Born of a fever dream wish it into being challenge from a fedi friend, radio free fedi was a classic smell of an oily rag let's get it going and see what happens after that kind of story.

#StateOfTheStation

The reality

We appreciate the patience and love so many of you have shown in helping us to navigate how the sometimes overwhelming levels of communications and noise we need to organise and manage which can impact our ability to respond or act immediately. The reality for us as a single, disabled and IRL unwaged volunteer is that our daily tasks require a great deal of coping mechanisms and grouping of tasks that includes:

managing submissions, editing/cleaning/recording voice content, adjusting music submissions that may not meet basic format clarity or level thresholds, cleaning track meta data, cleaning imagery, adding extended meta for every single track with fedi link/support link/license so that multiple services/sites can ingest and highlight, all artist and station communications, ALL customer service inquiries, ad-hoc community support, vetting new contributors to not platform any fascists etc, previewing and queuing station adds, playlist programming for both channels, multiple website management, reviews, interviews, archive blog, care and feeding and maintenance for multiple server platforms, development and tuning for systems, station expansion planning, balancing costs, catering, other duties as required...

The great news:

As we have stated before, RFF would not be “on the air” or growing such amazing organic connections amongst artists and listeners and supporters were it not for some amazing patrons who love the vibe and love their fellow fedizens and independent artists. The bare minimum to keep the lights on is funded until NOV/DEC 2023. Awesome!

As a community we have not only helped each other with artist promotion and instigated fiscal and real world support out there for the contributing artists but also generated an incredible amount of love, support and goodwill that while it cannot buy groceries, is a strong fuel to carry on and create. The amazing support of all kinds including emotional from listener to artist, artist to listener, artist to artist, listener to listener has been an absolute honour to have had even the smallest part in facilitating.

The less great news:

The volunteer has no personal resource to cover any gaps so there may be some tough decisions on the horizon. In terms of content and news and updates and community events we want to do all the things but we cannot afford the time and there is sometimes a lack of understanding of how much free stuff can cost.

If the community rallies to cover the non-human costs, we will do our best to carry on. Given the scope and scale and spoon count and the collective desire to do more cool stuff that has proven to massively resonate with the community, there may begrudgingly but certainly in line with our community driven ethos be a separate support mechanism for the human at some point. Again, community willing.

Until then, we keep sending out positive vibes and try our best to expand the ways we can walk the walk as a non walled garden, non-commercial, consent and agency promoting, as transparent as possible discovery platform that invites, nay encourages listeners and supporters to leave it and interact with and support fedi artists!

Rationale

RFF launched end of Jan 2023, we received our first donation in Feb 2023. We are therefore mapping things to try and survive the first year meaning FEB-FEB. At time of this post we are funded until ~DEC 2023 and about $80 short of making it a year. Infra costs have already gone up when we added the comfy channel and our next expansion will shrink how far we are funded.

For anyone casting any doubt on the intentions or ethos, THE SOLE VOLUNTEER building, managing, running all operations and community work for RFF has taken zero donations, rather have tried to commit to securing infrastructure stability for a stable time into the future.

RFF would have been folded up early in if not for the amazing community of patrons (some also contributing artists) who have covered the infrastructure costs that are very reasonable but not doable for said volunteer. We are posting this for transparency and a reference as needed if there is any question of what we are trying to accomplish with limited resource and solely community driven.

money money money money......MONEY

If we cover all expenses, we'd also like to make a donation to our masto server. We always want the focus to be on the music, not about any human curator or algorithm or platform, or hyper curated dead-end consumption experience. We are dead serious when we say, drop in and discover, and, support fedi artists!

