grady's blog

Sunday 6/12 is packed with local music, including Last Year's Men playing live on-air at 4pm, followed by Pink Flag talking to Savannah about their brand-new King of Scene EP at 6pm. Don't miss 'em!

Click here to go to the brackets!

Slam Dance 2011 is our answer to spring sports insanity.  The Nobody's Driving crew put together an highly unscientific list of their favorite punk bands, put them into brackets and are spinning it out to the listeners to decide!

You can vote on all or just some of the pairings -- just click on a band's name to get to a voting page.

We all know what happened once Punk Broke and Chapel Hill had its 9 months in the "Next Seattle" spotlight. But what about in the two decades before? You've probably heard of Let's Active, The Connells, Flat Duo Jets & Corrosion of Conformity. But how about Stillborn Christians, Foreign Bodies & UV Prom?

Tune in tonight (Monday 2/28) at 8pm for 2 hours of North Carolina Music circa '72 - '92.

 Yep, that's right, fresh off a whirlwind tour of Japan that just ended a few days ago, Mac McCaughan & Jim Wilbur of Superchunk will be joining us on Sunday afternoon (2/27) at 4pm to do that acoustic thing that has been a staple of Superchunk b-sides for the past 15+ years.Will we spend the entire time talking about Japanese food? Entirely likely. Tune in at 4pm to find out.

 Drug Horse Collective members The Light Pines will be playing live on the air this Sunday 9/5 at 4:00 p.m., in advance of their Hopscotch Music Festival appearance next Saturday night at the Pour House. Tune in & check them out!

Methodology is pretty simple: I count the number of plays each release receives (by all XDU DJs) during an 8-week period after its release. In the handful of cases where a release is close enough to a year boundary that it receives less than 8 weeks, I did a tiny bit of weighting, but in those cases the shift up/down was only 1 or 2 spots on the list. (by the same token, a handful of these were released in December 2008 but received the bulk of their play in 2009, so they're counted here.)

Here, then, are the top 80 NC releases of 2009 as determined by WXDU's DJs:

We've known des_ark's Aimee Argote since she was a high school member of Youth Voice Radio back in the late 90s. As des_ark, she's played live on WXDU twice before, in January 2006 & December 2007. Generally the way it works is that she shows up and picks an unlikely spot in the station to set up (in 2006 it was the landing halfway up the stairs, and in 2007 directly in front of the open window at the top of the stairs), and then we push the red button & whatever happens, happens. 

4:00 p.m., or as soon thereafter as we can get it together.

I booked more bands than usual for the next few weeks. Here's a quick rundown:

Sunday, September 27: Western Civ

Sunday, October 4: Veelee

Sunday, October 11: Tin Star

All three shows begin at 4:00 p.m. & should involve the band playing at full volume/instrumentation in our lounge (& thus from there over the air to you) for 40 minutes or so.

It was 10 years ago this month that the Bicentennial Quarters played their last show -- Memorial Day of 1999. I've loved plenty of local bands over the past 17 years, but the Bi-Qs were special. Nobody -- before or since -- could match their dedication to the triple pillars of Art, Rock, and Absurdity. Bassist Chris Eubank & drummer Shannon Morrow locked in so tight they could fool you into thinking they were loose, and guitarist Walker Martin would pursue any idea far past its logical conclusion. Every show felt like a high-wire act -- a Dada high-wire act, performed in full-panic death-defying fashion along a chalk-line drawn on the sidewalk.

Drummer Shannon Morrow moved to Chicago literally days later (though she's since returned to Durham, and leads the Scene of the Crime Rovers guerilla marching band). Guitarist Walker Martin moved to Los Angeles, of all places. Chris Eubank stuck around, and has played in dozens-if-not-hundreds of bands since (much as he had before the Bi-Qs came along).

This Sunday the 24th, in honor of Memorial Day, I'll celebrate this anniversary by playing a recording of that final Bi-Qs show on the air at 4:00 p.m.

You're looking at the latest (and hopefully the last for a while) redesign of WXDU.org

Whereas the last redesign was mostly visual (it was a *huge* change), this one is more functional. We're excited to be able to blog (and have our listeners able to *find* our blogs). We're also excited about the events listing in the right-hand column.

Take a look around, kick the tires, and let us know what you think!