Welcome to Behind the Frequency

Music, radio, creativity, and life on the other side of the speakers.

For a while now, this part of my website has simply been called Blog.

And technically, I suppose that was accurate.

I wrote posts here. I talked about my radio shows. I shared what was happening with Off the Beaten Track. I mentioned whatever I had been working on behind the scenes. It did what a blog is supposed to do.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that simply calling it “Blog” did not really say anything about what this space has become—or what I want it to become.

So now it has a name.

Behind the Frequency

And I have to say, that feels right.

Because there is a lot happening behind the music that comes out of your speakers.

There are playlists being built, songs being rediscovered, ideas being scribbled down, graphics being designed, radio shows being planned, projects being created, things going completely sideways and then somehow turning into something better than the original idea.

There are also a lot of different sides to what I do musically, and I realized that I do not want this blog to revolve around only one of them.

For quite some time, a lot of my blog posts have been connected to Off the Beaten Track, my Tuesday evening show on Jedi Council Radio.

That show is still going to be a big part of this.

I love Off the Beaten Track.

The whole spirit of that show is very much me.

Sometimes I begin with an idea. Sometimes I have a few songs in mind. Other times I start going through my music collection, find one song I have not heard in a while, follow that into another album, then another artist, and suddenly I have a show.

That wandering-through-the-music part is one of my favorite things about doing it.

There is no requirement that one song logically connects to the next beyond the fact that, at that particular moment, it made sense to me.

And apparently that is enough.

But Off the Beaten Track is only one part of the frequency.

That is really what naming this blog made me realize.

There is much more happening.

On Wednesday and Thursday mornings, I also DJ live in my game, usually from the beach, for an audience that is largely on the other side of the world from me.

A lot of the people listening there are Australian, which means my very early morning can be somebody else's evening.

There is something I really love about that.

I can be sitting here in the United States in the early hours of the morning while, somewhere else in the world, people are gathering on a virtual beach and listening to the same music.

And those sets are not just happening inside the game.

I broadcast them live on Jedi Council Radio too.

That means somebody does not have to be standing on that virtual beach to hear what I am playing. They can be listening through the radio station from somewhere completely different.

That little overlap between virtual space and real-world radio still fascinates me.

Then there are Friday nights.

Fridays have increasingly become their own thing.

That is when I open the nightclub in my game and usually run a much longer DJ set.

Those nights can last five or six hours, and I have started giving them musical themes.

One week might be grunge.

Another might be rock music stretching across decades.

Another night might head somewhere completely different.

Sometimes I am talking a lot and interacting with everybody.

Sometimes I am quieter and let the music do most of the work.

That depends on the night, the crowd, the mood and probably how much caffeine is involved.

But those Friday broadcasts are becoming another part of the bigger DJ Jedi world.

And then there is Jedi Council Radio itself.

It is not simply something I turn on when I have a show.

The station broadcasts 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

My live shows become part of something larger that is always running.

That has changed the way I think about DJing.

I am not only preparing individual sets anymore.

I am thinking about programming, presentation, station identity, production, transitions and what kind of experience somebody might have when they tune in at some completely random hour.

Maybe I am live.

Maybe I am not.

Either way, the frequency is still there.

And that brings me to another reason this blog needed a broader identity.

There is a lot happening behind the scenes that technically is not DJing at all.

Staticworks

Staticworks has slowly been becoming more real.

It started as an idea and has gradually turned into something that I am actually trying to build.

Staticworks is where a lot of my creative work comes together—audio, radio, visual design, production, music projects and whatever else I decide I need to learn how to do next.

And believe me, there always seems to be something else.

Some of that work will absolutely make its way into this blog.

I want to talk about what I am building.

I want to talk about the things that work and probably some of the things that absolutely do not work.

I want to write about learning new creative tools, building websites, creating artwork, putting together branding, working on audio and figuring out how all these separate ideas somehow fit together.

Because that is part of the story too.

The finished thing is only one small part of creating something.

Most of the interesting stuff happens before anybody else ever sees it.

That is Behind the Frequency.

Then, of course, there is DV8R.

Somehow, somewhere along the way, I started creating original music.

That led to songs.

Songs led to albums.

Albums led to artwork, booklets, logos, track orders and an entire identity surrounding the music.

There are now plenty of stories behind those songs and projects that I have barely talked about publicly.

That is going to change.

I want this blog to occasionally go inside those projects too.

There are songs that started from extremely personal ideas.

There are songs that started with one sentence and ended somewhere I never expected.

There are songs that simply rock and made me think, Okay, where the hell did THAT come from?

Those stories belong here.

So do stories about music I did not create.

I have spent a huge portion of my life listening to music.

I have favorites from different decades, genres and corners of my collection. I have songs connected to memories and albums that immediately take me somewhere else.

Sometimes I rediscover something I have not listened to in twenty years and suddenly wonder why I ever stopped playing it.

I want to write about that too.

Maybe one day I will write about an entire album.

Maybe another day it will be one guitar solo.

Maybe it will be an artist I have loved forever.

Maybe it will be some strange deep cut I stumbled across while looking for something completely unrelated.

There really does not need to be a rule.

And I think that is the biggest change here.

Behind the Frequency does not need to be one thing.

It does not need to exist only because I have a show to promote.

Sometimes there will absolutely be posts about Off the Beaten Track.

Sometimes there will be posts about the Wednesday and Thursday beach sets.

Sometimes there will be Friday-night madness.

Sometimes there will be Staticworks.

Sometimes DV8R.

Sometimes radio.

Sometimes creativity.

Sometimes it may simply be me talking about a song I cannot get out of my head.

And sometimes it might have almost nothing to do with what I expected to write when I sat down.

That sounds pretty appropriate for me, actually.

The common thread is the music.

And creativity.

And curiosity.

And whatever happens on the other side of the speakers.

I want this blog to be a place where I can show a little more of that world—not only the finished broadcasts and playlists, but the thinking, experimenting, remembering and creating that happens around them.

Because there is always something happening behind the frequency.

A song is being discovered.

A playlist is changing.

A show is being planned.

A graphic is being created.

An album is taking shape.

A radio station is playing.

Somebody somewhere is listening.

And somewhere behind all of that, I am probably staring at a music library thinking:

"Oh, I haven't heard this song in forever..."

And that is usually where the next adventure starts.

Welcome to Behind the Frequency.

Music, radio, creativity, and life on the other side of the speakers.

May the Music Be with You!

—DJ Jedi