All figures in $NZD

RFF annual expenses if no cost increases and prior to pending JUL expansion ($NZD) $26 Domains $208 Public facing streaming servers $104 Static public facing sites' hosting $364 virtual servers for station management systems, storage, drop/sharing

TOTAL expected annual infra costs: $702

Donations: $136.00 LP (liberapay) to date $256.00 Ko-fi to date $75.00 Other $158 LP promised

Total in to date: $625.00 Projected annual over/under: –$77.00

VOLUNTEER HOURS JAN 220 FEB 212 MAR 160 APR 100 MAY 80 JUN 56 JUL 168 projected (will be more due to expanding services)

TOTAL HOURS TO DATE: 996 If @ NZ min wage $22,908.00

OK, let's get back to finding more ways to promote amazing fedi artists eh?

how to listen/submit/contribute: https://radiofreefedi.net

this is your 24/7 fediverse #community #radio #radioFreeFedi

Heoi anō tāku mō nāianei Kia ora rawa atu

( please do not follow this account, this is for long form reading, expanded masto posts and archive reference. Please follow and interact with us at @radiofreefedi@musician.social where we announce and link the material here)

#howTo #help #production #tips #submissions #resources #audio

[Friend of the station Jamie Hill @hilljam@mastodon.social is an artist, engineer, producer and all around helpful sort. Check him out in the fedi for his many projects including a studio and production tips mail list and his amazing musical works with @shannoncurtis@mastodon.social]

When you're prepping a song for self-release, you want to make sure that it doesn't have any levels that go over 0.

The problem with this is that digital audio can contain momentary transient information, which you don't really hear, but the peaks of which can make you bring your master volume fader down so far that your song ends up sounding really quiet.

The solution? A limiter on your master bus!

A limiter is a “safety valve,” which contains those random transients for you, allowing you to bring the overall level of your song up to a much healthier level. You can buy fancy limiters costing hundreds of dollars, and if you're serious about doing proper diy mastering then you will eventually want to get a fancy limiter. But to start with, you can use the built-in limiter in your DAW, and it will help a lot.

The limiter should be the last thing on your master bus affecting the sound — so, put it after any other plugins on your master bus (with the exception of metering plugins. Metering plugins should go after the limiter, so that its effect on the sound is taken into account in the metering). Here's how to set the limiter:

• Ceiling: -0.1dBFS
• Release: 5ms

At the simplest level, that's it! Limiters have instantaneous attack; if you set the release to be nice and fast, so it gets in and gets out quickly, it will operate essentially transparently, as long as you're not pushing it too hard. You can push even a basic modern limiter into 4-5 dB of limiting before you start to hear it; if you push it harder, you may start to hear it having negative effects on your mix, so be watchful for that.

If you need help with this or other mastering-related topics, you can reach out to me through https://deptofenergymgmt.com and I'd be happy to help.

( please do not follow this account, this is for long form reading, expanded masto posts and archive reference. Please follow and interact with us at @radiofreefedi@musician.social where we announce and link the material here)

#howTo #help #production #tips #submissions #resources #audio

[Friend of the station Jamie Hill @hilljam@mastodon.social is an artist, engineer, producer and all around helpful sort. Check him out in the fedi for his many projects including a studio and production tips mail list and his amazing musical works with @shannoncurtis@mastodon.social]

The single biggest thing in prepping your own song for release is making sure the beginning and ending are properly “topped and tailed” — i.e., faded in and out. Here's how to do that!

The basic idea is that you want to make sure that you're automating the beginning and ending of your song so the resulting waveform when you bounce your song starts and ends at -∞ (a volume of negative infinity — i.e., no sound).

Why? Because if you don't, then your song might make a click or pop at the beginning and/or the end when someone plays it, and that's not good.

What I do is I put a Gain or Trim plugin after the limiter, and automate that. That way if I do a fade or something it's capturing the sound of the entire master bus and fading that, as opposed to when you draw a volume automation on the master bus, which is pre-inserts — meaning that as you automate the volume down for a fade, you're gradually pulling the song out of the master bus compressor and limiter etc, meaning that the sound of your mix CHANGES IN THE FADE 😱 Sometimes this is cool! But generally I just prefer to have my master bus sounding the way it's sounding, and then do fade-ins and fade-outs of that.

If the preceding paragraph makes your head hurt, then just automate the volume on your master fader, it's fine.

For the fade-out at the end of the song, it's nice to draw a little curve sometimes, especially for short fades, like when a song comes to a distinct ending but there's a reverb tail or room sound fading away at the end. The curvature makes fades in those situations sound less overt / more natural. Here's an example of how to draw a natural-sounding fade on a song that ends with a reverb tail, which as you can see takes place over about three bars. For reference, 3 bars at 120bpm is 6 seconds.

