On the seventh day of our new year, The AIR is back in fighting trim with exciting new episodes of Radio Free Charleston and The Swing Shift. We also bring you an encore of the first episode of Steven Allen Adams’ NOISE BRIGADE.

Tuesday begins a new era of  Radio Free Charleston as we go back to our roots and expand RFC into a three-hour format that will combine the best local music with new and exciting music from around the world, blending Alternative, New Wave, Classic Rock, Progressive Rock and more into a free-form radio showcase that will demonstrate that our local musicians can hold their own alongside the finest in the world.

We also have an exciting new artist on The Swing Shift, who contacted us through PopCult, and proved that he can bend genres with the best of them as he brings psychedelic guitar into the world of Swing, and comes up with something new and exciting. I’ll tell you more about Tyler Pederson below.

It’s an exciting time to be a fan of The AIR. Soon you’ll be hearing about a new series of music specials that cover many different types of music that we haven’t played before.

To hear these fine specialty music programs, you may point your cursor over and tune in at the website, or you could just stay on this page, and  listen to this embedded radio player…

It all kicks off at 10 AM (with a replay at 10 PM– all times EDT) with a brand-new direction for Radio Free Charleston.

Starting this week, RFC expands to three hours, mixing local music in with all sorts of cool stuff, and starts over as RFC Volume Five, Number One.

In case you’re wondering, RFC Volume One was broadcast on WVNS Radio starting in 1989. RFC Volume Two is the video version of the show, which shines the spotlight on local music. RFC Volume Two is still an ongoing concern, although I produce it much less frequently than I did from 2006 to 20016, when I was diagnosed with Myasthenia Gravis.

In 2014 I began RFC Volume Three as a weekly two-hour local showcase for Voices of Appalachia Radio.  When VOA mutated into The AIR a couple of years later, I re-christened it RFC Volume Four, and cut the running time to one hour per week. That was also when I began doing RFC International, which was where I played whatever I wanted for two hours a week.

Now, I’ve basically combined Radio Free Charleston and RFC International into one three-hour show, which oddly enough makes it almost exactly like the show I did for broadcast radio back three decades ago. The plan is to remaster all the episodes of RFC Volume Four and RFC International and make them available for download…for free.

Anyway, the reason for all this naval-gazing and self-explaining is to let you know why I decided to combine the two shows (RFC International will be replaced by a repeat airing of RFC Volume Five on Thursdays at 3 PM).  Frankly, I was getting bored. Not with local music, but with having to segregate all the local music into a one-hour ghetto each week, while at the same time trying to curate a really cool free-form radio show with RFC International. One of the great joys I got back during the original run of the broadcast version of the show was when I’d play a tune by a local band next to a song by one of their favorite bands…and they’d be so thrilled with the association that their exuberance was priceless.

When you have people calling you up, raving about the way you played their music at 3 AM, you know you’re doing something right.

Now I can do that again. I can match up the music better, too. Instead of cramming five kinds of music into one hour, I can spread the local artists out over three hours, and build a nice musical flow where the transitions aren’t so jarrring. It should be more interesting for our listeners, and more fun for the artists.

It’ll also give us a mile-long playlist, so let’s dive into that, shall we…

RFCv5001

hour one

Kevin Scarbrough “Impetus Worm”
The Who “All This Music Must Fade”
Frank Zappa “Peaches En Regalia”
Rasta Rafiki “Vicki”
Joy Division “Atrocity Exhibition”
Edgar Winter “Hoochi Coo”
John Radcliff “Here We Go Again”
U2 and A.R. Rahman “Ahisma”
Ann Magnuson “The Sun Don’t Care”
Club Des Belugas and Maya Fadeeva “Love Is like A Legend”
Sparks “Never Turn Your Back On Mother Nature”
Emmalea Deal “Queen”
The Steve Howe Trio “Gilded Splinter”
Peter Gabriel “Sledgehammer (Dance Mix)

hour two

Wang Chung “Everybody Have Fun Tonight (orchestral)”
Beggars Clan “Maiden Voyage”
The Beat “A Good Day For Sunshine”
The Specials “Breaking Point”
Joe Jackson “Kisses”
Sheldon Vance “Keep On Talking”
Adrian Belew “When Is It Coming Back”
Gary Numan “Down In The Park”
David Synn “Blood Moon”
Eddie Jobson “Easy For You To Say”
Cherry Poppin’ Daddies “Schizo”
Rick Wakeman “The Shoot”
Todd Tamenend Clark “Childhood Shadows”
Frenchy And The Punk “Carried Away”

