Aural Reports

John Penny believes in KUCI-FM 88.9.

What do you do at KUCI?

I am the music director, and I'm also one of the on-air DJs.

What does a music director do?

I'm responsible for adding all new music to the station, so I work with promotion companies and labels. They send us hundreds of CDs a week, and I have to go through those and determine what gets added to our station's library and what does not.

How do you determine that?

If they're established artists that are already popular at the station, we add those. Or if they're up-and-coming artists that have had a lot of hype on the blogs, or local bands that have been mentioned in the OC Weeklyor things like that, we try to add those artists, as well. After that, general production value and sound quality . . . things like that. We have a music policy at the station that differentiates us from any of the other—not just college stations, but commercial stations as well: We don't play any mainstream music. So anything that's been popular on KROQ or Power or any of the other major radio stations, we avoid because there's already a source for that somewhere else. We try to create real diversity in our sound. We will take something that's real off-the-wall or experimental versus something that's a carbon copy of whatever's big on KROQ.

On the other end of the spectrum, you said you listen for production value?

We love lo-fi artists, but there's a difference between being lo-fi and recording a record on a tape recorder in your closet. Transmitting it over the air—and especially since we broadcast live on the Internet, where the volume levels and things like that are a bit more sensitive to digital peaks—we make sure to take something with a good enough production value to transmit over the air. We don't want our listeners to have to debate whether they're listening to radio static or the actual song.

Does that take a lot of time?

It's quite a laborious task. I have an assistant music director. We also have genre assistants for electronic music, experimental music, metal, Goth, industrial, punk, ska, blues, jazz, country . . . you name it. That team assists me with the new releases for those genres.

What's your show, and what kind of music do you play?

It's called Minus Numbers. Typically, it's more or less an indie-rock sound, and I mix in some hip-hop, a little bit of experimental music and a little bit of electronic music. I try to focus on emerging artists.

What was it that made you want to join KUCI?

I grew up in Anaheim Hills; that section of town is devoid of culture. Moving to Irvine, while there's a lot of culture in terms of diverse food and people, there's really no sense of a youth culture, emerging music, or engaging talk issues, local community issues and things like that. KUCI was really kind of the last bastion of that in Orange County, so it was appealing on multiple levels. Some of it was ego-stroking, like "I get to be on the radio and prove to everybody how cool I am," but on the other hand, KUCI as an institution is a really important thing for Orange County, and being a part of it and working in management and trying to promote the station in the local community and throughout Orange County became really important to me as well.

Since you've been there for several years, have you seen any changes with the digital music shift in the music industry?

As time goes on, mainstream radio and television get more homogenized. It gets to the point where you flip through the dial and you really can't tell any of the stations apart. Over the past couple years, blogging has become immensely popular. With the music blogs and the MP3 blogs, anybody can become a music critic and write about independent artists and post MP3s from that band [Oh, really? —ed.]. The only outlet they have to hear that outside their computer is stations like KUCI.

KUCI is the only station like that in Orange County and even Southern California. Between our webstream and terrestrial radio, we see more and more listeners every day because of the content we're broadcasting. We always put Orange County before anyone else. This is our home and our main audience. But in making decisions, we need to keep in mind the national and international market. Since we broadcast 24 hours a day, there are fan bases around the world. Just because a DJ is on at 3 in the morning doesn't mean that no one is listening.

MINUS NUMBERS AIRS ON KUCI-FM 88.9; WWW.KUCI.ORG . MON., 4 P.M. VISIT WWW.MINUSNUMBERS.COM FOR MORE INFORMATION.