What inspired you to bring East Village Radio (EVR) back, and what did that process look like?
The station had a run from 2001-2015 and was very high profile during that time especially with a public-facing glass booth situation on 1st Avenue on the street, right next to Little Frankie’s restaurant, run by Frank Prisinzano, a restauranteur with a special interest in music and community and radio. With some high profile DJs (Andy Rourke from the Smiths, Mark Ronson) it went through a period of growth and demand but ultimately the costs related to all of that growth pulled the project back. But ten years later, Frank and Jorge Parriera (who started the station back in the day with a low power transmitter on the roof, short-lived, then went to streaming only) decided that the time was right in 2024 to give the station a reboot.
It was a sense of bringing something cool back into a community that had gentrified and physically changed greatly, and also a need to get yet another booster in the world for independent DJs and sounds in an increasingly narrow corridor for media outlets dedicating space for lesser heard music.
Having been the program and music director at WFMU for many years, and later Gimme Radio out in San Francisco, I had a keen sense of how eclectic and independent broadcasting worked, albeit with a bit more corporate knowledge via my time with Gimme in San Francisco. So when I was approached it seemed like a great project to start from scratch in my own vision and experiences in several sides of radio.
What were the biggest challenges stepping from your previous roles into a station manager and learning the tech side?
True, I had primarily been in the content role at previous stations, programming and music curation, but I always had a bit of a hand in some of the marketing and voice of those places. But yeah, buying a roomful of equipment, sourcing engineers, computer tech, hardware, software, instigating streaming was all new to me. Jorge and Iara Cardo (who does all the IT for the restaurants) helped me greatly in that regard, and after the equipment all got set up I went to work on learning all the problems and pitfalls so I could be prepared for any situation and train all the DJs I recruited (110!) to be able to handle any booth issues that came up.
It was most certainly a challenge after our launch, we had some tough obstacles and surprises come along that I learned to deal with. Gradually it got easier, but our first few months were trial by fire to say the least (not just for me, but for the DJs too). We are constantly winging it with technology, so there’s a lot of hacks going on in terms of me maintaining, scheduling around here.
How did you go about recruiting the current EVR roster and shaping the new EVR community?
I honestly didn’t want to add more of the same to the NYC radio landscape, so I took a programming approach akin to what I did at WFMU: freeform. I have a long tenure of being around creative types, musicians, and DJs here in the area, so my goal was to fill our roster with a wide range of styles, and often cross-pollinating DJs who worked in a few styles.
We do have plenty of shows dedicated to specific genres (garage-punk, drum & bass, Caribbean, Latin, Jazz, metal, African etc.) so I recruited a lot of people I knew who specialized in making engaging radio, plus when the NY Times article hit on our return in 2024 I was besieged with requests from many folks who wanted to get on the air. So I allocated specific types of programming for specific times and tried to really get a good representation of people and sounds rather than a single ‘monochromatic’ voice of the station. My hope was that different areas would attract different audiences who then could discover the other avenues we covered in a bit of a seamless way.
Everyone does 2 hour shifts, and there’s unfortunately no central ‘hang’ spot for us all to interact at once, so I’ve been active in having regular station hangs at a local bar periodically so we can all get in a dialogue with each other about the station. And it’s been great, I’ve been seeing DJs representing different genres co-hosting on each others’ shows, it’s really all about us all pooling together to project a solid if not varied voice as a station. So many online stations just kind of act as an outlet for various people to just drop in slots and not have much to do with each other, but at EVR I want us all to hang out and vibe from each other.
What does the “voice” of EVR mean to you today compared to its early days?
It was total ‘Meet Me In the Bathroom’ time in NYC when EVR started, all the post-post-punk stuff was happening, it was kind of in the middle of the big whirlwind of people getting excited about The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol etc., you saw a lot of people attracted to the NYC scene, and well, before you knew it uptown moved downtown, lots of DIY venues and cheap hangouts were displaced and people were all flocking here to have a $5000 small apartment. The best musical assets of Manhattan, places like Tonic and the Knitting Factory all were gone so condos could go up. I mean, it happened in Brooklyn too, but Manhattan really took a hit. You can’t see a show in this area unless one of the big companies puts it on and you’re out $100 to see it. But a lot of good places hung on to do their own stuff, galleries in the LES still haven’t been pushed out, poetry, art, dance, music still have a good foothold but it takes some doing to coalesce that energy to keep it going.
If anything, I hope that our presence can be a hub for whatever is happening and in truth there’s a real renaissance in lower Manhattan. There’s great record stores again, three of whom do shows here on EVR, the great jazz events we lend a hand to with frequent guests from the scene (Matthew Shipp, Alan Braufman to name a couple), even Martin Rev came out of his place to come spin some jazz records. Our Latin-leaning Ritmo show on Sundays blares from the booth and you feel like it’s the 80’s Lower East Side again. And we have some wild live performances in the booth right out in the open for passersby on the sidewalk to take in. Veteran East Villagers are super excited to see something tangible in the neighborhood to how it used to be, and that’s super rewarding. So if anything, our ‘voice’ is really to rep the huge diversity of the neighborhood’s history and keeping some kind of element of that going through our programming and our presence.
