These past couple of years have been super exciting for me. Helping out my buddy and extremely talented designer, Josh Skinner run things at
INtune Magazine and Radio. Doing design work for INtune, PeoplePowerPress and SG North has kept me super busy. While my time has been very productive I always felt that I wasn’t pursuing one of my passions. Playing and broadcasting Punk Rock music. While I did play Punk while hosting INtune Radio, through our night time program TOS:HC I felt that it didn’t really handle enough ground. INtune was and still is a magnificent outlet to find amazing underground music in The Greater Toronto Area. With Antagonist Radio it focuses on music from the entire world. To antagonize is to oppose or to be against the main thing and that is what Antagonist Radio is all about. Lets play stuff that wouldn’t be heard and wouldn’t be found. Lets grab as many ears and get them to listen to the greater unknown. The music played on Antagonist Radio focuses on Punk, Industrial, Alternative, Grunge, Noise Rock and Garage rock. All of these genres share an Antagonistic value although they can be very different from each other. I want to bring all these separate sounds and bring them together to put together a blending of epic noise.
I needed to find a way to play this massive amount of music and still focus on all my work and it seems I found just that. This handy website called Grooveshark lets you organize and upload as much music as you want and allows you to run your own broadcast. Yes this is pretty cool but there are some flaws. The inability to edit Metadata and album art on site as well as the inability to run 24hrs which would be nice. This can make things a little unattractive and organized at times but the convenience and library of songs available at disposal makes up for it. The first thing I needed to do was built the library of music. Which was worked on through so many years and has built up a huge pile. It pretty much has every song played on INtune’s TOS:HC and that’s only a fraction of what Antagonist Radio’s music has. The music was very easy for me but that was just a start. I needed a logo. Inspired by TOS:HC, vector artwork and Brute Propaganda artist Aiden Hughes who is a huge inspiration to me. I made a logo I felt perfectly captures the feel of this station (image above). The next thing would be to decide when this show gets played. Well considering Grooveshark only lets you play music while you have a computer on it made sense to make it Mon-Fri 9-6. Since I am at work and always in front of computer it is most reliable this way. Building Social Media pages is also of course a necessary step in starting something new. So of course this was the next step.
After getting the broadcast started I thought it would be a cool thing to reach out to artists by compiling a great deal of my best photographs over many years of attending shows and using those images to get people to take notice to Antagonist Radio. The cool black and white photo collection is now a new staple of Antagonist Radio and will be for years to come. This style of photography is very much another inspiration for me from one of my favourite photographers Ed Colver who is a legend in Punk rock concert photography. These photos vary from Punk, Alternative and Industrial shows and range around the last 3 years. (Artists in photos below Avarice, HighSpeech, Braincell Graveyard, METZ, Single Mothers, White Lung, Fucked Up, FLAG, The Rabid Whole and veteran Montreal Hardcore Punk band Genetic Control)
Four Months Later UPDATE:
Overall after a four month period this was successful gaining well over 1million listens. I am super proud of this broadcast. But it is now time to move on to other projects
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
#AidenHughes #PunkRock #Indie #WhiteLung #Highspeech #design #FuckedUp #Avarice #PunkRockPhotography #Antagonist #radio #Garagerock #Flag #BlackFlag #Photography #GeneticControl #EdColver #josephzambri #illustration #Industrial #HardcorePunk #AntagonistRadio #Grunge #METZ #SingleMothers #Toronto #Logo #Alternative #theRabidWhole #Grooveshark #Brute #INtuneRadio