For the fade-in at the beginning of the song, almost all of the time it's just a very quick “up from -∞ to 0” a little bit before the first thing in the song that makes sound. Like this:

Note the time scale here. We're really zoomed in!

As you can see, the first audio in the song in this example is at 0:00.52 (point five two seconds).

I generally put the “In” marker 0.2 seconds before the first thing in the song that makes sound, because sometimes players can take a moment to buffer, and if the first bit of audio is at 0:00 it can get cut off. So in this example I've put my “In” marker at 0:00:32.

And then the “fade up from nothing to 0” is only a couple milliseconds long and very abrupt. You can see that I've put it a little ways out from the downbeat, so there's a little “air” before the song starts, because I've learned that that helps the first note feel more impactful. If you try to get the fade-in right up to the audio it can lose something.

If you need help with this or other mastering-related topics, you can reach out to me through https://deptofenergymgmt.com and I'd be happy to help.

( please do not boost or follow here, this is only a long form reading and archive reference. Please follow and interact with us at @radiofreefedi@musician.social )

Artists supporting artists.

Listeners supporting artists.

Listeners supporting listeners.

Artists supporting listeners.

Fedizens supporting fedizens!

We've said it before but here it is again. It is truly amazing seeing and hearing of all kinds of mutual love and support organically traveling out there from you all.

As artists of diverse means and situations fiscal support is of course always appreciated because cause paying the grocer is needed. We hope RFF is a useful discovery layer for this where possible.

But do not underestimate the power we all have for a kind or supportive word.

When you hear something new to you and it resonates and you take a moment to drop a note to an artist you are a force multiplier of energy and GOOD that is hard to quantify but fair to say HUGE and often reciprocal.

It is hard to avoid much of the latest dramas in social media and the fedi.

What we will say is we are so amazed for the community that has formed to lift up RFF and each other.

Do we put energy into promoting each other? YES.

Does that equate to or need the vices, traps and negative fogs of clout cannon influencer culture and anti independent artist walled gardens? NO!

This is what the fedi and RFF is to us and we are so happy so many of you have come along for the ride.

Here's to keeping fedi weird and full of support and amazing organic collab and discourse.

Everyone can contribute here. Artists of any genre submit your work. Anyone can submit fun IDs or do reads from our scripts. Huge thanks to the patrons both public and anonymous that keep the lights on. And everyone has the power to lift each other up. We've seen it heaps and it is AWESOME!

Have a kick ass and/or comfy weekend. Enjoy the tunes and each other.

how to listen/submit/contribute: https://radiofreefedi.net

KEEP SUPPORTING EACH OTHER AND FEDI ARTISTS

and keep fedi weird

this is your 24/7 fediverse #community #radio #radioFreeFedi

Heoi anō tāku mō nāianei Kia ora rawa atu

( please do not boost or follow here, this is only a long form reading and archive reference. Please follow and interact with us at @radiofreefedi@musician.social )

Music updates are weekly or fortnightly and based on flow of submissions and mostly IRL pressures and stresses. The whole midweek update post idea is often bleeding more toward weekend. We recognise there is a decided lull in fedi activity on the weekend, but it is what it is.

#StateOfTheStation

We've rebuilt the nowplaying interface on the website which expands the comfy channel recently played to the same depth as the main channel and moved a few things around and softened some of the pain hopefully. We literally hadn't looked at it or had time to think about it since launch in February. Doh!

We posted recently that we have cruised past 2000 friends and 200 contributors and climbing almost every day. Awesome!

We have seen a number of amazing collabs kick of from fedizens finding fedizens and some via radio free fedi. And even more rad, we are now getting to put into rotation on the station some of the outputs of the collabs. Totally awesome! The collab between Lehto and Socool we've been spinning in advance of their EP release this month is so so good. There is so much talent on the fediverse hiding in quiet corners. Let's shout it all a little louder eh?

