Pump Up the Volume

MARK BRINDA AND Colin Ilgen needed an outlet for their obsession with Brooklyn’s music scene, and since they both lack the musical talent necessary to start a band, they settled for the next best thing: starting a radio station.

Officially launching April 19 with a showcase at The Knitting Factory, Newtown Radio—named for the polluted stream that runs past some of the Brooklyn and Queens neighborhoods where New York’s most exciting music is being made—will broadcast a mix of indie rock, live local shows and hosted programs from the website [www.newtownradio.com](http://www.newtownradio.com/). Or at least that’s the plan.

“None of us knew what the fuck we were doing,” Brinda admits of their entrepreneurial skills. “For probably the first four months it was really trial and error.” But Brinda, Ilgen and fellow co-founder Tariq Abdus-Sabur weren’t deterred by having to learn the hard way. The idea for an Internet radio station playing nothing but local up-and-comers came to Brinda and Ilgen last summer while they were lamenting the nearly non-existent presence of New York indie rock on the radio over drinks.

“There’s no station focusing on New York—specifically this Newtown Creek area music scene,” Brinda says. “All the shows, nobody was covering them. You get Brooklyn Vegan coming to take pictures, but nobody’s broadcasting live all of this stuff. Nobody was really featuring the artists that come from here and the artists people from here like.”

So they decided to do something about it. Granted, Newtown isn’t the first independent radio station in the city, but comparing it to others like East Village Radio and WFMU just doesn’t do it justice. “They’re like 90 percent eclectic mishmash, while we’re like 30 percent eclectic mishmash,” Brinda surmises.

That station’s programming consists of shows like D.C. LaRou’s Disco Juice, a three-hour set on Saturdays that highlights hidden classics from its namesake, including songs from The Tramps and Gazebo. The station also offers less sequined-studded programming—Arthur Radio is a mix of emerging music, live performances and interviews hosted by Arthur magazine personalities on Sundays afternoons. These programs are coupled with the station’s daily schedule. Shows like Morning Brew and The Daily Cycle with Inspector Selector, which offers an array of rock every evening, and Lo-Fi Lunch, which is jockeyed by Brinda himself under the pseuodonym DJ Bossasaurus, air every day. Ilgen and Abdus-Sabur are also ever present in-studio, doing DJ duties and keeping everything up and running. These are the only givens in an otherwise ever-revolving list of guest DJs that come in to pull night shifts as well as varying special segments. The programming is capricious enough to make you glad the station’s schedule is so detailed on their website.

And aside from the mishmash, Newtown offers an online fusion forum through streaming music online, use of social networking sites, downloadable MP3s and access to DJs via Skype. Their on-the-go, Ghostbusters approach to broadcasting doesn’t hurt, either.

“We just have this bag of stuff that we load up with a computer, a mixer and a bunch of microphones,” Brinda says. “Somebody called us like 30 minutes before this Neon Indian and Beach Fossils show at Market Hotel once and we were like, ‘Yep, we’ll be there.’ We just show up and plug in.”

When the broadcasting system isn’t in a bag, it’s spread out over almost every inch of space in the station.

Newtown runs out of a warehouse on Meserole Street in Bushwick, close to performance and rehearsal spaces for many of the bands it plans to feature. And Newtown is taking full advantage of these close quarters—knocking on doors in search of bands to make in-station appearances.

“We usually have two or three bands in the studio every Saturday and Sunday that come and just set up their shit,” Brinda says before copping to an awestruck moment after I ask him who’s been by the studio as of late. “The bassist for Real Estate [Alex Bleeker] has come in because his friend is in Family Portrait and they were playing. He was just here. Hanging out.”

And while in-studio jam sessions are an awe-inspiring part of Newtown’s program, it’s equally important for them to interact with their audience.

“We have short sessions sometimes when we’ll have a bunch of new tracks and ask people to call in and rate them,” Ilgen says.

Having the musicians that make up Newtown’s playlists nearby keeps them aware of what’s breaking big in the area’s music scene. But with their namesake creek only four blocks away, that, too, weighs heavily on the station’s priorities.

“I think part of it was to try and somehow capture the Williamsburg, Greenpoint and Bushwick neighborhoods with some sort of metaphor that would encapsulate the area, and at the same time, we’re also very interested in promoting the cleaning up of the river,” Ilgen explains. Brinda adds, “If we ever start making any money, we’ll definitely spend some of it in an effort to clean it up.”

But if name recognition is any indicator, so far they’ve been better at running a radio station than raising community awareness.

“People don’t even know what Newtown Creek is,” Brinda informs me. “People don’t even know. I would say nine out of 10 people don’t know.” But Brinda and Ilgen are not complaining about Newtown’s start. “It’s fucking crazy,” Brinda explains. And Ilgen agrees, before adding, “Everybody seems to really be getting into it and supporting it. We both grew up in the L.A. area listening to the radio all the time in cars and it’s like, ‘I don’t listen to radio here ever.’ Blogs and all that stuff are great if you want to actively discover stuff, but sometimes you just want to sit and have someone else decide what you’re listening to.”