Lights Come Down

First Transmission — May 7 - 10 pm - Melomania Safety Zone

It’s going to happen. Our first song is being played on DKFM — on Simon Leclerc’s Melomania Safety Zone. Which still feels a bit unreal to say out loud, honestly.

DKFM https://decayfm.com

...So DKFM. I’ve been listening to DKFM for a long time.

Like… back when it started in 2012. It was founded by Greg Wilson, and at the time there wasn’t really a proper place for shoegaze or dream pop on radio — at least not one you could just fall into whenever you wanted. DKFM kind of became that without really announcing itself as that.

No ads, no real noise around it. Just people running it because they actually care about the music. There's a good interview with Greg here where he goes into more detail about the station.

https://www.fadeawayradiate.com/interview-with-dkfms-greg-wilson/

Back then

Around that time my old band fjord rowboat was putting stuff out. We didn’t get much radio play, but there was a show called this radiant hour that picked up a few of our songs.

It didn’t feel like a big moment at the time, but I think it stuck more than I realized. Or maybe I’m only realizing that now, writing this.

Connection points

One of the things DKFM does, maybe better than anything else, is connect people who are kind of scattered.

This might be a bit of a tangent, but during the pandemic — when everything felt very disconnected — they started doing live sessions with bands from all over.

Around that time, our friend Craig Gloster (Hi Craig!) (fjord rowboat’s singer, and still our favourite space vampire) https://www.vampirezombiesmovie.com messaged saying we were going to be played on Simon's show "Melomania Safety Zone." We ended up listening together remotely, which doesn’t sound like much when you write it down, but at the time it kind of was.

Now

I’ve kept listening the DKFM since then, on and off. Simon’s show is one I come back to a lot — he digs through Bandcamp so you don’t have to, which feels like a very specific kind of public service.

It’s not Toronto-centric, but it still touches on what’s happening here while pulling in everything else going on. We ended up finding a lot of bands through that orbit, and eventually seeing some of them live at a MSZ curated show — The Neverminds, Luster Dust, Fires of Cheektowaga, Away Forward. That show probably gave us more of a push to start this than we realized at the time.

a Small Thread

A friend of mine, Brad Ketchen (we played together years ago in Bluescreen and Hollowphonic), introduced me to Simon more recently. One of the things we ended up talking about was our mutual love for Sianspheric — which was one of the bands that really got me into shoegaze in the first place. That felt like a good sign.

MSZ/DKFM

I asked Simon a bit about how he got into DJing and DKFM.

"The first episode of Melomania Safety Zone on DKFM aired July 5th, 2020. This was right after reacquainting myself with radio show hosting via a few MSZ installments for Nowhere FM – a temporary pirate radio station out of Halifax.

I’d done university radio at Trent back in the mid-90s, but never thought I’d be back in the saddle - being laid off during the pandemic gave me the time and space to explore this passion again. Some DKFM listeners were vocally supportive of my show on Nowhere FM and so after it wrapped up, Greg Wilson offered me a spot on the DKFM roster and here we are – almost 150 episodes later!"

He’s already talked about how he puts the shows together elsewhere on Surprise Cast (and probably better than I could summarize), so instead of trying to rewrite it, it’s worth listening to this below.

First transmission

So this is where the song shows up first.

On the radio! For a bit. And then it’s gone again. Before it exists anywhere else.

May 7 — 10pm
Melomania Safety Zone - If you’re around, you might catch it.

It’ll be out everywhere on May 8 (bandcamp and your streaming platform of choice).

This is the first time we’re putting something into the world like this — and you only really get to do that once. So I think we’re just trying to pay attention to it while it’s happening.