The KSUA 91.5FM Album Archive Retrospective

Pictured: A dimmed picture of various stacks of CDs. Text that reads “The KSUA 91.5FM Album Archive Retrospective” is displayed over it.

In its 10 years of commercial operation and subsequent 30 years of sexier, ad-less noncommercial operation, KSUA 91.5FM has received countless albums, EPs, and singles in the form of CDs. If you were part of KSUA before its move to the Wood Center like me, Moody (AKA “Airwave Valentin”), you can probably recall the amazing “hangout” room full of CDs, with shelfs full of hundreds of CDs containing tens of thousands of obscure songs, spanning every genre you could think of. Not just your top 40s, “public event playlist,” sludge that you can hear anywhere, but worldwide indie and alternative gems, including music now on the verge of becoming lost media. Many of these albums are unavailable on Spotify!

Pictured: The KSUA “hangout” room back when the station was in Constitution Hall. Hundreds of CDs occupy shelves on the wall, surrounding a beautiful, colorful painted wall mural of an owl next to the letters “KSUA”.

I began volunteering at KSUA in late 2016, upsettingly almost a decade ago. I found my first foxy gray hair last week, that was pretty cool (note: delete this in the final draft. Or keep all of it including this sentence.) Initially, I just played music every week but expanded quickly into scripted segments and shows with thematically relevant music breaks. These shows would often make use of sound effects and audio filters, something that would eventually help me land my first job at KSUA as a Production Director. After a few years of volunteering, I went on a radio hiatus shortly before the Covid-19 pandemic hit and KSUA moved from Constitution Hall to the Wood Center. As things slowly went back to business as usual after the pandemic, I was feeling the KSUA itch. Going to scratch it, I located the new home of KSUA and ran into then-General Manager (GM) Kevin Swenson, not to be confused with his successor Kevin Huo. Swenson recognized me from the pre-pandemic days as the DJ that did some wild things with audio editing. We caught up over a brief chat where he mentioned KSUA was hiring, and about a week later I was KSUA’s Production Director.

I was sad to see the lack of CDs in the new office space. A single shelf was relocated and saved, with the rest boxed up and put into storage. I understood why though, things change. Everything is MP3s these days. You no longer need all these Vinyls and CDs and their gorgeous album arts people spent hours creating taking up physical space. Oh, it’s 2025 now. In 2025 you don’t even need the MP3s taking up space in your digital storage, it’s all streaming the music and not actually owning it, to the profit of the streaming platform executives over the artis– on second thought, this is getting off topic. 

Pictured: The boxes of CDs from KSUA’s storage. They are displayed at an angle and some of the boxes are overflowing.

So, what was to become of these CDs taking up space in storage? The CDs nor their contents were doing anything for us, and we weren’t doing anything for them. At one point, someone tried to offload them all at a local transfer site where they would either be fully junked in a week or destroyed by the elements. I hated this idea. I intervened and took all the boxes home with me, much to the detriment of my personal living space. For a couple years, I was slowly listening to one at a time, jotting down their info, amending some of the errors on the old reviews taped/stapled onto the packaging, and adding them back to the station’s automation system if they were good. Without the need for the disc, I would rehome each one as prizes or handouts at events to make sure it was still in physical circulation.

After holding onto these boxes for years and across three different apartments, I admitted to myself that holding onto them was more trouble than they were worth. I like to travel light, I move houses a lot and I don’t really like merchandise or hoarding “things and stuff.” I’m a real Marie Kondo-type. Despite wanting to downsize these CD boxes, the feeling I was missing out on hidden gems gave me a twitch that wouldn't go away, and it felt disrespectful to the artists to dump them all out.

