EDBZ Blog #23

On Sunday, November 26, guitarist and founding member of Killing Joke, Kevin "Geordie" Walker passed away. Geordie created some of the most iconic guitar lines in rock and roll, playing his hollow body Gibson ES-295 through most of his career. The sound of his playing has influenced the likes of Metallica and Nirvana as well as many lesser-known acts through the decades. Geordie could play melody and powerful riffs in equal measure. His looks in the 80's and 90's were stylish. Just look at him in the video for Eighties. The band released 15 studio albums and several live releases, compilations and retrospectives. Their live shows are legendary. Their fans are called Gatherers and singer Jaz Coleman always made Killing Joke fans feel like family as we all joined in communion at the live shows. 

In homage, designer Mindy Scurto of MK Studios created the latest design for Eardrum Buzz Radio using the debut Killing Joke album cover as inspiration. You can honor Geordie Walker and Killing Joke as well as look great supporting our radio station.

We've got a few more logos and our Goth AF shirt in T's and hoodies for you to look great in the winter chill.

Printify store address: eardrum-buzz-radio.printify.me

facebook.com/MKStudiosgraphicdesign

Here's what I wrote after seeing a post from the duo Distance from Zero (distancefromzero.bandcamp.com) about only going to concerts to see bands you became fans of when you were 14 years old.

theguardian.com/music/2023/dec/05/im-only-seeing-bands-i-loved-when-i-was-14-am-i-in-a-musical-rut-or-is-this-growing-up?

As I read this article I'm listening to Steely Dan's Aja and sipping on coffee, deciding what to do with my day free of work. I wrote for a free music magazine for almost 30 years, saw multitudes of concerts, met some of my musical heroes in person and talked with them on the phone, read about, listened to and scoured the record stores for the latest releases. When I was 52 I decided to start an online radio station and have been turned on to many new sounds and bands, music that I would not have known about if I didn't keep seeking and listening. That said, I do understand the nostalgia, of being taken back to a time and place. I'll be going to the Cruel World Festival in May and aside from a handful of newer bands, they're all from the 80's, though some are still releasing new music and touring. Ride and The Charlatans are in January. Nothing from newer bands coming up yet, but if I have the energy, I'll go to a small club and bliss out to some lesser known though no less wonderful band. I think of what some of the newer bands and their music will last and imprint themselves on me. Are my best days behind? The aches and pains, the gut, the disinterest in socializing that's always been part of me? At least I'll continue to travel and dance and sing to the music in my life and I'll never stop looking for the next good feeling.

Aside from playing Baldur's Gate 3 I've been enjoying making mixes for our Patrons to hear. The latest is a three part mix that started as Synthpop songs from the 80's to today but morphed into New Wave meets modern acts. By including a few songs from mostly teen comedies of my youth, I started to make up a narrative in my head, at least for the second one. If you'd like to hear those mixes and many others, often focusing on one band, consider becoming a Patron. I've got Teen Movie Soundtrack, Teen Movie II: Pink & Black and Not Another Teen Movie Soundtrack already slapped together and ready for our supporters to enjoy.

I really don't like when the clocks change, which they did recently in the States. I've been lucky this time around with not being terribly affected by the change except for being ready for bed at 7pm and wanting to sleep past 8am. The weather is getting chillier though.

For all who thrive in the dark, the nightlife, the clubs and concerts, the restaurants and to just hang out with friends, the longer nights mean more time to enjoy nocturnal activities. But soon jackets will be on and so will pants when not at work. I'm a polo shirt and shorts type of person most days of the year. 

One thing you can enjoy with the stars above your head and a friend by your side is the music and our DJ shows on Eardrum Buzz Radio. You can listen 24 hours a day, but our DJ shows just sound better at night. I play most shows in the morning for the UK and European audiences who are half a day ahead of us, but I also replay most of them at night for the US listeners and those into the next day over in Australia. So every weekend show is on twice a day and usually repeated the following week. No excuse to miss out! Check the schedule below the player on the website's main page at eardrumbuzz.net and be sure to set your alarm, put us in your calendar and enjoy our DJ's and library tunes. 

By the time you read this I will have gone to Darker Waves Fest in Huntington Beach. It's full of 80's bands, most that still tour, some that still put out new releases. It will be a challenge to see all the bands. Human League and B-52's are on at the same time! Devo, OMD, Violent Femmes, New Order, Tears For Fears, Soft Cell, The Chameleons, Echo & The Bunnymen and The Psychedelic Furs are just some of the older bands with Drab Majesty and Twin Tribes bringing in a younger crowd. Those last two bands are playing early in the day. Wish us old folks luck making it through the day on the beach from noon to 10pm. 

