As of last Thursday, it’s been one year of the Warehouse Continuum on Portland Radio Project. It’s actually been a year and three months if we’re being strict, but this week was the 52nd new episode of the show. That’s a year’s worth of weekly shows, a year’s worth of music. Of course I’ve been on ~the radio~ for longer, I’m coming up on five years in fact, but I feel like I’ve grown as a DJ so much in the last year and change that it’s worth making the distinction between the former and current iterations of my show, even beyond the name change.
Rants and Raves, my old show on WBRS, was a bit of a hodgepodge. I had just come off of writing my high school thesis about the history of rave culture, but dance music to me was still something that existed mostly on the internet. Instead of spending my high school years sneaking out to parties in the woods or clubbing with a fake ID, I mostly went straight home and sank into books. Had I ever been to something that met my theoretical criteria for a rave? No, but I could list off with great accuracy a timeline of canonical subgenres and their origin stories. Rants and Raves rose from that primordial soup, a purview well-informed by history if not experience.
The resulting playlists displayed a huge range of genre, time period, and artistic legitimacy. Genuine deep cuts could end up in a playlist right next to a new Above and Beyond song, or Lizzo, or deadmau5. [For the record I do think we might be due for a critical reevaluation of Mr. Mau5 - some of his tracks could fit in nicely on Kompakt or Giegling - but that’s another article.] I’m not ashamed of the show, far from it, but it certainly didn’t have a distinct identity. It was like water on concrete - it’ll spread out, but it won’t go deep.
Rants and Raves skewed more commercial, more pop-adjacent, but also more eclectic and less strictly themed. The Warehouse Continuum has sacrificed some of that genre diversity (I notably play a lot less DnB and hyperpop these days), but it also has a consistent tone, even (gasp) a style
I’ve spent a week staring down my list of every song from every show, from the early episodes with each interstitial word preplanned and each sponsor segment carefully pasted into place; to the last-minute throw-togethers with half a show or sometimes only a catalyst of a track written down, the shows spun on the fly and recorded for history after the fact. The growth, to me at least, is noticeable. I can trace my obsessions over time with these lists, I can see the silhouettes of a new discovery and the shadows they cast on future weeks as the initial revelation fades away from shock to stock and carves its place in the repertoire. I can spot the legacies of old favorites from the RnR era that I’ve moved past, to be thanked rather than shunned, since even an embarrassing take from years ago is still woven into who I am today.
I still wouldn’t consider myself someone with a “unique point of view” to share, but I do think that the later episodes of TWC are starting to represent a cohesive and recognizable canon. I’m proud of that, and I’m proud of the work I’ve done to get there. The Warehouse Continuum has a voice, I have a voice. Here’s to another year of growth, of refinement, of digging in the crates, of searching for track IDs, of mixes and of playlists, of excitement, of thrill and, of course, of dancing.