Toronto Radio Project is the new voice of the underground
From a dingy basement on Bloor, an upstart Internet radio station is showcasing local music
One of the most quintessentially “Toronto” things about the Toronto Radio Project might be that the chap behind the whole experiment isn’t from Toronto at all.
Frazer Lavender relocated across the Atlantic from London just two summers ago, and yet already he’s gone all-in on a start-up underground radio station — underground both figuratively and literally, since TRP operates via wearetrp.com out of a single, unadorned basement room beneath a vintage shop in the Bloor and Dufferin area. It’s dedicated to giving the true depth and diversity of this city’s musical talent a public platform.
That’s kind of the way it goes in Toronto, though. Our town has matured a great deal culturally in recent years, but it’s still perhaps too modest and insecure by nature to really recognize what it has. Sometimes it takes an outside set of eyes and ears to draw our attention to our own gifts, to reassure us that, yes, Toronto might actually be happening right now.
“I can’t really comment on that because I haven’t been here that long, but that echoes well with what people say,” says Lavender, 29. “They say Toronto right now feels like it’s ‘coming up’ or it feels good.
“I was spending time here before I moved here because my girlfriend had already moved, and obviously she was a big draw. But I spent time here and I liked it, and I liked Toronto for all the different neighbourhoods and stuff.”
“Obviously it’s different from London, which is much bigger, but it’s what you make of it. I always try not to compare cities. There are always better things elsewhere, but things here are better than elsewhere. I felt at home here straight away. It’s an international, cosmopolitan kind of city.”
What this international, cosmopolitan city — a city blessed with one of the most fertile and celebrated homegrown music scenes on the planet — did seem to be lacking, in Lavender’s estimation, was one of the grassroots Internet radio stations that have flourished across the U.K. and Europe, and, to a slightly smaller extent, in the States, through outlets such as Los Angeles’s Dublab or New York’s late East Village Radio.
There were, he realized, legions of musicians, DJs and producers in Toronto making and playing music — from underground electronic music and hip hop to off-the-radar indie rock and metal — that didn’t have an outlet beyond occasional, fleeting exposure on college radio, yet who still commanded loyal local followings.
Lavender, who shared office space with an Internet radio outlet in London a few years ago and was impressed by the sense of community it fostered, sensed an opportunity.
“There’s nothing just kind of DIY and Toronto-centric,” he says. “So I just had it in my mind. And I actively spoke to people who I met or friends I made, and all the feedback was good to the idea so I just kept it in my mind. And it just kind of snowballed.”
Eventually Lavender, a media-advertising consultant with a reasonably flexible work schedule, simply decided to go for it. He contacted various DJs and producers he admired to gauge interest, recruited potential collaborators through the old-fashioned means of posters strung up along Queen St., and scraped together enough cash and donated gear to assemble a barebones but broadcast-worthy DJ booth. Finally, and most crucially, he found a dirt-cheap rental space in which to house the operation.
With no other mandate than to “just be different from any other local audio outlet,” the Toronto Radio Project launched on Nov. 24 with a “technical-metal/jazz-fusion hour” titled Technocracy and a two-hour mix of nu-skool R&B, hip hop, downtempo and house presided over by eclectic local collective Bedroomer.
The rollout was stealthy, just a simple Facebook announcement that TRP was live, but “people were in the chat room straight away” and the response was encouraging. Two months later, the station has a program of 40 shows, all produced and hosted by volunteers, cycling through a schedule that runs live from the afternoons into the evenings on weekdays and re-streams previous broadcasts overnight.
Eventually, the goal is to get TRP on the air seven days a week, although shooting for a 24-hour schedule seems ambitious, since it’s only Lavender and right-hand man Michael Newton running the show.
“Any time I’m not at work, I’m here,” says Newton, after dashing from a temp job to the TRP studio to relieve Lavender of managerial duties on a Friday afternoon.
Somehow, on top of helping out with daily operations, Newton also finds time to host two shows of his own: The weekly live-music-abouttown preview Intersections on Wednesdays and, every second Wednesday, a conceptual gem called Last Orders, wherein he plays sombre night music by the likes of the Carpenters, Radiohead and Scott Walker whilst tickling the ivories at an imaginary pub called the Richmond Arms.
It’s a labour of love, he concedes, “but that’s what I think keeps the quality of it up. These people are spending a good amount of their week preparing their shows and trying to get them to sound as profes- sional as possible without a budget. It’s not just, ‘Come in and DJ when you want.’ It’s ‘OK, you’re on every second week from 7 to 9 p.m. on Wednesday nights.’ They’re clearing their schedules. They’re telling their girlfriends, ‘I can’t go to dinner.’ It’s got to be important to people.”
The fact that TRP is basically funded out of Lavender’s pocket to zero return is also a good motivator for quality control, says Newton.
“It would be nice if it was self-sustainable,” he says. “I’m sure Frazer feels that way a little more strongly because it’s his money right now, but also it would be nice for me to know that he’s not dumping ‘X’ amount a month into it.
“That’s gutsy. It either takes someone who’s really, really passionate about it or someone who’s a complete idiot to do it. Luckily, I think he’s of a passionate nature.”
DJ, electro-funk auteur and Good Timin’ Records founder Jex Opolis expresses a similar sentiment. He’s agreed to keep doing his smooth-groovin’ Dance With the Stranger show on alternate Wednesdays for TRP, despite relocating to Brooklyn a month ago, partly because he appreciates that Lavender is “kind of doing it out of the goodness of his heart.”
“I’m sort of viewing myself as a brand ambassador for TRP,” he jokes from Brooklyn. “I’m like the Drake of TRP. I still have my Toronto roots, but I’m sort of ‘abroad.’
“I think it’ll benefit, going forward, from just having all these different voices coming through. Hopefully TRP will be a good platform for Toronto artists and as the tide rises, all the boats will rise with it. So being affiliated with it is a really cool thing and to be involved on the ground level, as it were, is pretty cool.”
Lavender isn’t averse to having TRP pay for itself someday, perhaps through hosting events or selling merchandise, but that isn’t the point. In any case, his cash outlay is minimal. Even the SOCAN licence doesn’t cost anything because the fee is calculated on money made from streaming, “and we don’t make any.”
“We want to make money from it, but in the right way,” says Lavender.
“These people are spending a good amount of their week preparing their shows and trying to get them to sound as professional as possible.” MICHAEL NEWTON, TORONTO RADIO PROJECT DJ