Update: We made it through Darker Waves! Though I missed seeing Daanon the whole day. Dave and I heard from a distance sets from most of the bands I listed above, though The Bunnymen were on the same time as the Furs so we didn't move from our picnic tables. Food and booze was plentiful, the lines at the outhouses weren't too long, the sand wasn't too bad and the weather was nice. There could have been half the bands on two stages near together and it would be so much better for old guys like us but it was a good time with lots of singing along to Blister in the Sun, Rock Lobster, Tesla Girls, Love My Way, Everybody Wants to Rule the World, Whip It, Perfect Kiss and so many other great songs. 

I'll also be seeing Depeche Mode next month, again with Dave. You'll likely hear about that show in the new year. And tickets to see Peter Hook and The Light are on sale now for next year. They'll be playing both Joy Division and New Order Substance albums. I'll be at The Palladium in Hollywood next September. And Cruel World tickets are secured! Go see the lineup for yourself. There's no way we'll see all the bands we want to see (as per usual at these festivals) but who we do see will be incredible.

We always appreciate free publicity too, so if you see an autopost on Twitter or an event on Facebook, please consider sharing and inviting your friends when there's a show you like coming on that week. Finding a larger audience for Eardrum Buzz Radio is a constant goal. 

You can support Eardrum Buzz Radio by becoming a Patron at patreon.com/eardrumbuzzradio where we have discounts on shirts, free mixes and early replays of our Vapour Trail Live shows. For as little as $5 a month you can show your support for independent radio and help keep us going for years to come. I want to thank all our Patrons, without you I'd have less money to buy more music and to keep the website and station going. Butch, Colin, Charles, Lat, En Jay, Clay, Steve, Dave, Whitney, John E, John T, Justin and Patrick: I most appreciate your support for Eardrum Buzz Radio!

Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!  Expect some Christmas and holiday-themed tunes in the coming weeks. Be sure to hug your kids, your family, your friends and your pets and enjoy the rest of the year! 

Thanks for your support!

Bret Miller

I'm on Facebook at: facebook.com/groups/eardrumbuzzradio, facebook.com/EardrumBuzzRadio, on Twitter @eardrum_buzz and Instagram @eardrumbuzzradio. I have an autopost for songs played on Twitter too. On Patreon you will get exclusive mixes of some of my favorite bands, a discount code for shirts and you'll get to hear Vapour Trail Live a week early, plus mugs, totes and more for the higher tiers. patreon.com/eardrumbuzzradio. Buy shirts and hoodies with three different designs and many color choices at: bonfire.com/store/eardrum-buzz-radio.

Visit us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or email me at bret@eardrumbuzz.net and send me your band submissions in MP3 format as well as your requests and keep up with our latest shows! Sign up for our monthly newsletter at the bottom of our website or check out the Blog page on the website.

Become a Patron and help support the station at: patreon.com/eardrumbuzzradio

Other ways to support Eardrum Buzz Radio are via Paypal: paypal.me/eardrumbuzzradio. Every little bit helps and goes towards bills, saving for new gear and purchasing more music for your enjoyment. You can also retweet our autoposts from Twitter @eardrum_buzz and on Instagram @eardrumbuzzradio and repost and share our events on Facebook, post about your new music and releases at facebook.com/groups/eardrumbuzzradio and join us there to chat during our shows.

Thanks to everyone who listens to Eardrum Buzz Radio, chats with us throughout the week and during our live shows and helps spread the word. You are appreciated!

Eardrum Buzz Radio Patreon page: patreon.com/eardrumbuzzradio

LINKS: linktr.ee/eardrumbuzz

LinkTree: linktr.ee/eardrumbuzz PayPal: paypal.me/eardrumbuzzradio

Written by Bret Miller Eardrum Buzz Radio eardrumbuzz.net

Follow Eardrum Buzz Radio: Instagram: @eardrumbuzzradio Twitter: @eardrum_buzz Facebook: facebook.com/groups/EardrumBuzz

Podbean: listen HERE

Spotify: listen to our podcast HERE

Send submissions to: bret@eardrumbuzz.net with "Submission" and your band name in the subject. Please only MP3 files, no WAV files, no Spotify links, just your awesome music!

EDBZ Blog #22

Now that the summer is over, the days are getting shorter and cooler, less sweating is a nice thing yet I can still wear shorts and short sleeves as I do for the vast majority of the year. It's not jacket cold yet. What does happen around now is the time changes, for a few weeks the schedules are kooky for Australia, UK and US as our times don't change on the same dates. So be sure to check Google for the times our shows air in the coming weeks through October. This also means that you can expect two shows of spooky tunes from DJ Wednesday on Six Beats Under Saturdays at 9am & 9pm plus I'll be playing more scary songs all day October 31st.

