“This room is, to a certain extent, a trophy room,” Jason Bentley admits, his morning DJ voice rendered even smoother than usual following an in-studio set by local downtempo electro-soul group Rhye. The host of Morning Becomes Eclectic is seated slightly uncomfortably on a stepladder in KCRW’s cramped music library, as staff members clear out electric candles from the performance space (the band and station arrived at the alternative lighting in order to maintain Rhye’s relative anonymity, while still giving viewers of the video stream something to look at). The space is exactly what you’d want in a radio station library: high, cramped shelving units that are somehow impossibly messy and immaculately organized all at once. Between the CDs and vinyl stacked on shelves and tucked into hidden drawers, there’s a vast catalog of music in this room, but it’s clear in the five seconds it takes to walk from door to door that this space couldn’t possibly house all the songs required to maintain a 24-hour schedule as diverse as KCRW’s.
“We have moved to digital, mostly,” the DJ / music director continues. “But this is really the spiritual center and the heart of the radio station.” The setting is in stark contrast to Jersey City’s WFMU, where the concept of a music library is still very much a living, breathing thing. In spite of the station’s ties to the claustrophobia of the greater New York City metropolitan area, WFMU’s set is far more spacious, housing more music than could ever be enjoyed in a single lifetime. At the beloved freeform station, physical media is still a primary tool of the DJ’s arsenal, albeit one augmented by a 250,000-song digital music library. But for all the care devoted to its library, WFMU’s charm lies within a structure seemingly held together by duct tape and love — and walls decorated with glittered LP covers created by listeners at its annual record fair.
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