The fediverse focused publication wedistribute is back and released a nice writeup on our little community project and some of the feels of listening to radio free fedi. https://wedistribute.org/2023/06/radio-free-fedi/

Thanks to the amazing group of patrons that have rallied to RFF and a few new friends joining that effort, our infrastructure is sustainable for months to come. While it is hard some weeks to donate the time we'd like for developing and keeping the station going, content gathering and review, community management, editing, data entry etc etc etc, when that monthly bill comes for the servers it is nice to report that we feel zero existential dread in that respect at least. So thank you to our patrons.

https://radiofreefedi.net/#shouts

It wouldn't be a thing without you as we would have pulled the plug for costs some time ago, and instead we are out here making amazing connections for and with artists and listeners. Awesome!

We've received multiple new station IDs and new spoken word micro fiction from a fedizen collab writer/reader team that organically formed around a fedi interaction. Awesome!

Artists you are doing pretty darn good at letting us know when you have a new release, single, EP, album, collab etc and often sending them our way for advance play which is so cool! Please keep that up. We see chatter out there that there are definitely regulars who notice and call out new stuff from artists they previously discovered on RFF which is guess what...AWESOME!

Everyone, if you want to hear more of something, send it in, or encourage artists you know and/or love to submit.

The response to the csv file for easy masto and derivative import of the RFF artists list was overwhelmingly positive. This is great for networking and promotion and is why we make sure you are ok with and give us a public fedi ID. it's a great way to catch up and add as the station adds, or pare down as you find artists that jam your way.

https://radiofreefedi.net/following_radioFreeFediContributors.csv

We update this file every single batch of station updates, as well as the txt list of every artist with their links and licences on the website, and we have started shouting out by tagging new artist adds and existing artists new song adds in the regular station update posts.

We were recently called corporate/commercial and anti diverse due to our rough time limit guideline? We hope anyone that tunes in for a few minutes or reads the website or a couple of posts will get that the entire mission is to promote going AWAY from RFF straight to the artists and supporting them. The intention of keeping things neighbourly in length is to provide more diversity for the drop-in and discover experience. As in previous state of the station reports, we cannot afford the time or infrastructure to provide hyper curated genre end points for dead-end consumption. That's antithetic to the weird, wild, fun and diverse discovery experience of your fediverse community radio. That being said if you have long form work or very experimental long loop or drone kinda stuff and don't mind providing an excerpt, the bottom of the hour theTrafficReport is an awesome place we'd like to highlight more sound collage and excerpts of other long form stuff.

If there is ever a lag in response time or we get a bit of data wrong, we apologise, please reach out via DM and we appreciate your love and patience as this thing grows and grows. We are a lone hamster in a wheel.

We have had quite a few folk reach out to do station IDs, station read, or reads of materials we have ready for TheTrafficReport and TheNews segments but not submit. We would love for a variety of fedi voices to be included in this way. Don't be shy, DM the station for info, we have script outlines and material ready to help you and some new writers have also appeared.

Reminder that our playlist bot @radiofreefedi@botsin.space account is unattended so try not to DM it on accident. It's name has BOT in the front of it. Please do use it as a reference if you were washing the dog and could not look at the screen 27 minutes ago to get links for an amazing artist you heard!

And you did it, it's the end of the message. Stay awesome out there!

how to listen/submit/contribute: https://radiofreefedi.net

KEEP SUPPORTING EACH OTHER AND FEDI ARTISTS

and keep fedi weird

this is your 24/7 fediverse #community #radio #radioFreeFedi

Heoi anō tāku mō nāianei Kia ora rawa atu

( please do not boost or follow here, this is only a long form reading and archive reference. Please follow and interact with us at @radiofreefedi@musician.social )

Ahoy fedi friends, thank you so much for your amazing community vibes, sharing your thoughts on what you are hearing and supporting fedi artists. And now some extremely fascinating.........housekeeping

Weekly updates Given the midweek surges in fedi activity and liveliness and the being a busy time for concurrent listeners we have shifted to a midweek weekly update on new tracks an artists. We work on this continuously following up with artists, reaching out to more, and constantly getting tracks ready behind the scenes in the station to then go live in groups around when we post that kind of update. Generally there is a late weekend to early week response to the weekend posts by submitting artists.

This week we had a second midweek surge so just kept on adding awesome new tracks. We hope you have a kick ass and/or comfy weekend hearing new things on both channels.

