Dead Air

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Dead Air was a program I "hosted" on Trent Radio in the late 1980s and early 1990s (exact dates lost to history; perhaps they're in the Trent Radio logs?).

The show worked like this: I ran an endless tape loop over the air that said something like "This is Dead Air. To fill up the dead air, phone 743-1777 and say anything. This is Dead Air." When a call came in, I simply picked up the phone and switched it to air, with no discussion, moderation or intervention.

Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. There was some minor "let's see if we can get away with this" calling, but not a lot. At one point I introduced two telephone numbers, so callers/producers could have a conversation, and this produced some interesting results. One guy phoned in from a local coffee shop and played the fiddle. A teenager and an older woman had an interesting multi-hour dialogue about World War II.

Dead Air was an experiment in taking Trent Radio's "producer oriented" credo to its logical end by removing almost all "barriers to entry" for radio production. In doing so it also removed all of the "producer supports" that Trent Radio provided: advice, counsel, structure, rigor.