Castle Point Radio (WCPR), the Stevens student broadcasting station, announced its Fall 2023 show schedule, rolling out new hosts to curate the sound of Stevens. Featuring hour-long segments of sounds from Weezer to smooth jazz, WCPR opens up its radio channel to students interested in sharing their music taste or learning about station broadcasting.
Interested but hesitant to commit to a show? After two club meetings, WCPR members can sign up for shows throughout the semester and become radio hosts in which their music or stream will fill empty slots in between current shows. WCPR welcomes all music styles and show topics beyond streaming as the eBoard walks new radio hosts through DJ training, which can include uploading personal playlists to adjusting mics for live guests or talk shows.
On air, anything goes, as long as it meets WCPR guidelines. Daniel Korzen, WCPR President and 3/4 Electrical Engineering major, hosts the Wednesday night show UpBeat and is a member of Dale, a local band on campus. As Korzen has Wince, an underground band from Brooklyn, on repeat, he says WCPR is, “a way to get introduced to new music and underground artists. Bringing that to light outside of commercial radio, there’s a lot of freedom and you can get into different genres a lot easier.” Korzen recognizes that many students may not know that Stevens operates a student radio station, but emphasizes the silver lining of being under the radar. Compared to music organizations based in live events and artist performances, WCPR can lie low which offers freedom to explore underground genres and hone in on radio host personas. Korzen and the eBoard make the Stevens radio scene accessible with easy show sign-up and support.
While weaved into the music network on campus, WCPR stands as one of the oldest media organizations on campus, with strong alumni associations reaching back to the 70s that still attend alumni mixer events. Korzen emphasizes the point that WCPR boosts and contributes to other music clubs as a network, but is also looking to maintain a distinct role by hosting independent events. Korzen says, “I love collaborating with the music orgs, but a big thing is I don’t want everyone to get muddled into one, having that distinction is important not only for administration sake, but also pushing different stuff and so it’s not all under one umbrella.” Maintaining a line of distinction to acknowledge each music and media organization from each comes from a concern for contingency and preserving the stand alone music network that gives the campus a different scene that sets it apart from other engineering schools.
After setbacks from COVID, which were felt within all performance clubs, WCPR is on the move for growth. For WCPR, shows were slow to pick up after returning to campus from virtual sessions in which the studio contains relics from artists that had visited WCPR to perform in the past. Posters hang on the studio wall and a signed Mitski CD sits on the desk from when she played for WCPR in the early 2000s. Looking to focus on event management to feature Stevens artists, Korzen is interested in developing the WCPR website to cover music journalism as a radio station looking to give a platform for artists as well as an archive for the undulating music scene in Jersey. Korzen elaborates on the ephemeral quality of college bands in the area, “I think the ability to not only play live on the radio, but also have recordings of what’s going on at the moment at Stevens is very important.”
As WCPR welcomes new hosts to fill the channels with music and commentary to represent the Stevens voice, the club looks to transition the website to access blog-style articles and samples of recent band events, in addition to the live WCPR stream. Korzen embraces diverse forms of music media as “having access for anyone creatively if they want to write something, if they want to photo something, if they want to play something… That’s just how I view it and try to push things.”
