In her freshman year, Neepa Acharya organized a student string quartet and got Barry Shiffman, second violinist of the resident St. Lawrence String Quartet, to coach it. As a sophomore, she gives free violin lessons to kids at a local middle school. Acharya is co-chair of Sanskriti and treasurer of another South Asian group, SAHELI, and she single-handedly built and tends the herb garden at Columbae, the co-op where she lives. In her spare moments she hosts—what else?—Eclectica, a weekly midday show on KZSU, 90.1 FM.
It’s a fitting title. “It’s like, my show is ‘Eclectica,’ and my life is ‘eclectica,’ so I can just keep talking about so many things,” says the likely double major in music and economics. “The three hours on the radio is a time for me to do something I really enjoy.”
From Isaac Stern to Hot Hot Heat to George Clinton and the P-Funk All Stars. Acharya plays vinyl and CDs. Major labels and indies. Glam, math rock, punk, funk, classical, hip-hop, alternate country, blues and flamenco. “If you’re a lover of music, you don’t stick to just one thing. You love music for what it is.”
Um, math rock? “It’s between metal and punk rock, where the music constantly changes time signatures and modulates to different keys,” Acharya says. “It’s similar to classical music and becomes a rhythmic cycle, constantly changing.”
Thank you, Milwaukee Youth Symphony. Years of lessons on violin, viola, piano and French horn probably deserve a line in the show’s credits. “Being trained classically, I think I look for things with a lot of intricacies, like a lot of guitar work, or music that uses polyphonic tradition, with more chord structures—things that aren’t minimalist,” Acharya says.
Tuning in from the South Pole. KZSU inherited its equipment in the 1960s from a Girl Scout troop on the techno-rise. Several lights on the mixing board don’t work, and the words “replacement parts” make the chief engineer giggle. But the 500-watt signal that emanates from the dingy bunker under Pigott Theater can be heard from San Jose to Oakland, and music is streamed over the Internet to listeners as far afield as the McMurdo Station in Antarctica. “Sometimes I feel like a teacher when I’m on the air,” Acharya says. “I like to tell a lot of stories about the musicians and their history.”
DJ Decorum 101. There’s a long waiting list for the 50-plus DJ slots, and only a handful of show hosts are undergraduates. Everyone who makes the cut has to put in 15 hours each quarter at the station on such tasks as reviewing new CDs or looking for older “lost lambs” that have escaped from the fold. The DJs also take a broadcast training course. “The idea is to teach you how to use the boards and do bookkeeping, and also get familiar with what FCC violations you could commit while you’re on the air,” Acharya says.
Time for something a little different. In a library of more than 100,000 titles to choose from, plus the 100 to 200 new CDs that arrive each week, Acharya can pluck out something as specific as postpunk bands from San Diego, like The Strokes or Blood Brothers. “For college students and people in the community who are exposed to pop music on stations run by Clear Channel, there are so many interesting artists they don’t hear about,” she says. “That’s why I like to play a lot of different music, because I think it really is accessible and people can find things they’ll really enjoy.” Postpunk, by the way, is a mixture of funk and rock ’n’ roll.