In Spring 2024, I took over as KSUA’s new GM. Admittedly, the station was in a bit of chaos and there was a lot that needed to be fixed. Day one, we had a teeny scare with the FCC where I had to scramble through a few years of paperwork to get us relicensed. To make matters worse, shortly after, our automation computer’s hard drive unexpectedly died. As it turned out, our automation library hadn’t been backed up on a cloud or anything for so long, that the most recent backup was so old it couldn’t be used. Lovely. Suddenly, the huge boxes of CDs were my heroes. Between hour-long support phone calls starting up a new automated system from scratch on a backup computer and getting it to broadcast properly, I would listen to many of these CDs, categorizing the songs on them and dumping them into the fresh, empty new automation system. Due to other career opportunities and shifting priorities, I had to step down from being GM at KSUA, although I still wanted to stick around and stay involved because KSUA means a lot to me. As of now, I’m still here, uploading music, working on projects, and waiting for a new GM to pop up so I can take time off from my main job to train them. 

During this downtime time, my main focus at KSUA has been finally getting every single one of these CDs digitally archived with proper tags. For a couple of months I spent hours a day archiving each disc and preparing multiple songs on each for automation system adds. I put all my other KSUA projects on hold to get through all 700+ CDs as fast as possible. I would back them up while responding to emails, during Zoom meetings, and even outside of work. I was very serious about this. A single CD could range from a few minutes to well over ten minutes based on a variety of factors. Also, some of the CDs were not given proper metadata, so I had to meticulously go in and give them proper metadata based on track listings on the packaging for clarity. Note: Any future discs sent to us that do not have proper metadata are… probably still going to be accepted, but begrudgingly so.

Pictured: The CDs from the boxes all stacked onto one another. Around 100 CDs weren’t placed on the stack due to packaging or casing damage making them too unstable to stack. Approximately 4 and a half feet tall.

Why go through all this trouble for a bunch of dusty old songs? As an artist of visual and audio mediums, there was the aforementioned “hidden gems” twitch. It also just felt disrespectful to all the artists who spent hours of their lives pouring sleepless sweat and tears into these passion projects. All that time those people learned to play those instruments, write those lyrics, etcetera, and then burn them onto discs and go through the trouble of mailing them to us. Sure, some of these were distributed by labels that did some of the heavy lifting, but a lot of them were personally sent in by individuals. And sure, some of them… aren’t very good, I’ll give you that. But the majority of them are pretty good, and a lot of them are fantastic. I felt the need to honor the dedication, craft, and generosity of these artists. These artists are integral parts of KSUA’s history as an alternative station and deserve to be immortalized on our airwaves and within our files. You never know, one of these previously forgotten songs playing on KSUA might cause some wacky butterfly effect that gives it a second life, like how The Ghost Town DJs’ 1996 song My Boo exploded in popularity in 2016 after being used in a viral video.

So with all these things archived, you’ll likely see some of these discs popping up at local second hand shops and handed out by KSUA at events around UAF. Now that I have them all backed up, I can actually get back to listening to them. Ever since what I’ve dubbed the Fatal KSUA Automation Crash of ‘24, our automation system has had a small selection of 1,000 or so songs. It seems like a lot, but it really isn’t for a station like ours. If you’re a frequent listener you’ve probably been hearing the same song multiple times a week. This is par for the course on any other station that’s driven for profit, but not for cool and varied stations where money doesn’t matter like ours. Thankfully, with this digital archive of countless songs, you’ll be hearing thousands more songs start to trickle back into our robot DJ’s selection. And the best part is? We’re working on getting better, proper, physical music backups that will be carefully maintained, meaning that if we ever have a catastrophic crash again, we can immediately dump all the thousands of songs back in. 

With this project finally complete, I am looking to upload one or two of these albums a week, and choose at least one a month to do a deep dive on. One lucky album a month will be the subject of a new retrospective KSUA blog post, with extensive research done on the artists behind it, and me attempting to contact the artists that worked on it for an interview. Beyond that, I will be retooling the music submission system KSUA currently has in place, and I might start looking into backing up the CDs we’ve still got displayed on the big shelf in our office, alongside archiving our Vinyl and Cassettes.

For now, thanks for reading, and take care.

Moody AKA “Airwave Valentin”

March 24th 2025