Host: SynKult (A weeks, every other Tuesday, 10 p.m.- midnight)
On Freeform Portland Since: 2025
Instagram: @littlegravitas
Tell me about the role that music plays in your life and why it’s important to you.
Music has many functions for me. It serves a social function, a way to meet and bond with people. It serves personal functions, various forms of hobbyist discovery and self-mastery. Attaining a better understanding of music also helps one attain a better understanding of history, aesthetic, politics, the technical side of music creation and reproduction, and so on. Everything connects to everything else at the ragged edges.
How did you discover Freeform and why did you decide to volunteer with us?
Through somebody’s Letterboxd profile. After I graduated from college, I decided to volunteer with Freeform Portland because it seemed like the best way to continue doing independent radio.
Tell me about your show.
History of electronic music in context. The pioneers to the present day. The past 80+ years of electronic tonalities. With the occasional DJ mix, artist interview, subgenre deep-drive, and insane crate dig from university archives and the like.
Finish this sentence: “Freeform Portland is…”
One to three degrees of separation from anybody who is anybody in the local music scene.
Three songs you’re digging right now.
What I’m listening to as I type these words…
And an old favorite.
Can you share a favorite musical memory?
Seeing Tim Hecker at the Lodge Room in Los Angeles in fall 2023. Lights off, except for one coruscating strip of blue LEDs. Extremely thick fog. I only had one beer, but the experience had the room spinning and me feeling weak at the knees!
Tell me about some musical artists that inspire you.
Robin Rimbaud, known professionally as Scanner. Very thoughtful, urbane, intelligent, kind, and well-read guy. One of the first experimental musicians I really got into back in high school. I was lucky to have him on the show for an interview last year!
If you could meet any artist, living or dead, who would it be and why?
I’d love to get dinner and drinks with the late great John Peel and pick his brain on the many revolutions in British music, radio broadcasting, etc. between the mid 1960s and 2000s.
Why is freeform, community radio important to you? To your community?
The bar for remaining active in community radio is much higher than for college radio. Not only is there the volunteering component, but cultivating a show takes more effort as an independent adult with a full-time job, family, other hobbies, social obligations and a studio that just isn’t a quick walk down the quad from your dorm room. Everyone at Freeform Portland is incredibly passionate about music in an active sense. That’s a rare milieu to find.
What is a genre/artist/record that some might be surprised to find in your collection?
While show regulars would know that I’m generally much more familiar with the 20th-century contemporary classical avant-garde (Stockhausen, Ligeti, Cage, etc.) than with what most people refer to as classical music, I really love Bach’s chorals. What power!
Given everything happening in the world today, what’s one song you turn to for comfort or inspiration?
Sometimes the best “comfort music” is music that hurts you, but hurts you good…
Tips for aspiring DJs?
Ask questions and attend events! Your fellow DJs and volunteers are here because they love music and being in community and will be genuinely delighted to help you skill up, figure out the station and so much more!
