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About The daily Astorian. (Astoria, Or.) 1961-current | View Entire Issue (Oct. 18, 2018)
4 // COASTWEEKEND.COM On Saturday nights, ‘Everything’ is all around you KMUN radio show marks 100th episode Oct. 20 By ANDREW TONRY FOR COAST WEEKEND I t’s Saturday night and the radio is tuned to KMUN. Maybe you’re listening at home, baking cookies. Or maybe you’re in the car, barreling down U.S. Highway 101 as rain pounds the windshield. At first you may not realize it. What’s coming through your speakers seems something like the radio you’re accus- tomed to: big songs and smash cuts. But something is askew. The show’s sponsor — the Darling- ton Electronic Instruments — couldn’t be real, could it? You perk your ears, lean in. Was that just a PSA for … STDs? A taste test of … Soylent? Meditative new age music and ... snoring? George Costanza and … Depeche Mode? OK, you start to think — am I losing it? What’s happening here? Has the world gone mad? This hilarious, subversive, snaking and surreal ride is “Everything,” a four- year-old program on KMUN whose 100th episode airs 10 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 20. For creator Will Chapman, it’s an occasion both marvelous and fraught. Hyper-obsessive about “Everything,” the milestone compounds Chapman’s never-fully-satisfied perfectionism. The average episode takes Chapman between 30 and 40 hours to produce. As the barrage of audio — which includes music movie clips, stand-up comedy and God-knows-what-else — ping-pongs at such a frenetic pace, live mixing would be impossible. Anyway, Chapman’s focus is granular: Every millisecond is critical. It has to be just so. While music is not necessarily the heart of “Everything,” songs played in their entirety serve an important role. Though the show is genre neutral — you’ll hear country, jazz, electronica, rock and more — the tracks share one thing in common: They’re insistent and elicit a response. You might not like ev- ery song on “Everything” — you might even hate some — but none will pass by without getting in your face. Along with the music and trademark interstitial bits — often unraveling ANDREW TONRY PHOTOS Will Chapman, host of ‘Everything’ on Coast Community Radio. Will Chapman assembles the ‘Everything’ show. via thematic threads — “Everything” includes a number of recurring seg- ments. Among them: “Naptime and the Dream,” “The Everything Taste Test,” “The Lucky Caller Fabulous Prize Giveaway,” “Jessamyn with the Satur- day Night Recipe,” “Off The Wall” and more. Some of these segments — the “Dream” sequence (where actual, nonsensical dreams are submitted to the show and read aloud) and the “Prize Giveaway” — were included in Chap- man’s original pitch for the show. Essentially, “Everything” emerged fully formed. When he discovered the tools of audio editing, Chapman realized the ride he could take listeners on was almost limitless. At times, listening to the show is akin to scanning the dial of Chapman’s discursive brain, following rapidly firing neurons from one wild pop culture reference to the next. When he decided to start volun- teering at the station, Chapman also proposed an electronic music program, “Electronic Tonic.” In the four years Continued on Page 16