Making the music seen

Sam Thompson didn’t know what a podcast was until just about the moment he recorded his first.

Nearly 13 years later, the music-obsessed journalist from Winnipeg is one week away from posting the 1,000th episode of Witchpolice Radio, a weekly local music interview program that’s outlived the iPod itself.

Since the show’s pilot in 2012, “doing Witchpolice” has become a rite of passage for hundreds of recording artists spanning musical eras and genres. Whether the artist makes Portage la Prairie queercore punk like Ticked Off (Ep. 997), cathartic metalcore such as Hopscotchbattlescars (No. 782), or danceable hip-hop fusion such as JayWood (No. 589), Thompson has maintained an open and receptive ear.

“I never thought the show would make it 100 episodes, let alone 500, let alone 1,000, so it’s kind of cool,” says Thompson, who will be on the receiving end of listener-submitted questions for the milestone episode.

“I mean, there’s so many bands in Winnipeg of all genres that I haven’t even scratched the surface.”

Recorded via video interviews conducted from Thompson’s bedroom studio, Witchpolice Radio emerged from the podcaster’s former blogspot.com site, which served as a digital repository for a collection of gig posters, music recommendations and local taped recordings by bands including Thompson’s own and those of his friends.

A devoted collector of physical media, the 42-year-old enthusiast “never did the MP3 thing,” so podcasting felt out of his media vernacular until a friend sent him a direct link to a long-form audio interview with Henry Rollins of Black Flag.

“That was a lightbulb moment. ‘Oh, I can do this, too.’ You don’t need any kind of special equipment,” says Thompson, a Red River creative communications grad who works as an online journalist for CJOB.

As a teenager, Thompson was inspired by low-budget, low-cost independent all-ages concerts that shared the same self-starter ethos, including Corefest, a music festival held at the base of Garbage Hill each year from 1992 to 2000.

“Going to see that as a 13-year-old or whatever was huge in just realizing that not only can people start their own bands, but there can be this whole ecosystem for local bands to do it themselves,” he says.

In the late 1990s, Thompson enjoyed going to all-ages shows at the Royal Albert and the West End Cultural Centre, while also playing guitar in bands such as Filtered Reality and Grandpa’s Army, whose five-piece horn section filled bar rooms “at the height of the third-wave ska revival,” he says.

“I just started out doing that, starting terrible bands, meeting other people in terrible bands, and then we’d go see each other’s terrible bands,” Thompson says with sharp self-effacement. “And then all of our terrible bands would be opening for some good ones, and that would be an introduction to the ones that are actually worth listening to.”

At Red River, Thompson enjoyed a stint covering entertainment at The Projector, the college’s venerated weekly, and upon graduation, was hired at the Virden Empire-Advance, published since 1907 in the western Manitoba town.

As a general assignment reporter, Thompson covered all elements of the paper’s mix, which periodically included shows at the historic Aud Theatre. (Founded in 1912, the theatre is currently raising funds for the second phase of its ongoing restorations project ahead of November’s run of Something Rotten!, featuring a cast of 50.)

“Bands would come through once a month and the entire town would go to see whoever it was, so I saw stuff I’d never have thought to check out because I was there and this was the only show happening in town,” recalls Thompson, who started Witchpolice while working in communications for insurance companies.

With Witchpolice, Thompson says he was able to keep his feet in both the local journalism world and local music scene, viewing the podcast as an ongoing archive.

“I feel like that’s what the podcast has become — it’s a way to sort of archive all this stuff that’s happening,” says Thompson, who in early episodes was joined by co-hosts including former bandmate Rob Crooks and Jon Askholm, the keyboardist of the defunct mayoral indie pop group Glen Murray.

The patron-supported podcast, which is available for listening via streaming services and through broadcasts on 101.5 UMFM, is a “very, very bare bones” production, says Thompson, whose collection includes about 1,300 local records, tapes and CDs.

Prior to the pandemic, the host would conduct interviews at artists’ houses or jam spaces with a digital recorder, but a pandemic-era pivot to Zoom has benefited the show, limiting cross-city mileage and giving Thompson better control over audio quality.

Thompson hesitates to suggest any guests who have stood out from the podcast’s first 1,000 visits, but makes a compelling case for investing time in lesser-known entities.

“The people I assume are going to be big episodes because they’re relatively famous that’s not often the case,” he says, citing his listener statistics. “Often it’ll be a band that’s only played a handful of shows. They’re in a basement. They recently started, and they’re really pumped about it. Those episodes get the best feedback and get shared the most because those people are hungry for it.

Thompson points out that an artist interviewed five times that day about their new record is not going to be as passionate about sharing it as a band giving its first ever interview, whose members’ enthusiasm and gratitude is palpable.

“There are artists that I love whose music I love, and I’m happy that I’ve been able to talk to them, but these unknown ones, where they reach out and I give them a listen to the one single they have — I love it. Those ones are often the most fun interviews to do,” he says.

Witchpolice Radio’s 1,000th episode will be shared on Aug. 31.

ben.waldman@freepress.mb.ca

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