Don't touch that dial! It's WPRB live from the basement of Holder

Tucked into a little corner of the basement of Holder Hall is the broadcasting center of Princeton's radio station, WPRB. It's not an impressive sight at first; the room from which the broadcast is sent out is itself hardly half the size of any moderately respectable Princeton single, and half the space is taken up by banks of well-used and forbidding equipment.

But WPRB's exterior is misleading. The station broadcasts all the way from the outskirts of New York City through Philadelphia and into Wilmington, DE, making it one of the largest college radio stations in the United States.

This weekend I had the opportunity to chat with two of the djs at WPRB, to learn a little about their tastes in music and their preferred styles of running a show, and even to watch them in action for a bit.

Brianna Stout, '05, was the first dj that I talked to. Her show is on Thursday night, from 10:00 to 1:00 PM. I met her about an hour before it started so I could get a chance to learn a little bit about her before hearing her on the air.

Medium height, with Rivers Cuomo-style glasses and a green t-shirt that had a picture of a washing machine on it, she had a sort of reserved attitude that I soon found out concealed a sharp and ironic wit.

Brianna grew up in central Ohio, near Columbus. In high school she listened to alternative rock and some more mainstream indie rock, but the radio scene where she lived was somewhat less than satisfying. "I think we had one oldies station. That was about it," Brianna said.

Still, the local music scene was good, with more than a few punk and emo bands, and at a young age she was able to hear the style of music that she knew was her favorite.

But it wasn't until she was a junior in high school, visiting her brother at Princeton (Kyle Stout '03, also a WPRB dj), that she first heard her favorite band, Dismemberment Plan, and their particular brand of anarchic melodies.

Brianna began training to be a dj her freshman year, and by second semester had her own show. From 1:00 to 4:00 AM on Monday. "Actually I was lucky," she said, "Most freshmen are stuck with the 4:00 to 6:00 AM time slot." It was at this time that she began exploring the immense WPRB collection of cds, and widening her taste for the infinite variety of indie rock.

It was also at this time that she started learning how to deal with call-in listeners. "Being on from one to four in the morning," Brianna said, "means you get a lot of strange callers. People asking me out, people threatening to come down to the station and find me. But you also get a lot of people just wanting to say they like the music, or asking me to play a certain song."

Brianna thinks that this semester her show has changed a lot from what it used to be. "I probably only knew about ten percent of the stuff that I play now when I was in high school," she said. Learning about many new styles of music has led her to play less poppy, mainstream music, and explore some of the more experimental and unusual areas of rock.

I agreed to meet with Dave Morris '03 in Frist café at 4:30 on a Friday. He emailed me that he would be there, and since I'd never met him, he'd sent me a description. "I am wearing a black polo shirt, have scraggly facial hair and am balding (easily my most distinctive feature, ha)."

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After a minor false start (I asked the first balding, bearded guy I saw if his name was Dave, but no go) I found him and we sat down over some coffee. I asked him how long he'd been working at WPRB.

Dave, like Brianna, has been at WPRB since he was a freshman. Before that, he went to an arts school in Mississaga, outside Toronto, where he played the saxophone and listened to alt rock, jazz, and grunge.

It wasn't until he came to Princeton that he started listening to indie rock and other lesser known styles. "The indie rock kids at my high school were too pretentious," he said. "It wasn't until I came here and was exposed to a more open, honest environment that I got interested."

Freshman year he subbed for other djs at WPRB, and played a lot of electronic noise and other avant-garde styles of music. His sophomore year he was the jazz director for WPRB.

During his junior year, he had a jazz show from ll to 2 that bridged the gap from early morning classical to afternoon rock on the station. He could play different styles of jazz earlier in the show, and later on move towards the rock that came later in the evening. This gave him a chance to explore many different styles, and improve his own knowledge of avant-garde jazz and rock music.

This year Dave has a show on Modays from 4 to 7, where he is further exploring styles of music. He is currently interested in the punk music popular in 1977, the music associated with it, and many of the artists that were signed onto the Sun label like Elvis Costello, Chuck Atkins, and Johnny Cash. Dave is interested in this earlier music, because, as he says, "I like music that has withstood the test of time."