Hollow Earth Radio is an online, streaming, DIY radio station based out of a Wallingford mothership house. They champion local and Northwest music with live house shows and in-home performances, and they feature indie / underground music from around the world. Hollow Earth Radio is interested in what they call the “human experience.” They want to know the stories behind the songs and musicians. They want connection of internet to souls. Hollow Earth also airs audio oddities such as found sound, field recordings, paranormal story-telling, and dream analysis. Hollow Earth broadcasts twenty-four hours a day seven days a week.

Co-founder / director Garrett Kelly broke down the station’s make up:

How does Hollow Earth Radio broadcast its signal online? What is the technology used?
Kelly: We broadcast from an iMac computer at our central station in a Wallingford attic. We use software for the Mac called Nicecast that costs $40, and while not free, it’s really easy to setup and use. Using Nicecast, we broadcast our 'signal' out to a Shoutcast Server that is hosted by Rockandrollhosting.com and that server handles all the bandwidth of multiple people connecting to the radio at once. When you tune in via iTunes, you're actually connecting to that Shoutcast server which is being fed the stream by our attic computer, The Mothership.

Another piece of the puzzle is the service called LoudCity.com, which is how we pay royalties. LoudCity has an interesting way of dealing with the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) laws which basically say that royalty fees must be on a domain by domain basis. Instead of small broadcasters having to pony up a bunch of money in order to even get started, LoudCity has found a way to share the costs. Basically, they have a huge user base who all host their streams at the same website and each pay a small fraction of the bulk royalty rate. When you browse to the 'Listen' page of Hollow Earth Radio site you are technically on LoudCity.com but it looks fairly similar to the rest of the Hollow Earth site so most people would never know.

Walk us through your setup? Gear wise, what equipment do you run the station with?
We have the main iMac computer that is sadly in the shop right now after a hard drive failure. Right now, we're on a backup machine that someone donated. We have a small mixer next to the computer, a compressor, and a huge mic that Alex from 20/20 Cycles donated to us. He called it the 'Donkey Dick' mic. I saw Howard Stern using one. We also have two PC's tucked away in the corners for volunteers to upload new music and do behind the scenes stuff on. One of the PC's has also recently been setup to handle transfers of old reel to reel recordings - someone donated about a 1000 old reels to us and we're going through and digitizing them all.

What's the most embarrassing thing you've accidentally played on the air?
Eek. Maybe Rachel's drunk Georgetown / Capitol Hill Block Party interviews? Although, we didn't play those on accident. Sometimes DJ's don't realize they still have the mic on and you can hear what they are doing and talking about. But I like to listen a while before I tell the DJ’s they can still be heard.

Have you ever had a Canadian man on the air who claimed he was reptilian?
Sasha, Amber's sister, did in fact interview a man in Canada who said that he was a reptilian being, and he meant it. I was convinced of his reptilian-ness. Shannon Perry had a good show last weekend where she did two hours without playing any music - totally just winging it. She called up her friends and shot the shit. Forrest's Star Wars / Star Trek nerd show got simulcast by a terrestrial radio in New Jersey — very exciting!

How often does nudity occur during broadcasts?
I'm not so sure about this one, although one of our DJ's did have a first date while on air and we have the whole thing recorded. Amber and I went up to check on them and caught them kissing so we left them alone.

Run us through the setup for your remote broadcasts.
This is something I'm really excited about. I wrote some scripts and instructions for people so that they can use this program called 'ssh' to login to our Mothership remotely via their terminal window. It's all like War Games and shit. Anyway, they can login and there are these scripts I wrote so that they can stop the main broadcast and fade out the music and then as that's happening, they can start the broadcast on their computer. If all goes right, people listening will have no idea that the broadcast just switched from our Wallingford headquarters to say, Billy Joe in Albaqueque, New Mexico (who DJ's on sundays'). We've done live remote broadcasting from What The Heckfest in Anacortes, Wa, Folklife at the Vera stage, various house shows, and events around Seattle. Just this weekend we setup a remote broadcast system at YMCA Camp Colman over in the South Sound so that they can broadcast their 'campfires' over the summer. We're hoping to have a few more substations set up around the Washington area so that we can get more diverse voices and small broadcasters all hooked in together and sharing the same Hollow Earth Radio infrastructure.

Campfires? Internet campfire broadcasts? Will you be close mic'ing s’mores? Ghost stories? Ghost stories scare the ever living shit out of me.
I think it's going to be mostly skits and singing. Our first test run was with the Camp Counselors doing their version of American Idol. It was out of control.

How does internet radio work?
We press 'start broadcast' and the magic happens. Nicecast takes the audio and combines that with the data regarding the titles of the songs and passes that along in one stream. That's actually how LoudCity keeps track of what we're playing. They pull all the data out of Shoutcast stream we're on and keep track of it in a big database so we don't have to do any kind of hand written reporting like I’ve heard they do at terrestrial radio stations. It's also how your music player knows what to display for titles when you're listening to the radio.

How did you go from saying, "Lets have an internet radio station" to actually having an internet radio station?
Many motivating factors. I used to live in a house close to the current location of Hollow Earth and we would have a lot of house shows in the living room with touring bands. Amber Kai Morgan (co-founder / director) and I love these kind of shows and we really wished that we could find a way to let more people know about the great music that passes through the city.

There's also the fact that when I was growing up spent a lot of time on a CB radio in my dad's truck and would try to talk to truck drivers and / or listen in on their conversations. I definitely think the aesthetic of talking to strangers or listening in on conversations that weren't necessarily meant for me is something that still highly influences my life and the things I work on and I wanted to do that with the radio.

Perhaps the nerdiest influence was that I was, at the time, messing around with this virtual world called 'Second Life', and some random stranger there told me if you bought some land in the virtual world you could pipe in music using Nicecast. I thought it would be awesome to make a virtual version of the house I was living in and play live streams of the bands playing in the house. I actually think it's still broadcasting in Second Life.

What problems do you run into with your broadcasts? What's the most common glitch? How do you fix it?
One of the hardest things to deal with is all the music that we acquire and loading it all into iTunes. We have something like 500 gigabytes of music now and we need to make sure that that is also all backed up. Unlike terrestrial radios who play music right off the cd, we use iTunes to broadcast. I'm not sure if there's something wrong with our setup, because our hard drive did just crash, but iTunes has become incredibly slow. There's no way you could try to rip a cd and broadcast music at the same time, so we actually do all the ripping of the music we acquire using the PC’s.

Other problems include things like the fact that the majority of our DJ's, including Amber and myself, are all completely amateurs at doing any of this. With so many people coming in and out of the station messing with the mixer levels, tinkering with the plugins that we use to pull sounds out of Firefox or Skype (for telephone calls into the station), or just the plain old microphone, the configuration you walk into when you sit down to DJ can be sort of a mess. Also, since there are not people to man the station twenty-four hours a day, it's hard to time keeping music going all the time or know if it's ever down for some reason. Luckily we have a lot of volunteers who can notify us if we miss something, and I have some tools on my iPhone to remotely connect back to 'The Mothership' as we call it, and get things back in order.

What's the best way to listen to hollow earth?
After going to the website the first time and downloading the little 'listen.pls' file, I just have the link in my iTunes and pop it on while at work. I'm also working on an iPhone App. Right now I got something that connects and plays the songs, and soon I'll be showing the titles of what's playing. I got it working a while ago and was riding around on my bike listening to Karl Blau playing at a house show somewhere in the U-district. It was AWESOME. Right now the Hollow Earth Radio App is just a picture of our cat Esther with the play button where her third eye woud be.