I won't go into too much detail but for a while I was getting ready to move to another server for Eardrum Buzz Radio. The only reason was because of a lack of space. I had too much music and too little room to hold it. After a few weeks of annoyance, trying to figure out the new server and fretting over their lacking, and it was a HUGE lacking, the once and future home of Eardrum Buzz Radio offered three times the space for half again as much as I was already paying. Phew! We would have had to use 3-4 different programs just to have live shows with more than one person on the mic and to be able to hear each other live, pre-delay. And they wouldn't have had the one, single program we've been using to hook up, hear each other and have access to the library like we do now. Granted, the other server had excellent customer service, much better tracking, a few other perks as well but what it really came down to was: could we do our live shows with ease? So I'm happy to say we're staying where we are but now we have additional space.

What does this mean for you? Absolutely nothing! You still get the same great music, the same awesome DJ's and song selections and incredible classics and new tunes 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Nico has changed his new music show to Shore Dive Records Transmissions. Shore Dive is his label so I guess a little branding doesn't hurt. He has his Shore Dive Records Hour weekdays from 2-3pm and Saturdays at 11am PT with music from the label and on Saturdays at 12pm, 4pm & 8pm PT you can hear new music from the label and songs from other bands and labels along with Nico's introductions.

Our Eardrum Buzz Radio Store is still up and there are plenty of shirts and logos to choose from. Craig and Damian of Tina & The Hams have worn their shirts in public, on stage and in Craig's backyard. Here they are modeling for you.

Sean Schultz is also using the power of the Buzz while in the recording booth for his Sonder band.

David Kasheta is doing two hour shows from 11am-1pm Pacific through the end of the year while Keeley Moss is busy touring and promoting her debut full-length album. We'll find an earlier time for David to continue his two consecutive hours once Keeley is back in January. Until then, rock your socks off at 11am and 7pm PT with two hours of catchy tunes on Rock Never Rusts.

I've rambled enough for a while. Thanks to everyone who tunes in for the whole day, someone in San Marcos, Texas, someone in an unknown city in Germany, someone in Toronto, Canada and to all who join us for our live and recorded shows and who post on our facebook group page. Knowing you're out there keeps me going.

Thanks for your support!

Bret Miller

I'm on Facebook at: facebook.com/groups/eardrumbuzzradio, facebook.com/EardrumBuzzRadio, on Twitter @eardrum_buzz and Instagram @eardrumbuzzradio. I have an autopost for songs played on Twitter too. On Patreon you will get exclusive mixes of some of my favorite bands, a discount code for shirts and you'll get to hear Vapour Trail Live a week early, plus mugs, totes and more for the higher tiers. patreon.com/eardrumbuzzradio. Buy shirts and hoodies with three different designs and many color choices at: bonfire.com/store/eardrum-buzz-radio.

Visit us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or email me at bret@eardrumbuzz.net and send me your band submissions in MP3 format as well as your requests and keep up with our latest shows! Sign up for our monthly newsletter at the bottom of our website or check out the Blog page on the website.

Become a Patron and help support the station at: patreon.com/eardrumbuzzradio

Other ways to support Eardrum Buzz Radio are via Paypal: paypal.me/eardrumbuzzradio. Every little bit helps and goes towards bills, saving for new gear and purchasing more music for your enjoyment. You can also retweet our autoposts from Twitter @eardrum_buzz and on Instagram @eardrumbuzzradio and repost and share our events on Facebook, post about your new music and releases at facebook.com/groups/eardrumbuzzradio and join us there to chat during our shows.

Thanks to everyone who listens to Eardrum Buzz Radio, chats with us throughout the week and during our live shows and helps spread the word. You are appreciated!

Eardrum Buzz Radio Patreon page: patreon.com/eardrumbuzzradio

LINKS: linktr.ee/eardrumbuzz

LinkTree: linktr.ee/eardrumbuzz PayPal: paypal.me/eardrumbuzzradio

Written by Bret Miller Eardrum Buzz Radio eardrumbuzz.net

Follow Eardrum Buzz Radio: Instagram: @eardrumbuzzradio Twitter: @eardrum_buzz Facebook: facebook.com/groups/EardrumBuzz

Podbean: listen HERE

Spotify: listen to our podcast HERE

Send submissions to: bret@eardrumbuzz.net with "Submission" and your band name in the subject. Please only MP3 files, no WAV files, no Spotify links, just your awesome music!

EDBZ Blog #21

Eardrum Buzz Radio is curated by human beings, not an algorithm. And we're free to listen to!

