Witchpolice Radio

As Rob Crooks finishes off his European tour, Witchpolice Radio soldiers on with yet another guest host. This time, it's JD Ormond of the redoubtable Ultra Mega. JD joined us for a chat about "Failure," which resulted in a lot of old-timey country stuff getting played, and he capped off the show with an excellent solo performance of Ultra Mega's "Hamburglar Blues."

This week's episode is all about being "Dependent." Along with guest host **Shauna Alcorn** , Witchpolice Radio regulars Sam and Jon discussed synth music, record collection, Jon's innate ability to encourage others to drink to excess, and more. Oh, and we played some great songs, too, based on the randomly-generated theme.

Since Rob Crooks is still in Europe, we brought in another guest host this week -- Tim Haverluck of local bands The Stabs, the Smash Brothers, the Red River Ramblers, and awesome back-in-the-day punk bands like Kirby and Gherkin. In a first for this program, Tim performed a live song at the end of the show. It was meant to illustrate a particular guitar style he was talking about, but I really like how it turned out, and I'm going to encourage all of our future guests (assuming they're muscial) to do the same. This show, somehow, also marks the first time we've ever played a local band on-air, as KEN mode's "The Hammer Party" fit the theme. And yes, Tim, that's "KEN mode," not "Keb Mo'."

This week's episode of Witchpolice Radio features special guest host Greg Arcade (filling in for Rob). All kinds of madness ensues. The theme for episode #9 is "Ruined," which seems weird until you realize it can from a random word generator. We try our best to associate songs with the theme and ended up playing some really good stuff. Lots of reminiscing about the good old days on this one

Jon couldn't make it to the recording session, so he was temporarily replaced by Mr. Dave Halcrow, of local bands like The Brat Attack and Talk City (who had one song on the Be Our Friend compilation, but I'm hoping to get more of their music on here.) Dave was a good substitute, and played stuff that neither Rob nor I would have otherwise listened to, so it was cool. Expect more guest hosts in future, as our schedules are such that getting all three of us in a room at the same time isn't always a given. Rob is going to Europe soon, so we'll have some fill-in hosts while he's gone as well.

The fellas and I took a break from Witchpolice Radio over the holidays, so our loyal listeners (all 10 of them) had to go without the dulcet tones of our voices for two whole weeks. I imagine the withdrawal must have been terrible. Anyway, we return with episode 7, themed around fire. If it sounds like we're just getting these themes from a random word generator... well, we kind of are. As usual on the show, we all pick songs that are loosely based on the one-word theme, and this week turned out to be a pretty awesome selection. We did get a little sidetracked by a series of long rants about neck tattoos, mind you.

This is the police episode. It's a little long, rambly and off-topic, but I think it's actually a pretty solid program. The song selection is great, and although we tend to go way off-topic on this one, there's some pretty interesting stuff, including a rant about third-wave ska, a critique of Paul McCartney's "Nirvana" performance and some discussion about the local rap scene. This'll (likely) be the last episode for 2012, as the holidays mean we're going to be hard-pressed to record and post anything until the new year (although who knows, maybe it'll happen).

This week the theme is New York, a city none of us have ever visited. There's a massive range of songs about NY, so we had a lot to choose from, but the show ended up being one of the most aggressive we've done to date, with a lot of short, loud n' fast numbers.

Here's the latest episode of the Witchpolice Radio podcast. This week's theme was "Drugs," which proved to be a little difficult, since it's such a prevalent topic in music. It wasn't hard to find songs, it was hard to choose the best ones to play. As usual, there's a short (one-hour) version as well as a longer, more rambling version, but the extended one gives you more discussion about straight-edge, hating the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the ethics of eating meat, television and other off-topic turns. I think this is one of our better podcasts to date, just in the music selection alone, but you can be the judge of that.

In this, the third weekly episode of Witchpolice Radio, Rob, Jon and Sam tackle the latest theme: Diseases. As with episode #2, there's a full-length version coming in at just over an hour and half, plus the concise, edited one-hour version. This time, my editing wizardry has improved, so both include all nine songs.

Episode #2's theme is "spiritual music," which, like the other themes we're going to do, is totally up to the interpretation of the show's three hosts/selectors. Since the first episode ended up being well over two hours in length, we tried to keep things a little more concise this time around, but it still wound up being over an hour and a half. If you want to hear the full version, you get two extra songs and a lot more discussion, but if you'd prefer a tight one-hour podcast, there's an edited version available as well.

So we finally got around to doing a podcast. I've been talking about this idea for years, and it came to fruition a few days ago when I sat down with Jon Askholm and Rob Crooks ** ** and recording a rambling, over-long 'radio show'. The format, if you want to call it that, was that we would each play records and discuss them, and despite a slow start, it actually started working out. We'll be ironing out the kinks in subsequent weeks (it's going to be a weekly show), cutting the show down to an hour and having a weekly theme... but here's the raw, unpolished debut episode of **Witchpolice Radio**.