like “don’t make me cry, amor (?), yo te necesito” numerous times so as to seem to be the chorus. The tempo speeds up during the song.

    I know it was a long time and a million songs ago in life, but if you, by some miracle, remember a song like this … please let me know.

  5. Here is a link to the mp3 I made from the cassette:

    https://tinyurl.com/vxvjt2e

    Date? — other stuff I recorded on the tape seems to come from early-ish 1993, with stuff from later 1992 as well. Unfortunately, it doesn’t sound like I recorded the whole show/set as most of the stuff on the tape is just songs caught here and there from the radio.

  6. Right! Thanks. God, haven’t heard that in so long. Think I remember the record now – just need to find it. Pretty sure it didn’t speed up originally, that’s just me being a dork.

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