Turn It On and Leave It On

KFRP is Killing Field Records' own radio station. It's live right now at kfrp.live, it runs 24 hours a day, and it sounds better than just about any internet radio you've ever put on. The standard stream runs at 320kbps, which is as high as MP3 goes. Most internet stations stream at 128 or 192. Hit the Lossless button on the player and the stream doesn't throw anything away at all. Underground hip-hop, horrorcore, dark instrumentals and the whole KFR roster, coming out of Lincoln, Nebraska, in the best quality I can push through the internet. It's fucking badass, and I'm not going to pretend to be humble about it.

So that's what it is. Here's why I built it.

Killing Field Records needed a bigger footprint online. That's the unglamorous truth and I'm not going to dress it up. We put out records, we post about them, we play shows, and then the internet forgets we exist until the next drop. That's how it goes for almost every independent label, and it's how it's gone for us. A radio station doesn't let that happen. It runs all day and all night whether I'm awake or not, whether I posted anything that week or not, and every person who leaves it on in the background is somebody hearing KFR who probably wasn't going to come looking for us on their own.

The name took about four seconds. Killing Field Radio Programming. KFRP. It's on brand, it sounds like a station, and that was the end of that conversation.

What's actually running it

If you've never thought about how an internet radio station works, it's way less mysterious than it sounds. There's a little Mac mini sitting in the studio. It runs software called AzuraCast, which is basically a robot DJ that never sleeps and never asks for a raise. It pulls songs from the music library on my main studio computer, figures out what plays next, blends one song into the next, and sends the whole thing out to anybody listening at kfrp.live. The signal leaves the building through a secure tunnel, so the station can reach the whole world without me leaving the studio's front door wide open on the internet.

What it plays isn't random. I built a pile of playlists and gave every one of them a weight, which is just a fancy way of saying I told the robot how often to reach into each bucket. That's the difference between a station and somebody's phone on shuffle. Shuffle doesn't care what it played last. KFRP leans the way I want it to lean, and when it's working right you can feel it.

Before any of that could happen I had to clean house. The library was full of duplicate tracks and files in formats the station software didn't even want to play. I ended up writing scripts just to hunt down copies of the same song so the station wasn't running one track three times under three different names, and converting everything else into something it could actually stream. Not glamorous. Necessary.

Making it sound right

This is the part I actually care about, because I'm an engineer first. A lot of internet radio sounds like a phone call. Everything gets crunched down so it streams cheap, and the music pays for it. I didn't want that. Getting the lossless stream working took a custom setup and more hours than I'm going to admit to here, and it was a genuine pain in my ass. Worth it.

Then I found out the station software had a feature switched on that was quietly turning every single song down to the same level. On paper that sounds fair. In practice it took records with real punch and flattened them out, so everything came out of your speakers sounding polite and lifeless. I mix these records for a living. I spend hours getting a kick to hit right. I wasn't about to let a robot undo that work in real time, so I shut it off and kept one processor on the very end of the chain so the station hits as hard as the records do.

And then, because nothing is ever easy, a software update knocked the entire station over. I had to dig through the guts of the thing and put it back together piece by piece. It came back, and I learned more about how it works than I ever wanted to.

What you'll hear

There's no fake morning show here. No guy pretending to care about the weather, no traffic report, no sponsor read every eight minutes. The core of the station is the Killing Field roster: Sugar Cones, enemyX, Jinx, BLXXDSHOT, and my own instrumentals. In between our stuff you'll hear underground and classic hip-hop, the shit we grew up on and the shit we're bumping right now. It's the music we actually want playing at three in the morning, which is the only test I've ever cared about.

Every day, Jinx's Book of Colors trilogy gets its time on the station. Black, Sanguine and Gold. That isn't really a programming decision. It's how I'm going to honor my brother on this platform, and it's going to play every single day for as long as this thing is on the air.

The site

kfrp.live isn't just a play button. When a song changes, the page knows the second it happens and swaps the artwork and the title right then. When one of our artists comes on, you get a bio I wrote. When it's anybody else, the site goes and pulls a summary of who they are on its own, because I want people walking away from this with new artists to look up, not just ours. That feature already bit me once. It looked up Jamie Madrox and came back with the Marvel Comics character instead of the Twiztid rapper. Fixed now.

It works from your lock screen and through your car's Bluetooth like any other app, so you can actually drive with it. If you open the full player you can request songs. There's at least one easter egg hidden on the site, and I'm not telling you where. And for the record, the first version of the player had a glow effect that came out blue and purple and pink, and it looked like a rainbow nightclub. That did not survive. It's red and black now, like everything else around here.

It was never just for us

The other reason KFRP exists is that it was never supposed to be a KFR jukebox. I want to give other artists a platform. There are people around here making real music who never get a look, and those are exactly the people I want on this station. If you make music, especially underground music, especially out here in the Midwest where nobody's paying much attention, send it to [email protected] and I'll give it a listen.

Where it's going

Right now the station runs itself, but that's where it starts, not where it ends. Live DJ sets are coming. Call-ins are coming. I want people calling in, requesting something, talking their shit, and actually being on the air, not just leaving a comment under a post. I'm also working on getting KFRP into the radio apps and directories people already use, so you can find it without having to remember a web address.

And there's some hardware on its way from China right now that might put KFRP somewhere you'd never expect to hear it. That's all I'm saying about that.

So go to kfrp.live and bookmark it. Leave it on while you work, in the car, at three in the morning when you can't sleep. Tell somebody about it. And if you've got music, send it.

– Cryptic-X