When you enter the EMU take a left, go past the Jamba Juice, past the students studying for their midterms, walk until you reach the craft center, take a right and hidden in plain sight is the heartbeat of campus. A small tardis of a radio station: 88.1 KWVA Eugene.
“Those times where everybody’s not really awake yet, I turn on my home stereo and switch to 88.1. Well, who am I kidding? It’s always on 88.1,” cinema studies senior Joaquin Arriola, who goes by DJ Taco Supreme, said.
DJ Taco Supreme is a DJ and the production coordinator at KWVA since 2019. He manages the equipment, runs the station’s Sunday live sessions, and if you’ve ever tuned in you might have heard one of the PSA’s and station IDs —- think “you’re listening to 88.1 KWVA Eugene” at the top of the hour — he makes for the station.
“It’s really vulnerable. You think like, oh, it’s whatever. I’m not going to be nervous. And then you go on, you put the headphones on, you turn the mic up and you press on,” DJ Taco Supreme said. “You do that and a red light comes on and suddenly you’re speaking into a void of potentially everybody in Eugene and Springfield that could be listening.”
DJ Taco Supreme hosts “The Station Rotation Variety Power Hour” from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. on Mondays. His time slot consists of a mix of new music — which the station encourages all DJs to play — and the “classics,” which he described as Wu-Tang Clan, Deftones, Wilco and the Grateful Dead. It’s all about variety, he said.
“I think that every person will be confident in saying, ‘I have a pretty niche music taste,’ or ‘I have a pretty unique music taste,’ and then they come here and they realize physically how much music exists in the world,” DJ Taco Supreme said.
The mountain of CDs stacked floor to ceiling in the music director’s office might make that realization come a little faster for newcomers. Keep in mind: this mountain is only the uncatalogued CDs from the old KWVA office pre-2016 — back when the station was occupying a former women’s restroom prior to the EMU remodeling. All of the cataloged releases occupy their own shelves and most new releases are sent in digitally via email.
Jackson Kvikstad is a senior environmental science and music major as well as music director at KWVA Eugene. “Of the several hundreds of emails I get a week, I will give most of them a listen and try and discern like, ‘this would sound good on the radio’ or ‘this wouldn’t,’” he said.
Kvikstad, also known as DJ Fud, started working as the music coordinator over the summer. As a DJ, he hosts “The Evil Radio Show” on Mondays 10 a.m.-12 p.m. where he plays primarily funk and soul.
Kvikstad said one of the requirements for being a DJ is playing a certain amount of new music —- qualified as music released in the last six months.
A constant rotation of new music is a symbiotic relationship between labels and radio. Playing and charting new music helps labels and promoters keep track of what’s popular. This keeps them sending in more music to the station.
DJ Taco Supreme said, “It’s great that we all have our own music tastes, but we all collectively have this attitude where we want to support new music that comes out.”
This is a big year for KWVA. The station has recently updated their outdated website, the last of the university’s departments to get one, according to DJ Taco Supreme. Additionally, KWVA is adding a second frequency extending to Oakridge, and they have begun uploading live sessions to their YouTube again.
While KWVA is expanding, other radio stations across Eugene are struggling. Many radio frequencies have been bought by corporations, such as Cumulus Media, and transitioned into programmed broadcasting, but KWVA remains run by people with a passion for sharing music with the world.
To keep the radio running is not as easy as hitting a button and choosing a song. DJ Taco Supreme spends approximately 25 hours a week in the station from DJing to hosting the live sessions featuring local bands from across Eugene. Kvikstad spends several hours every day in the office listening to new music and sharing it with the DJs. But both DJs said you get as much out of it as you’re willing to put in.
“There’s a certain soul of radio that’s been lost that is still alive and thriving at KWVA. If there’s one reason that people should listen to it over watching another episode of The Office, it’s to hear something real, to hear something unique,” DJ Taco Supreme said.
