Finding the Frequencies

Tune in, Tokyo! Tune in, Tokyo!

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The signal has been around a long time.

In this issue:

• 📻 The Station Nobody Asked For

• 📺 Tuning the Dead Channel

• 📡 You Are Not the Meat

I never could abandon my desire to be in charge of my own radio station, so I made one. It’s like the David Lynch soundtrack of my brain. I love it.

Let’s fuckin’ gooooo…

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📻 The Station Nobody Asked For

Somewhere in 1995, in a town small enough that the AM radio station shared a parking lot with a restaurant, a kid who had no business being behind a microphone talked his way into one anyway.

The station was nothing. A crackling little signal that barely cleared the county line, running an afternoon rock block to an audience of maybe forty people, most of them trapped in cars.

I wasn’t getting paid. I was getting something worse. I was getting the idea that this was the thing I was supposed to do, that sitting in a room pushing sound into the air for strangers was some kind of holy act, and that idea burrowed into my skull like a parasite and never left.

That was thirty years ago. The parasite is still there.

I tried to get back in. Multiple times, multiple stations, multiple cities.

Not just on-air work. Scheduling. Producing. Sweeping the goddamn floors if it got me near a broadcast console. Nobody was hiring.

Nobody was hiring because radio was busy dying, swallowed by the same corporate consolidation that eats everything good in this country, digested into Clear Channel slurry and excreted as identical playlists in every market from Portland to Pensacola.

The medium that gave us Wolfman Jack and pirate broadcasts and late-night DJs whispering dangerous music into the dark was now a vending machine. Insert ad revenue, receive product.

So I built my own station.

GZS Radio is live.

It’s online. It’s streaming. And it is, without question, the weirdest thing I’ve ever made, which is saying something if you’ve been paying attention.

This is not a normal radio station.

This is your broadcasting partner no matter the apocalypse you face. An omniversal, multi-dimensional radio experience spanning past, present, and future. Here you will enjoy the hallucinated sounds of music that was never real in the first place, echoes of other worlds, and the background noise of the omniverse.

You might hear something that sounds familiar. You won’t find it anywhere else. Unless someone makes a mixtape.

Let me explain what that means before you call someone.

Every single track on GZS Radio is AI-generated music.

Created in Suno, licensed to me, played by me. Not because I have some philosophical stance about the future of artificial creativity, though I do and we can fight about it later.

Because I can’t afford to license real music and I refuse to let that stop me.

I’ve been writing lyrics my whole life. Never been a good poet. But I’ve got notebooks, plural, filled with half-finished songs and full ones, scratched out in barracks and break rooms and the kind of 3 AM that only comes when the words won’t let you sleep.

Some of it’s good. Some of it’s shit. All of it’s mine, and I’m going to keep making it because this is the radio station I always imagined needed to exist.

The station nobody asked for. That’s the point.

Radio was supposed to be free.

It was supposed to be weird. It was supposed to be the thing you accidentally tuned into at 2 AM on a road trip and couldn’t turn off because whoever was behind the mic was either a genius or completely unhinged and you needed to find out which.

GZS Radio is that.

A stream you stumble into and stay because the atmosphere has its hooks in you and the music sounds like transmissions from a dimension adjacent to this one, close enough to recognize, far enough to unsettle.

Here’s how it works, because I know you’re wondering.

It’s free.

Always free. Like radio is meant to be. Right now it’s basic, just a stream, but the architecture is there for something bigger. Live segments. Guest DJs. Syndicated shows. The vision is a platform where creators who make weird, uncommercial, beautiful things can broadcast without asking permission from an algorithm.

The ads are fun.

You’ll hear them. They exist. But they sound like songs, and they’re selling you things you might actually want instead of things a corporation decided you should want based on the surveillance data they harvested from your phone while you slept.

I’ve already dropped a few Niche of One spots into the rotation. They slap. I will not apologize.

I’m considering DJs.

Volunteer basis only. If you’ve always wanted to do a radio show and never had the chance, this might be your shot. It’s not a job. It’s a calling that doesn’t pay, which is the purest kind.

If you make AI music, send me an MP3 and your permission to play it. That’s the barrier to entry. An email and a file. No submissions portal. No review committee. No A&R guy in a bad jacket deciding whether your sound fits the brand. Send it. If it’s interesting, it plays.

Podcasters, listen up.

I’m exploring syndication. You put your show on GZS, you sell your stuff through it, like infomercials except they’re actually cool and the products don’t suck. Think of it as community radio for the internet’s weirdest neighborhood.

Ad time will be affordable.

I’m building this out through Passionfruit, and when it’s ready, the rates will be set for actual humans with actual budgets, not venture-backed content factories.

The goal is to cover costs, which right now run about thirty bucks a month. That number goes up if bandwidth does. That’s a problem I’d love to have.

Because here’s what I know after thirty years of wanting this and not having it.

The thing that made radio magic was never the technology. It wasn’t the signal strength or the playlist or the production quality.

It was the human voice pushing sound into the dark, not knowing who was listening, trusting that someone out there needed to hear exactly this, exactly now. That’s an act of faith. That’s broadcasting in its original, holy, pre-corporate sense. One person transmitting. Another person receiving. The space between them filled with something neither of them fully controls.

That space is where the good stuff lives.

GZS Radio is my attempt to build that space with the tools available to me, which happen to include artificial intelligence and a streaming server instead of a transmitter and an FCC license.