Interviews Have you enjoyed any of the artists spolight interview we have run? We haven't done an artist spotlight interview segment in a few weeks as IRL has been exceptionally heavy on your one hamster in a wheel RFF engine room. We may make these available from the website for streaming only and think they are a bit of fun to help introduce amazing fedi artists. Feedback was a bit sparse. They are labour intensive for comms and prep and edit so we are re-assessing.

If you have an upcoming release that is a great time to organise having a spotlight synced up so please DM the station account if you are keen.

Time and effort and ethos and thanks Full disclosure even when we skip some features, segments and have a “light” week it is still generally a half-time job to keep things ticking, growing and to maintain the vibe and hopefully diverse and/or comfy standards while making certain we are staying true to the ethos as a discovery layer that CELEBRATES sending you off to fedi interact with artists and hopefully even support them on their platforms of choice.

We are in a pretty good spot in terms having the core infrastructure funded for a few months thanks to some amazing artists and patrons. The other fuel that really keeps this going is when YOU, the community, support each other and hopefully we get looped in to see that kind of amazing collaborative and support spirit in practice. Quietly or openly hearing from artists on what this project means to them really solidifies why it is so important to celebrate artists, agency and consent, together. Keep it up team.

If there is ever a lag in response time or we get a bit of data wrong, we apologise, please reach out via DM and we appreciate your love and patience as this thing grows and grows.

Spoken word and writings We have had quite a few folk reach out to do station IDs, station read, or reads of materials we have ready for TheTrafficReport and TheNews segments but not submit. We would love for a variety of fedi voices to be included in this way. Don't be shy, DM the station for info, we have script outlines and material ready to help you.

Writers, do you have some poetry, micro fiction, or weird and wild possibly out of context sections of writing we can point voice readers to or in abscence of that our amazing announcer crew at.

New Releases Similar to the weekly update on new tracks added shifting to midweek, we will also do the announcement of recent/new/pending releases from artists on the station then and boost for the weekend

beware of the robots

be advised our playlist bot @radiofreefedi@botsin.space account is unattended so try not to DM it on accident. Please do use if you were washing the dog and could not look at the screen 27 minutes ago to get links for an amazing artist you heard!

Reviews We have a backlog of mini reviews and we will start trickling those out, again spoons and time. We reckon these are handy for artists to boost or quote in other formats so they feel they are tooting their own horn. We say TOOT TOOT!

404 not what now? Also weirdly various posts with both the bot and the station account mentioned have not shown up to to the station account and this week we've had a number of DMs and bookmarked posts vanish from our end so thanks for your patience.

Wow you made it to the end you legend. Stay awesome out there.

how to listen/submit/contribute: https://radiofreefedi.net

KEEP SUPPORTING EACH OTHER AND FEDI ARTISTS

and keep fedi weird

this is your 24/7 fediverse #community #radio #radioFreeFedi

Heoi anō tāku mō nāianei Kia ora rawa atu

( please do not boost or follow here, this is only a long form archive reference follow us at @radiofreefedi@musician.social )

Often times numbers are used to divide, conflate, obfuscate, other, and oppress. But we hope in this instance here are some numbers to celebrate your #radioFreeFedi community in reflection of 3 months 'on the air'!

#StateOfTheStation

192 the number of music, voice, writing, financial contributors in RFF to date. AWESOME, keep it growing and submit music, readings or other help.

41 hours of material in our main channel rotation pools

10 hours of content in the young and emerging comfy channel rotation

50% funding to offset the first year of back-end and infra fees for RFF. We are 3 months into being public and thanks to some amazing contributors (including artists) we had no hesitation to add the comfy channel and improve our permanence and stability.

1 hamster in a wheel volunteer operation so thank you for your support, patience and enthusiasm as this experiment has grown rapidly and organically

PRICELESS

The support you all are showing for one another as listeners and artists. The discovery and encouragement to artists are why this thing exists. Well done team!

Not wanting to being the end point of consumption or the focal point of attention, but rather a discovery layer to fuel interaction and support with artists may seem odd to some. The interaction we have seen, heard of and been in are a testament to YOUR awesomeness

( of course as soon as this was posted as it's original masto thread the numbers changed because you are all awesome )

how to listen/submit/contribute: https://radiofreefedi.net

KEEP SUPPORTING EACH OTHER AND FEDI ARTISTS

and keep fedi weird

this is your 24/7 fediverse #community #radio #radioFreeFedi

Heoi anō tāku mō nāianei Kia ora rawa atu

from the desk of radio free fedi . please do not follow or boost this blog account or post. it is only a reference to long form we can't smash or make into 1 of 12 threads in masto.

