Do you want the love of the fire? Cuz I’m not gonna wait around to give you my desire.

For some reason an ex-girlfriend of mine gave her number to a guy who called himself The Dragon. Not surprisingly he left her a string of insane voice messages. These are just a few of The Dragon’s many attempts at wooing.

This is the sound of Matthew Shifrin using his BrailleNote—a computer for the blind that pushes plastic nodes through tiny holes to display text in braille.

Five Days after I began broadcasting classical music over one of St. Louis' existing Christian stations Albert Pujols announced he was leaving the St. Louis Cardinals for the Los Angeles Angels. Now what does Albert Pujols have to do with JOY-FM you might be asking. Pujols was one of the major donors to the down payment fund for the purchase of KFUO. I propose Pujols take JOY-FM with him and in exchange we get one of L.A.’s classical stations. We would even settle for kMozart 1260 AM.

For this episode of Random Tape I hit the streets to find out what people in St. Louis think of Pujols’ departure.

Classical music station KFUO in St. Louis was one of the oldest radio stations west of the Mississippi. The stationed was owned by the Lutheran church up until last year when it was purchased by Gateway Creative Broadcasting’s JOY-FM. On July 6th, 2010 KFUO broadcasted Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D minor and then went silent. The following morning JOY-FM began it’s broadcast of Christian contemporary pop music. There are now six christian stations in St. Louis and zero classical stations.

On Saturday December 3rd, I powered up the 40-watt FM transmitter I built and “tagged” a Christian station (89.5 FM) with Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor K. 626: Sanctus. For a couple square miles at least, you can hear classical music on the radio again coming from high atop the chimney of a former convent.

This is a recording of the moment my signal went live.

My friend Casey was a holdout during Hurricane Katrina. He worked occasionally for a friend who owned Old Time Photo, one of those business where you take fake historical photos with your friends. On the night president Bush came to the city there was a seven-o-clock curfew. Casey was heading home at seven twenty when he had an encounter with a couple of state troopers. Casey tells the story of what happened next.

I was walking my dog the other night when I came across Larry Boutan sitting on a concrete wall drinking a beer. I noticed he was missing his right thumb so I asked him how he lost it. This is the story of that fateful night when a large woman started hurling canned goods at him…

Francis Matherne was the organist at St. Henry’s catholic church in New Orleans for 25 years. A while back he brought some of his poems over to my house so I could record them. This is a short clip from that recording session.

I came across this LP from 1963 that features three naked women playing bongos on the cover. It’s one of the most inexplicable recordings I’ve ever heard. Each side is a single fourteen-minute track of what appears to be two people having sex on a rusty bed while a man plays the bongos and shouts in what may or may not be a real language. I give you the final two minutes of side A.

Now that’s what I call goddamn great drum music!

These voice messages were left on my friend Danny’s phone by his dad. They are two of my all-time favorites. We’ll never know how the second message ends. The machine cut Danny’s dad off mid-message.

I was reading in bed one night when I heard a strange sound coming from the foot of my bed...