hour three

Fletcher’s Grove “Virgil Burgess”
Andy Partridge & Robyn Hitchcock “Turn Me On Dead Man”
Go Van Gogh “Requiem For Peppeland”
Trevor Horn and Seal “Ashes To Ashes”
Three Bodies “The Trax”
Ringo Starr “Better Days”
Heather Findlay “Cactus”
Howard Jones “Hero In Your Eyes”
John Wetton “New Star Rising”
The Heavy Editors “How The West Was Won”
Todd Burge “On My Knees”
After The Fire “Carry Me Home”
Alien Skin “Charles Dickens”
Jeff Lynne’s ELO “Goin’ Out On Me”
Jon Anderson “Make Me Happy”
Stark Raven “More To Life Than This”

As you can probably figure out, I’m having way too much fun with this new format. There’s still as much local music in the show as their used to be, but now it’s presented in a better context, at least I think so. On top of that, I was able to crowbar in tracks where Gary Numan, Wang Chung and Trevor Horn with Seal are all accompanied by orchestras.

Radio Free Charleston can be heard Tuesday at 10 AM and 10 PM, with replays Thursday at 3 PM, Friday at 9 AM and 7 PM, Saturday at 11 AM and Midnight, Sunday at 1 PM and the next Monday at 8PM, exclusively on The AIR. We are looking into ways that we can makes these available on demand without running afoul of the copyright gods. The YouTube experiment turned out to be a bust, as nobody bothered watching the shows there. I’ll keep you posted on that project later.

At 2 PM on NOISE BRIGADE we go back to the first episode of Steven Allen Adams’ Ska/Punk showcase. Steven has a day job that is entangled with our state legislature, and with the legislative session kicking off this week, he needed time to devote to that. New episodes of NOISE BRIGADE will return as soon as possible. You can read about this episode of NOISE BRIGADE HERE, and check out replays Wednesday at 11 AM, Thursday at 5 PM, Friday at Noon, Saturday at 9 AM, Sunday at 4 PM and Monday at 7 PM.

At 3 PM your PopCulteer returns to host a new hour of The Swing Shift as we continue to bring you the best Swing Music of the last century.  This week we bring you three tunes by Tyler Pederson, who contacted us through PopCult to tell us about his music. Tyler makes guitar-based Swing Music, mixing in elements of psychedelic rock, surf and blues, and creating a new and different sound that still swings like crazy.

If you want to check out and purchase the music of Tyler Pederson, visit his CD Baby page, where you’ll find two full albums, plus two singles that you can add to your collection.

You can also tune into The Swing Shift over the coming weeks, and prepare yourself for more, because I plan to play Ty’s music on the new Radio Free Charleston, and I’ll be sending a couple of tracks to Nigel Pye so he can run them on Psychedelic Shack in the future.

Here’s the playlist for this week’s episode of The Swing Shift

The Swing Shift 084

Tyler Pederson “T-Boneasaurus”
Tyler Pederson “Swing Beyond”
Kenichi Tsunodoa Big Band “Air Mail Special”
Marcus Shinkle Trio and Jascho Stephan “Swingin’ Patetique”
Sir Jay and his Orchestra “Let’s Jump Tonight”
Peggy Lee “It Ain’t Necessarily So”
Squirrel Nut Zippers “Karnival Joe from Kokomo”
Queen Bee and the Honeylovers “Legend of Zelda Fitzgerald”
Pat Travers “Sing, Sing, Sing”
Joe Stilgoe “Pocket Song”
Glenn Miller “Beat Me Daddy, Eight To The Bar”
The Swingin’ Sisters “Onnele Vastu”
Jive Me “The Crook”
Keith Emerson “Barrelhouse Shakedown”
Royal Crown Revue “Beware”
Tyler Pederson “Mysterioso”

You can hear The Swing Shift Tuesday at 3 PM, with replays Wednesday at 7 AM and 6 PM, Thursday at 7 PM and Saturday at 5 PM, only on The AIR. You can also hear all-night marathons, seven hours each, starting at Midnight Thursday and Sunday evenings.

Stick around because we’ll be telling you about new episodes of our music specialty shows all week on The AIR, plus PopCult will have plenty of other surprises in store for you.