What we've learnt so far in our first 7 weeks and from putting it out there about possible growth.

#StateOfTheStation

There can be a response to jump on a wagon of cool, now “hey be all the stations/playlists/genre silos like spotify/soma/etc/etc.” We can't because we are:

• unapologetically niche. all fedi, wildly diverse. weird and wonderful.
• community driven, volunteer, will always avoid commercial or walled garden mechanisms in our sphere, and fedi presence for artists and highlighting consent and attribution are not negotiable!
• committed to ALL are welcome and we do mean ALL, all humans (and a few raccoons, possum, badgers, alien deities etc), all genres and genres busters! except nazis, and fascists, and racists, and anti trans, and anti queer. fuck them. we celebrate sound and each other, not otherism.
• because of the above item we will never automate nor payola submissions as a trust mechanism for the community we are a part of and want to celebrate. time sink yes, good for community also yes.
• weird wild and lavishly diverse to yes sometimes gently challenge, but mostly to spark adventure and discovery
• meant to be a transparent non-commercial non-corporate intermediary for discovery not an end point for consumption
• against highly siloed curation that shifts focus away from artists toward a platform. the main stream will always be weird and wonderful drop-in and explore as you wish
• most likely not be doing highly curated genre channels because that makes RFF more of an end point of consumption and not the discovery layer to get you to the artists which is the mission
• a jumping off point to go fedi interact with and to support fedi artists on their platforms of choice which we do not judge. SUPPORT FEDI ARTISTS
• the artists, connections between them and with listeners are the absolute focus, not any RFF layers hence no RFF specific “app” or distracting web stuff
• you will continue to hear electronic and metal, folk and classical, downtempo and bangers, sometimes you catch a wave, sometimes you catch a basket of wth. enjoy.

Trouble we are having:

• some days it feels like 1 in 3 fedizens are a soundscape, noise, drone, ambient, experimental artist with 17 minute compositions. we are trying to feature excerpts of things like sound collage into spots like theTrafficReport and be as inclusive as we can but without artists taking this onboard and providing us said excerpts or edits we can't always afford the editing time
• similar to that, we do our very best to get SOMETHING on from everyone who submits, but again long format, very long loops, poor sound quality or well outside of levels sounding balanced in broadcast we try but simply don't always have time to adjust submissions. these things are just not neighbourly to the other artists or the listeners in a diverse unscheduled drop-in discovery format
• expectations? we are the opposite of a paid genre curated artist obscuring service. we work very hard to balance artist rotation based on number of tracks by each to maximise variety. many people get it, it is 100% not demographic, algorithm, payola, ad driven. This IS 100% community driven. What is on the station, outside of the above issues, is exactly reflective to what is submitted. As previously stated going hard silo and making the THING an ultra curated endpoint you consume is not a goal. The THING is a little challenging sometimes, but it is celebrating diversity, each other and THE FEDI ARTISTS, not a curator or a website or a playlist. Want more of a certain genre? Then please help encourage more fedi artists to participate.
• there are many things we could do. technically and content driven. however, rule 1 is not to distract from core mission of interact with and support fedi artists!
• if not hyper curated “channels”, scheduled genre shows will take a MASSIVE chunk of programming time and could technically be on a side stream, but as it stands, we do not feel they should be on the main stream. “you” may like it, but it thwarts the drop-in anytime and catch some diverse discovery ethos.
• as a disabled person needing remote work, saying “I'd pay for a feed/show of xyz” would be exciting to me were it not antithetical to the station mission. I can't yet see a way to balance that up without becoming the things we are actively not.

Whats awesome:

• so so many stories of discovery, mutual artist support, listeners subscribing and buying and giving words of encouragement to artists!
• the overall support for things we recognise as being weird and different and the core tenets we are standing on
• have you heard “golf punk” by sockpuppet or everything by Helen Bell? I mean come on, we are so excited these amazing artists came into our feed.
• it's a lot of work but we are having fun with artist spotlight interviews and hope you are liking them
• your boosts and interactions tell us that you like or tolerate our nowPlaying mini reviews and we try to do an 8 or 12 hour boost on most station posts to catch you awake

**************************************************

where to then?