Creating a playlist for a radio show in my mind must be much like when a band puts together their songs for a record. You want to take the listener on a journey and keep the listener engaged through to the end. I agonize with my song selections for our twice monthly Vapour Trail Live, knowing that I'm going to share my sets with two other people with different tastes in music than my own. Do I worry about what they're playing and how we all fit together? Not really, as that is part of the experience. I do concern myself with the internal flow of each of my sets and if they sound good together and as a whole in my own world. Think of it as a narrative, a point of view of a character in a story. And hopefully, the flow of the whole show works well together. Regardless, it is a journey and the places we go, the bands we play, and the very songs we play create a picaresque travelogue to entice your soul and give you some amount of pleasure and escape from whatever is going on in your collective lives. Crafting our shows certainly must fuel our souls at the very least and for you to tune in and chat with us gives us a brief respite from whatever is going on in our lives.

That being said, just a few weeks ago, Eardrum Buzz Radio celebrated its third anniversary on this planet and we featured many guest DJ shows as well as shows from our DJ family who all made great one and two hour sets of music that made us smile, gave us a break from the day-to-day and got us moving. Thanks to everyone that made it possible, for giving away music and even going live when their shows are usually recorded. The time and effort and thought and good musical taste that you put into each and every show is inspiring to me and likely to you as well. Thanks to you, the listener, for taking the time to listen to as many shows as you did and for sharing your enthusiasm with us too!

We've got a new monthly show called Shots From Across The Pond featuring the band members from Say Yes, Do Nothing. They contacted me about doing a show for our third anniversary and turned in a Scotch-fuelled good time of chatting and playing tunes. They'll be on fourth Mondays at 11am and 8pm Pacific time. For those in the UK, that's 7pm Greenwich time and 4am on Tuesday morning. Their second airing will be on right after Kris Gardner's Your First Listen, so stay on after her show on fourth Fridays. And the first airing is on my birthday, July 24th!

Here I am at around 11pm at night putting on the station a bunch of songs with "moon" in the song title reflecting on where we've been as a station and where we're going. Will we ever gain more listeners? Will people buy more of our shirt designs? Will I get more Patrons to help the economic burden of running the station and website? Will I slow down buying new music from Bandcamp and other sources which inevitably also helps keep the musicians going? Will people realize that paying the Spotify executives and lifting songs off Youtube causes them to be a part of the problem of the whole music business, by not actually supporting the bands by purchasing their music? Simply paying a dollar a song isn't going to make any of these bands selling their music on Bandcamp rich in any way, but buying into a jukebox service doesn't do the actual bands any good either. So I challenge all you music fans out there to put your money where your heart is and purchase the music we play on Eardrum Buzz Radio, to go and see bands perform live and to keep talking about the bands you hear making music now, not just wrap yourselves in the nostalgic and cozy blanket of music from decades ago picked by an algorithm. Stay young, stay creative and stay at www.eardrumbuzz.net to hear music that just came out yesterday as well as those favorites of days gone by long ago. And hopefully, your enthusiasm will fuel me to have a fourth anniversary!

Thanks for your support!

Bret Miller

I'm on Facebook at: facebook.com/groups/eardrumbuzzradio, facebook.com/EardrumBuzzRadio, on Twitter @eardrum_buzz and Instagram @eardrumbuzzradio. I have an autopost for songs played on Twitter too. On Patreon you will get exclusive mixes of some of my favorite bands, a discount code for shirts and you'll get to hear Vapour Trail Live a week early, plus mugs, totes and more for the higher tiers. patreon.com/eardrumbuzzradio. Buy shirts and hoodies with three different designs and many color choices at: bonfire.com/store/eardrum-buzz-radio.

Visit us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or email me at bret@eardrumbuzz.net and send me your band submissions in MP3 format as well as your requests and keep up with our latest shows! Sign up for our monthly newsletter at the bottom of our website or check out the Blog page on the website.

Become a Patron and help support the station at: patreon.com/eardrumbuzzradio

Other ways to support Eardrum Buzz Radio are via Paypal: paypal.me/eardrumbuzzradio. Every little bit helps and goes towards bills, saving for new gear and purchasing more music for your enjoyment. You can also retweet our autoposts from Twitter @eardrum_buzz and on Instagram @eardrumbuzzradio and repost and share our events on Facebook, post about your new music and releases at facebook.com/groups/eardrumbuzzradio and join us there to chat during our shows.

Thanks to everyone who listens to Eardrum Buzz Radio, chats with us throughout the week and during our live shows and helps spread the word. You are appreciated!

Eardrum Buzz Radio Patreon page: patreon.com/eardrumbuzzradio

LINKS: linktr.ee/eardrumbuzz

LinkTree: linktr.ee/eardrumbuzz PayPal: paypal.me/eardrumbuzzradio

Written by Bret Miller Eardrum Buzz Radio eardrumbuzz.net

Follow Eardrum Buzz Radio: Instagram: @eardrumbuzzradio Twitter: @eardrum_buzz Facebook: facebook.com/groups/EardrumBuzz

Send submissions to: bret@eardrumbuzz.net with "Submission" and your band name in the subject. Please only MP3 files, no WAV files, no Spotify links, just your awesome music!