Over the course of the first two Dead Air campaigns, I’ve had a blast putting together playlists that reflect the music spun by each of the CJNK DJs. With each character getting their own genre of music to be passionate about (which in turn informs their respective personalities and fashion choices), I was able to dive deep into the tunes that I myself loved back in the late 1990s when I was in my own university radio era.
 
Through happy coincidence, there’s a radio station in the Eastern Townships that has been looking to revamp its programming. CIDI 99.1 FM is a community station based in Knowlton, and I happened to come across a newspaper ad earlier this year alerting me to their existence. I reached out via email to offer my support as a volunteer, and was told that they were looking for someone to do a 90s show—which seemed too good to be true given the creative world I’ve immersed myself in at the moment
 
Long story short, they wanted me to bring Dead Air to their airwaves, and I’ve spent the last couple of months recording the first 10 episodes of Dead Air Radio. At first, I used a format that explored each DJ’s genre and discussed why they would have chosen those particular tracks, and what the songs meant in to each DJ at that time in their lives. Over time, however, I found it was better to simply approach the project as a CJNK takeover of the CIDI station, and while I maintained the genre-specific focus—one week electronic music, one week Britpop, one week metal, etc—I focused more on the music and its context in the 90s as a whole.
 
The first show is being broadcast May 8 at 9 pm, with a rebroadcast on May 11 at 10 pm on 99.1 FM, and then every following Wednesday and Saturday at those same times. If you happen to be outside of the Eastern Townships, the easiest way to listen is to stream it live at www.cidi991.com. By mid-summer, there should be enough episodes in the archive for them to start to appear on the station’s Sound Cloud account for individual streaming.
 
This project has been a lot of fun. For starters, bringing Dead Air to an entirely new audience in a completely different format has been challenging, in a good way. It’s forced me to stretch into new territory and get back into the on-the-mic personality I haven’t used since the early-2000s, because I’ve discovered radio is very different from podcasting. On the music side, I’m having a blast digging through the 90s and serving up not just tracks I would have played on my own show, but stuff that Michelle, Josie, Ferry, and Esmeralda would have, too.

I know next to nothing about Astro Boy, but this re-telling of one of its most famous story lines was recommended to me by the good folks at Crossover Comics and for that I am grateful. Presented through the lens of a famous robot detective as he tries to figure out who is murdering the most powerful mechanical creations on the planet, it takes the format to places I was unfamiliar with and demonstrates how versatile manga is as a narrative tool.

I’ve been following this story of a failed, fictional Britpop band—the titular Geezer—since the beginning, and if you’re at all into this period of musical history it’s well worth the read. William Potter and Philip Bond are excellent at capturing all the absurdities of the music biz in that time, and all of the requisite cultural relics and idiosyncracies are present and accounted for.

Montreal’s own Sherwin Tjia (writing here as Sully) put together this series of vignettes from life as a 20-something on the island about 15 years ago, and while I was familiar with their later work (and subscribe to their Patreon), The Hipless Boy was a fun discovery in a Toronto bookstore. I found it strong reminiscent of my own experiences in the city at that age, albeit with much more genuflection about their meaning in the overall scheme of life.

I wasn’t expecting much from this book, in which Carter Alan presents his own personal journey through music by way of 50 concerts he actually attended himself. I was pleasantly surprised by just how relevant and accessible Alan was able to make his own experiences (starting in the 1970s) to someone like me, who grew up in a different era. Overlook a little of the rock-ism in some of these pages (Carter Alan was the music director at WZLX Boston for a very long time), and there’s a ton of interesting history and introspection regarding the place of music in our lives.

Remember when I said I was getting into 90s pop culture? That includes revisiting a TV show that lasted a single season, but which I still think about 30 years later. My So-Called Life was way ahead of its time in its portrayal of a young, flannel-clad Angela Chase (played by Clare Danes), and Soraya Roberts gets to the heart of why it had such an out-sized impact on nearly everyone who watched it in this easily-digestible, 136-page volume.