You are staring at a time capsule. A piece of the Internet from its silver age of the early 2000s. A time when Facebook was just emerging, Instagram would be a novelty of hipsters seeking to photograph food or landscapes, and all your friends were still on MySpace contemplating whether to jump to the other social media sites or not all while still tweeting less than 180 characters on their Twitter through a SMS text to the site to let you know what salad they just ordered or who should win the VMAs that year.

The Internet was a simple place in 2001. We met online to either find new friends to meet in real life (IRL) or we met online to catch up with old friends to make IRL plans for the day, week or weekend. AOL Instant Messenger was key to all this. You would go active on AOL IM, shoot messages to friends, figure out plans across 15 different chats and then all proceed to go offline into the real world to meet up to do something somewhere. Every now and then you would hop on this new fangled Google thing to search Internet for new stuff or perhaps a subject of interest. You would hop on Napster to download music as a MP3 audio file to put on your favorite MP3 player. This is how you listened to MP3’s before smartphones or 5G mobile services. You had to actually download the music files onto a device or burn the audio tracks to a CD using a CD-ROM burner (a device you longer have in your computer most likely nor need) so you could take those files with you to listen to it on a homemade compact disc (or CD). Fancy cars had MP3 CD compatible disc players. Others you had to use some makeshift way to hook up your MP3 players to your car audio system. Nothing integrated easily. It was not for the faint of heart to figure out. Hence it was mostly young kids or adults doing such things. Everyone else was still using “old media” and you did not worry about your grandparents (or even your parents) finding out about what you just posted on FB much less them sharing their cringe/fringe political views with the pure intent to start a fight on their social media feed. You had to wait for such things to happen during family get togethers or Thanksgiving dinner instead. Fun times.

YouTube was new. The first videos were short, grainy, and while amusing not really content in the traditional idea. More of commercials, previews and shorts to keep us updated about movies, TV shows, and radio shows. Yes, people still consumed most of their media content through newspapers, magazines, TV stations or cable TV, radio stations, or books. YouTube was merely a way to enhance or expand that media. It itself was not a true content platform at that time (at least not yet– give it another decade).

With all this in mind I decided I wanted to push things further when it came to making a radio show. To bring classic college style radio with its randomness, avante garde content, and FCC defying methods of content delivery to give a new generation of kids growing up only on the Internet a way to access content that was fun, different and possibly strange. At the same time I wanted to give other Gen X adults who had just left their teenage years with a tethered media experience the ability to take some of that nostalgia into the digital age to experience it in a new way. DigitalFl00d Studios was born. I leaned heavily on my earlier analog audio production days where I made cassette tape based pirate radio shows. In this world though the shows were now digital in format and in a decent audio quality MP3 format that still could be downloaded on a dial up connection. No broadband kids. 56 kbps if you were lucky– and most were not. I wanted to lean into my recent days as a college DJ in the late 1990s where I merged styles of music, DJ styles, and cultures to create something new– something exciting. I wanted my friends and family to participate in it. Reality TV like “Road Rules” had just become very common and was slowly taking over cable TV shows. I wanted a very non-reality based TV format to all our interactions on the shows that used real people in very made up unreal situations. So much of the content featuring people is very made up and not their real person.

We are acting. None of this is really us. Sorry to spoil things. The music though was genuinely what we loved and listen to. It was an eclectic multi-generational and multi-cultural mix of musicians. The show would never work on traditional radio. It was not marketable or even in most instance abided with broadcast rules for public radio. But the Internet had no real rules at that time. It was the wild west of media production and content delivery. This was the OK Coral of that time. A rough and tough makeshift take on college radio gone very very wrong. It was “pirate” in every sense. Illegal feeling. Dangerous. Defying all the civic authorities of the time. It all seems so silly now and well passe’ but in 1999 though 2005 it was all new– very risky stuff.

Today all the people on these Pirate Radio shows including myself are adults. Many of us are on the verge of 50 years old and no longer our twenty something year old selves. We are much different in real life both at that time and now. You are listening to exaggerated nonsense at best when we say anything. Though much of it is based on who we really were and what we thought was funny– none of the situations are actually real in most cases. The show was in the vein of “Monty Python” or more timely to that era “The Kids in the Hall”. It was nonsensical comedy. The feeling was very close to the radio styles of WSOU, WPSC, WOCC and WFDU. All very popular “underground” college radio stations at that time (and still today as I understand). Music choices were heavily influenced by the MTV music shows “120 Minutes” and “Headbangers’ Ball”. Mixing was similar to Hot97 FM’s late night DJ sets specifically those of DJ Megatron whose endless mixes would weave commercials and music to the point where you couldn’t tell which was which. These were magical times in music. We still traded CDs or cassette tapes. We went to local American Legion Halls, skate parks, dive bars, and makeshift punk rock/hardcore clubs that would during the day be a Latino Bar or on weekends a Pop Music dance club to watch local or national music artists perform. At one show I was literally the fat guy who fell on Jamie Josta of hardcore punk band Hatebreed fame and he stopped the show because of it. Not mainstream music venue stuff at all.

Who we are today is very different admittedly from both our IRL young selves along with our very made up Pirate Radio selves. So do not judge us on the time capsule. The jokes are cringe at times if not outright offensive on purpose. There is (like most dated 80s and 90s content) much here that would be deemed politically incorrect or social unacceptable in modern culture. Some of it may be outright unacceptable today to say or do. Again this is made up make believe from a very different time and place in history. It is not real nor is based on the society we have today. I cannot stress this enough. It was written to offend those we sorely wanted to offend and at the same time amuse those who we wanted to be amused by the inside joke of it all. Everyone else coming into it was probably just confused. At its peak we saw about 350 unique listeners a week. We had no advertising. Everything was word of mouth or people stumbling onto it through Google searches. We made some very loyal listeners who I never met in IRL. All pretty impressive for a zero dollar budget show thrown together literally on a computer in my bedroom (or early on in my parents’ basement). As far as I know it was literally the most listened to local podcast of its time in the Hudson Valley NY area and one of the very first podcasts floating around the Internet ever. It was like me and Joe Rogan. Seriously. Clearly one of us stuck with it and the other went on to other things. I am pretty sure you can figure out who was who.

So enjoy it for what it is. A time capsule of make believe radio shows with no one genre or storyline. No real point beyond being entertaining and fun to listen to. Lots of crazy music that even today would not get radio airplay. I hope you enjoy it and this is why I leave it here at this website even though today this is definitely no longer me but– it still brings back good memories about good times, great friends and a simpler era were anything seemed possible. I give you digitalflood Pirate Radio. Enjoy.