Therefore, given the poll direction, and more importantly some very constructive chats with listeners, and assuming continuing patron help with some infrastructure upgrades, we think the following is the least distracting most “on brand” for a RFF small growth step.

We are in the process of scaling up and developing a “comfy” station feed. This will be both a subset of contributing artists and a superset of tracks, being able to feature more material maybe not included on the main feed. This will not be a genre channel persay, rather a vibe.

NEW “CHANNEL” FACTS:

• this channel will not have spoken word bits and sound collage at top and bottom of hour
• there will be no jump out at you surprises in terms of drastic sonic clashes and we hope that helps some listeners
• sonic and vocal pallets of light beats and rhythms we hope most will agree are suitable for focused OR background discovery, chill out and enjoyment
• while we are shaving off some of the experimental, hard, rough, piercing, throbbing edges, this will still be wildly varied from as many artists as possible who ALL will still be on the main discovery feed with varying degrees of track overlap

radio free fedi comfy!

What we need:

• keep supporting fedi artists!
• continued celebration of our difference and of our community
• keep sending in original music, if you are already contributing to the station please let us know when you have new stuff we can consider and help hype
• keep putting hands up to do station reads
• if you have the means, help offsetting infra costs is how this thing is evolving from the initial smell of an oily rag operation and we have begun to separate out some tech for resilience going forward
• more understanding that there isn't always time to respond to queries that might be pretty clearly answered on the site, that we can't always find a way to include every submission nor have the time to adjust things to within parameters to do so. We can't always respond to every post about “why don't you use this platform?” or “I hate Martian Speed Casio Waltz, why is there not more Hungarian Death Lute Polka!?!?”. The station is and will as direct as we can hustle behind the scenes to make it be a direct reflection of who contributes material. Any compassion, help with care taken with quality submissions to minimise our workload, or maybe holding off on helpful demands that would obviously strain or distract from our core ethos is a massive help.
• Not my style but I have been told it is worth noting that a lone volunteer spent 60 hrs a week for a month getting this community experiment up and running if that helps with understanding that this is not spotify in resource, ethos, or hatred for artists.

phew, thanks if you made it this far. we hope it helps to have a place other than truncated threads to document more long form some of the behind the scenes in evolving a community driven artist discovery tool

KEEP SUPPORTING EACH OTHER AND FEDI ARTISTS

and keep fedi weird

this is your 24/7 fediverse #community #radio #radioFreeFedi

listen and contribute: [https://radiofreefedi.net]

Heoi anō tāku mō nāianei Kia ora rawa atu

#np #nowPlaying #review #radioFreeFedi

Helen Bell – all the songs!

It's fair to say there is a not a single folk leaning bone in my abrasive music body, yet every time a Helen Bell track comes on I am absolutely GLUED to the speakers.

We love “Broken Town” but cannot list favs or recommended tracks as every single one is a pure sonic delight and an absolute master class in lyrical storytelling. Every track is a wonderful journey.

show @helenbellmusic@sunny.garden some fedi love

[https://helenbell.bandcamp.com]

this is an archive post so it is not lost in the masto ether... listen and contribute to radio free fedi at: [https://radiofreefedi.net] and follow us for more amazing fedi artist discovery at @radiofreefedi@musician.social

#np #nowPlaying #review

Limnetic Villains – Replications

modern electro with strong 90s alt vibes, 80s synth flairs, a tinge industrial (mbm drum vibes), and that noughties indie edge of pop alt rock disco revival all today!

driving scoots like “Rise of the Idiots” dark and brooding synths of “Lost Chemicals” to station favourite “Shitty”

this album is absolutely packed with flavour 9.4/10 guaranteed to be something to like or love on here

go show @limneticvillains@mastodon.online some fedi love

[https://limneticvillains.bandcamp.com]

this is an archive post so it is not lost in the masto ether... listen and contribute to radio free fedi at: [https://radiofreefedi.net] and follow us for more amazing fedi artist discovery at @radiofreefedi@musician.social