End of weekly broadcasts

After six years, I have decided to end the weekly broadcasts of Sunshine After Dark, which is carried by CJSR, CHMA and CKXU. It feels like the right time to wrap it up, go out on a high note, and turn my attention to other pursuits. However, the archive of shows will remain up on Mixcloud, and I may upload supplementary episodes there from time to time. There are still a few months in 1975 and 1976 that I might like to revisit more comprehensively. We'll see. But this will be the end of the weekly radio broadcasts.

November 6th, 2025 will be my last show for CJSR, which I will be hosting live for FunDrive. I've made a special final episode for CHMA and CKXU to run on November 8th and 11th, respectively.

It's been an amazing experience for me. I thought I knew disco before I started, but I have learned so much exploring this repertoire systematically from beginning to end. 1980 was the coda to the peak year of 1979 for what had started to bubble up from the underground in late 1974. 12" singles or Disco discs landed in 1976, blowing up sound systems everywhere with their powerful sound. 1977 and 1978 saw the blending of rock and electronic aesthetics. Every innovation was meant to take the sonic experience on a disco dance floor to the next level. And then, as quickly as it caught fire, disco was dumped by North American culture and cancelled so thoroughly that it had to be renamed "dance music". Because who could imagine a culture without dancing? The next chapter of the story, beginning slowly in 1980, would build on the culture of dance floors that disco began. I love that music too, but I realized this is the natural moment for an intermission. Tim Lawrence had to write two books to cover the history, after all.

Sunshine After Dark first hit the airwaves in October of 2019. I wanted to get back involved with campus-community radio station CJSR, which had hosted my previous show, Clocks & Clouds, a decade earlier, and I thought it would be a great opportunity to share with people all of the disco records that I had been steadily collecting through the years. I had just ended a long-term relationship and was ready for something new. Within six months, though, the COVID-19 pandemic changed everything, and suddenly the show had a purpose. Keeping spirits bright.

Out of necessity, I started recording the show in my one-bedroom apartment that also served as my work-from-home office and general purpose bunker for the end times. Pre-recording the show allowed me the novel pleasure of listening to the broadcast while riding my bicycle through the Edmonton river valley on blissful summer evenings, or meeting friends in parks for listening parties.

About a year and half into the run, I started to program more "time capsule" episodes, where I'd take a DJ playlist from a given week in a given year and recreate that moment through music. I soon became obsessed with the unique experience this type of historical re-enactment afforded. You heard the same types of drums, the same instrumentation, the same vibe across the songs, and this made any incremental stylistic innovations really stand out. Vince Aletti's Disco File columns and charts from Record World were the road map. Luckily I had the foresight to start the time capsule shows from the earliest Aletti columns, which began in late 1974. I relished the fact that I was in sync with a month that had happened exactly 45 years earlier, the RPM of a single!

Over time, what was a monthly feature became the only thing I wanted to do with the show. In a sense, I was training myself how to DJ, as though I were alive through the disco era. How to string together songs in an order that set each one off to best effect. I came to think of Sunshine After Dark as a project of historical reenactment or period performance, carried out through the medium of radio. Without carrying the analogy too far, it calls to my mind the efforts of the early music movement in the 1970s and 1980s to learn how to play the music of the renaissance and the baroque with original instruments and stripped of modern technique. Nicholas Harnoncourt and Gustav Leonhardt must have learned something about how to perform Bach through the project to record all 193 of the sacred cantatas, a project they began in 1971 and completed only in 1990.

So I have a sense of completing the Sunshine After Dark project, rather than ending the show.

I am still quite involved with CJSR's board of directors and there are a lot of exciting things happening with the station that I will have more time to help support now. I'll probably pop up on Catch the Beat from time to time (Saturdays on CJSR, 4-6pm), and you can usually catch me at Mimi bar in downtown Edmonton once a month. In the resonant words of one of my favourite bands, Telex, "en route vers de nouvelles aventures." Underway towards new adventures.