It’s Not Just For Hipster Grannies
First Contact • Part One
We Apologize for the Tractor Beam / There Is No Sound Between Stars
September 13–19, 2026
1–3 PM Central
WDRT 91.9 FM
1–3 AM Central
WDRT 91.9 FM
First contact rarely happens the way anyone expects. Sometimes there is a signal. Sometimes there is silence. Sometimes there is a tractor beam, an awkward apology, and several unanswered questions. This week opens the first half of the story.
Wednesday looks up. Friday goes farther out. And somewhere between the two, the signal changes.
Wednesday • Eclectic Wonderland
Something has apparently gone slightly wrong with First Contact. Expect extraterrestrial detours, strange signals, questionable interstellar etiquette, and the sort of musical decisions that happen when nobody remembers where the manual went.
Friday Overnight • Velvet Umbrella Radio: After Hours
After midnight, First Contact changes temperature. The chatter disappears. The distance gets larger. Signals drift through darkwave, dream pop, ambient spaces, and whatever waits quietly between one star and the next.
The signal keeps turning.
First Contact • Part Two
September 20–26, 2026
Wednesday • Eclectic Wonderland
The visitors are back. Or perhaps they were here first. Either way, the archive reopens for the complete extraterrestrial transmission.
Friday Overnight • After Hours
After midnight, the signal gets quieter. Stardust drifts through the static, and Side B refuses to end.
This Week's Transmissions
Same frequencies. Different versions.
1–3 PM Central
WDRT 91.9 FM
1–3 AM Central
WDRT 91.9 FM
Wednesday pulls familiar songs apart, rewires them, rearranges the furniture, and puts everything back together slightly wrong. Then Friday overnight, the light changes. The signal gets darker. And somewhere inside the static... something starts listening back.
Wednesday • Eclectic Wonderland
Remixes, alternate versions, unexpected reconstructions, and familiar songs returning from somewhere just slightly left of where we remembered them.
Friday Overnight • Velvet Umbrella Radio: After Hours
Darkwave, post-punk, dream pop, midnight signals, cathedral shadows, distant voices, and the frequencies living quietly between stations.
The record keeps turning.
Three Shows • One Story
Sometimes the only way forward is to let the air change.
Three transmissions trace the same movement from three different rooms. First, the windows open. Then the storm arrives. And somewhere beyond all that weather... the tide finally turns.
Each artwork below is a door into its part of the story. Click the image to wander deeper.
Part One of Three • Eclectic Wonderland
Fresh air, strange songs, unexpected openings, and the peculiar courage it sometimes takes to stop holding everything shut.
Part Two of Three • Velvet Umbrella Radio: After Hours
The rain has moved on, but the room remembers it. After midnight, we stay with the silence that follows: dark rooms, distant signals, washed streets, and everything that sounds different once the weather breaks.
Part Three of Three • Velvet Umbrella Radio: Petals & Hooks
Eventually something gives. The current changes direction. The things we carried toward the water do not necessarily come back with us.
The record keeps turning.
This Week's Transmissions
The dream has two doors.
Two shows. One strange little dream. One door opens in daylight. The other waits until almost everyone else has gone to sleep.
Door One • Eclectic Wonderland
Robots, suspicious moonlight, impossible memories, electronic curiosities, and a café where waffles have apparently made some extremely questionable decisions.
Door Two • Velvet Umbrella Radio: After Hours
The lights dim. The edges soften. Shoegaze, darkwave, liminal rooms, distant signals, and the places that only seem to exist after midnight.
The curtain has opened.
The archive is waiting.
Four transmissions.
Four doors.
Follow the breadcrumbs.
Four transmissions.
Four doors.
One story moving quietly behind them all.
🗝️ Watch the mirrors.
Follow the strings.
The archive is open.
The curtain closes...
but somewhere behind the velvet...
the strings are still moving.
This week, familiar songs arrive wearing entirely different clothes. Covers, reinterpretations, fifty years of love, and a darker version of midnight.
Wednesday • Eclectic Wonderland • 1–3 PM Central • WDRT Viroqua
Two hours of unforgettable cover songs, musical reinvention, and a celebration of fifty years of love.
DJ Tea, Mr. Announcer Man, and Mickey Fingers explore familiar songs heard in entirely new ways, along with a special celebration honoring Jan and Art and fifty years of music woven through their story.
Friday Overnight • Velvet Umbrella Radio: After Hours • 1–3 AM Central
Dream pop. Darkwave. Shoegaze. Post-punk. Twenty-six haunting reinterpretations after dark.
Mickey Fingers and Celeste Violet slip deeper into the night with reinterpretations of music connected to The Cure, Bauhaus, Joy Division, Echo & the Bunnymen, David Bowie, Depeche Mode, and more.
Because sometimes the songs don’t change. We do.
Dancing mushrooms, midnight static, explicit release, and eight hours of corridors. Choose your door.
Wednesday • Eclectic Wonderland • WDRT
Dancing mushrooms, electronic curiosities, oddities, and questionable decisions.
Friday Overnight • Velvet Umbrella Radio: After Hours
Shoegaze, dream pop, darkwave, ambient drift, and music for everyone still awake.
Petals & Hooks • Door One • Explicit
Unfiltered. Unhinged. Explicit. Scream with us into the void.
Petals & Hooks • Door Two • Eight Hours
Liminal spaces, ambient rooms, distant signals, and somewhere to disappear for a while.
Corridor I
Corridor II
This Week’s Transmissions
This week we are opening two rather different doors from the archives. Wednesday brings comic-book heroes, giant monsters, peculiar auditions, and several spectacularly questionable decisions. Then Friday night slips through the threshold and into a moonlit darkroom beside the ocean.
Wednesday • Eclectic Wonderland • WDRT
Audities: Heroes, Monsters & Bad Decisions — Vol. 1
Heroes assemble. Monsters arrive without an appointment. Bad decisions are made with tremendous confidence. Open the comic-book transmission and follow the evidence.
Friday Overnight • Velvet Umbrella Radio: After Hours • WDRT
Two transmissions. One doorway. Moonlight, photographs, strange chemistry, and the tide moving just beyond the walls.
The first hour lingers at the threshold, where music becomes ritual and the doorway refuses to behave like an ordinary doorway. Then the second hour follows the filmstrip toward the sea, into a darkroom filled with moonlight, memory, and photographs that may know more than they should.
This Week’s Transmissions
Mystery, questionable evidence, cathedral shadows, beautiful corrosion, and music that wandered in after dark without knocking.
Wednesday • Eclectic Wonderland
An Incomplete Dossier
Follow the clues, inspect the evidence, and listen to the complete archive transmission. Answers remain suspiciously unavailable.
Friday Overnight • Velvet Umbrella Radio: After Hours
Cathedral echoes, dangerous shadows, and something beautiful moving beneath the static.
Turn down the lights. The signal gets darker after midnight. This one arrives wrapped in corrosion, velvet, cathedral reverb, and one dangerously seductive little transmission.
Open every window. Stay through the night. Follow the tide a little farther.
Show notes, stories, artwork and more links coming soon.
Show notes, stories, artwork and more links coming soon.
The music is here.
The stories and strange little doors are still unfolding.
More show notes, blog stories, artwork galleries and links are coming soon.
Peace, Love & Cosmic Bunny Rabbits
Archived radio shows, animated artwork, visual experiments,
strange discoveries, production diaries, and a growing collection
of beautifully questionable decisions.
Every transmission tells another part of the story.