The medium changed. The impulse didn’t. The kid behind the mic in that AM station parking lot is the same person pressing play on an AI-generated track at midnight in Nashville, thirty years older, considerably more damaged, and still absolutely certain that pushing sound into the void for strangers is one of the few things worth doing with the time you’ve got.

The stream is live. The signal is out there. It’s free, it’s weird, and it doesn’t need your permission to exist.

Tune in or don’t. The station plays either way.

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🔗‍️ Store Links:

• From Posts to Products: Don’t discount all the content you make. Use it effectively.

• New Fiction: Humboldt County: Day’s End (H. Sheridan), Fimbulwinter (Bjorn Skau)

• Finding Interzone: The Early Years by Litchfield Hills Press. Well worth the very affordable cost for a piece of history you never knew you wanted to know, but did.

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📺 Tuning the Dead Channel

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

Gibson wrote that. Everybody quotes it. Nobody talks about what’s actually on a dead channel.

I do. Because I’ve been there.

Late nights in Okinawa, spinning the shortwave dial past the last identifiable station, past Radio Nikkei and the BBC World Service and the Chinese numbers stations with their ghost-voiced women reading strings of digits to spies who may or may not still exist. Past all of it. Into the static.

The static isn’t empty.

There’s a sound between stations that most people interpret as nothing. Absence of signal. Dead air.

But if you sit with it, if you let your ears adjust the way your eyes adjust to darkness, shapes emerge. Patterns. Rhythms that aren’t random even though they should be.

The cosmic microwave background radiation is in there, the echo of the universe’s first scream, fourteen billion years old and still reverberating through every frequency we haven’t learned to name yet.

You were trained to skip past this. The whole culture is built on skipping past this. Find the station. Lock the signal. Consume the content. The space between stations is wasted time, dead air, nothing to see here.

But the dead channel is where the interesting shit lives.

Every breakthrough I’ve ever had, in writing, in magic, in understanding what the hell I’m doing on this planet, came from the dead channel.

From the space between knowing and not knowing.

From sitting in the static long enough to hear the pattern underneath it.

Meditation does this. Psychedelics do this. Sleep deprivation does this, though I wouldn’t recommend that particular tuning method.

The dial has edges. You can go past the last station. Most people don’t because the static makes them uncomfortable. It sounds like nothing and we’re terrified of nothing because nothing sounds a lot like the answer to questions we’ve been avoiding since we were old enough to ask them.

What’s past the last station on the band?

I don’t know. That’s the honest answer.

Forty+ years of spinning the dial and I still can’t name the frequency. But I can tell you it’s not empty. It’s not nothing. It’s the sound the universe makes when it thinks nobody’s listening.

Somebody should be listening.

Tune past the last station. Sit in the static. See what finds you.

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🛰️ Good Reads:

Down-Grid Rooms

Your memories are killing you.

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📡 You Are Not the Meat

The body is lying again.

It does this every morning. You wake up and it feeds you data, stories about hunger and gravity and the dull ache behind your left eye that might be a tumor or might be last night’s bourbon still looking for the drain. The body says I am you. The body says this is all there is.

You’re not. It isn’t.

What you are, if you strip away the meat and the credit score and the persistent illusion that you chose the right toothpaste this morning, is a frequency. A signal.

You are thought housed in a biological receiver, and the receiver has been picking up static for so long it forgot it was tuned to a station.

The Gnostics figured this out two thousand years ago and the Church burned them for it.

Not because they were wrong. Because they were inconvenient.

The Gnostic creation myth isn’t a fairy tale about a bearded engineer who builds a terrarium and gets mad when the lizards eat the wrong fruit. It’s a horror story.

The material world is a prison. The body is the cell. And the warden, the Demiurge, that blind idiot god who thinks he’s the only game in town, built the whole thing to keep the divine spark trapped in meat so it would forget it was ever anything else.

Read that again and tell me it doesn’t sound like a system you recognize.

Quantum mechanics has been circling the same drain for a century.

The observer effect. The particle behaves differently when you watch it. The universe, at its most fundamental level, appears to give a damn whether consciousness is paying attention.

This isn’t mystical hand-waving. This is peer-reviewed, replicated, deeply uncomfortable data that the materialist priesthood would rather not discuss at faculty parties.

The Buddhists call it Buddha-nature. The Gnostics call it the divine spark. The quantum physicists call it the observer. The chaos magicians call it the operant. Different maps. Same territory. A consciousness that precedes and exceeds the biological machinery it currently inhabits.

Nothing is true.

I’m not asking you to believe any of this. Belief is a trap.

Belief is the Demiurge’s favorite tool, the mechanism by which the receiver forgets it’s a receiver and starts thinking it’s the whole broadcast network.

I’m asking you to notice.

Notice the gap between the thought and the thinker.

Notice that you can observe your own mind, which means there’s a you that exists separate from the mind being observed.

Notice that the body screams its demands, hunger, pain, fear, pleasure, and something behind all of it, quiet as a frequency nobody’s measuring, watches the screaming without being consumed by it.

That’s you. That’s the signal.

The body will keep lying.

The receiver will keep calling static reality. But underneath all of it, quiet as a dead radio channel at 3 AM, the signal persists.

You’re not the antenna. You never were.

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🧠 ON MY MIND

Signal Loss

What Combat PTSD Actually Feels Like

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If you made it here, that means you should…

That’s it for this week. Don’t forget that standing still is how most things die. Until next time…

~ J.D.

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