I didn’t have much of a sense of KTRU when I was a student…it was hard to get on campus at the time (pre 91.5).  It was really only after leaving school and moving further away from campus that I really started to understand what a gem the station was.

I think I was pushed to listen initially by some dj’s I knew…I’d turn it on from time to time listening to see if they were on.  And what I found was some absolutely amazing music.  Music that was truly interesting.  I think the first song I really fell for on KTRU was Free Guitar Lessons For Animals, by Flossie and the Unicorns.  It was so bizarrely awesome, I loved it.

I made any number of friends listen to it…it was one of the songs that were part of getting to know me, “Hey you have to listen to this!”.  Another fond addition to my musical collection which came from listening to KTRU was the user and the Symphony for Dot Matrix Printers.  Talk about serious nostalgia for childhood.

And then there were the shows…I remember bouncing with excitement the first time I heard the children’s show and old songs that I remembered from my childhood.  And when I first heard Blues In Hi-Fi I was completely blown away, it remains one of the most amazing things I have ever encountered.  It’s a shame that it’s on wednesdays, really, I end up missing it often due to other committments, but I love that show passionately.

And an important thing about it is that, although I like just sitting and listening to it, I really prefer listening to it while driving.  There’s something about driving and listening to good radio…I feel I can focus more fully on the music than if I’m sitting in a quiet room.  I think it’s because on the road, I don’t get distracted in to thinking about other things…that part of my mind is engaged with driving.  So I’m able to really enjoy the music in a way I don’t when I’m at the house.  And that’s one of the big reasons I lament the loss of the transmitter–I really like KTRU, but I LOVE listening to KTRU in my car.

There are, of course, other shows that I also love.  Chicken skin music is great, and the vinyl frontier holds a special place in my heart as well.  I used to play trivia every Tuesday, and the show was always on when I was headed home at the end of the evening.  But I also love the unprogrammed shows, listening to students picking up albums they clearly have no familiarity with and picking a track that sounds interesting.  It’s great getting to explore music along with them.

And although I really do love some of the conventional music, I really love the esoteric music as well. When I’m listening to a track on KTRU where it’s challenging to see the musicality (ambient noise, or feedback, say), I’m always reminded of the great American composer Charles Ives, and how his dad would stretch his ears as a child.  Although the image that comes to mind is the cartoon from “Bach, Beethoven, and the Boys”, where his ears are being pulled by weights, of course what he meant is that his dad would make them listen to sounds that challenged their perception of music (a quick google search comes up with an example “such as having them sing “Swanee River” in E-flat while he accompanied them in the key of C”).

And that’s what I think KTRU is great at, and what I’m so thankful for.  It’s helped me to appreciate music in a completely different way, to appreciate and enjoy each track for what it is, not for how it fits into some preconceived notion I have of what it should be.  I’ve been so spoiled by the variety of music that KTRU plays, I have a hard time feeling musically satisfied listening to anything else.  My 80GB iPod doesn’t hold nearly enough music on it to give me the same sort of variety that I can get all the time on KTRU.  And you know what, my dirty secret?  I even love robo-KTRU.  It’s so much better being able to have music coming from KTRU than having to turn to my own not-insubstantial collection, or, god-forbid, to the other radio stations on the air.

There’s nothing like it.  When I travel, I’ve looked for other stations like it, but there just isn’t any.  Other college stations…they end up talking too much, or they play music that is, frankly, too mainstream.  I hear the mainstream stuff everywhere else, thank you very much, I want my KTRU where I can listen to things I’d never know existed if it weren’t for the fantastic DJs of KTRU discovering music for and along with me.

Jacy Grannis
Baker, 1999