What’s changed about how the station operates — technically or creatively?
The first era of the station might have had a bigger office staff and public events, which cost a bundle so we’re a bit more focused on doing great radio with our resources at hand. Not that we won’t put on big public events, we’ve started to co-present shows and ultimately will be a lot more out in the field. It’s a little tough as a one man manager and everything going on daily, but we’ve made giant strides in our first year. We’re online streaming 24/7 and to fill the off hours I have brought in some non-local programming from some great people out of town/state/country to do episodes for us in the spirit of the rest of the station.
We do a lot of social stuff primarily on Instagram and Facebook, with more personal technology we can have a lot more live documentation of what’s happening in real time whether it be on socials or our live booth cam. The evenings and weekends it’s great to see the shows interacting with the sidewalk diners, and all the spontaneous stuff that happens because we’re on display in the neighborhood. We’re very focused on the community too, spreading the word on key events, fundraisers, blood drives, gigs, readings, happenings and such, and have aligned ourselves to promote great people in the cultural realm like Abasement/Stereomandrax putting on the best events in lower Manhattan for underground music.
Our archives are all available easily on Mixcloud, and also liked to our individual DJ pages, so we’ve made a lot of progress making it easier for people who don’t necessarily catch their favorite stuff live, And we have ad space for organizations as well who wish to get some support for the station’s revenue which I would like to step up in the upcoming year.
How has using Radio Cult impacted how EVR runs or how you manage day to day?
Well, the first few months here were a huge struggle to keep things upright, we used another streaming system that was pretty glitchy and had poor support when we needed it. I wholeheartedly endorse the Radio Cult crew - the grey cloud lifted the day after we went live with it (ha), I think in September 2024. It’s a superb and intuitive service where I can act quickly if there’s a problem, setting up the shows, playlists have been a breeze, and with our daily switches from live to tape it has yet to fail us in smooth transitioning on the air.
I really love all the features and with the overnight prerecords it is really simple to drop stuff in, download a day en masse. I appreciate the fact whenever we have a problem Radio Cult is there quickly to answer, and in many cases adjust things on our recommendation!
Why do you think independent, freeform broadcasting is so important right now?
Simply put, the music industry is run to squeeze the most dineros out of the fewest artists because they assume everyone has low bandwidth on musical discovery in the one or two places they choose to draw it from. Honestly, the media landscape is terrifying right now seeing networks buckling under government pressure and now with revocation of CPB funds and the axe taken to NPR and PBS it’s a very dismal time to get any kind of alternative information out let alone music. Community stations are closing because of their CPB reliance, especially in remote locales where hearing something cool is like a magic bullet to a person who doesn’t have a lot of access to underground music to attend in person or has limited word of mouth discovery.. But there’s always great music, a lot of artists don’t have labels and that doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t worthy of broadcast. Independent and primarily freeform radio is so important because it’s the well from which movements happen. Large streaming services and radio who don’t make time for the independent underground have no place for seeds of the future to grow. And we’re seeing this already with so many retro acts and station formats not embracing new music. We play a lot of old music but we also have many folks doing the deep digging on new stuff you won’t hear anywhere else. We’re putting a bunch of those records on our newspage monthly with links to hear the artists.
I’ve seen my old station directly affect the musical landscape and I hope people can get juiced on what they hear on EVR as well. It’s more important than ever for as many cultures outside peoples’ comfort zones get exposure, the iris is closing more and more on how much of that will filter into the mainstream now. We really all have to band together to present new ideas and directions as much as humanly possible. Freeform radio lets it all tie together seamlessly and let the listener extract whatever applies to their lives. And not just music — a show here like Girls Club Radio helps bolster the Lower East Side in terms of bringing in kids to educate them how to make their own voice in media. If you’re just not told about this kind of stuff, it will be swept under the carpet.
What’s next for EVR? Any projects or goals you’re excited about?
Sure, we just hope to keep the ball rolling with awareness and self-promotion, fine tune some tech needs in the booth. We've been experiencing some nice growth and scoring a lot of great artists to come by and spin/chat/play and I hope that trend continues. But some outward-facing events, we've started presenting live shows, maybe getting a regular event where we and guests spin out a bit more to the public. We just launched a big fundraiser for Jamaican hurricane relief with a day of programming to benefit AFJ’s Disaster relief fund.
We’re also keen to tie ourselves into other East Village DIY businesses in the community to help cross-promote each other, we’re already hosting a number of ads on site for some of them, and we’d ultimately love to be a real hub of information for everything going on in our neighborhood to augment the organizations also doing so. And great people keep knocking on the door to get slots which I try to accomodate as much as possible while keeping a balance of things.
