KTRU is a
college radio station in
Houston operating at 91.7
FM. They broadcast from
Rice University.
All of the radio stations in houston are awful (some more awful than others), except KTRU. KTRU is wonderful. They let students come in and DJ, and the programming is dictated totally by the student. The style of music played literally changes completely every hour and a half. You may tune in at one point and hear indecipherably distorted heavy metal; tune in later and hear classical music; tune in later and hear drum & bass; tune in later and hear Indian sitar music; and tune in later and hear "experimental" music that appears to be faint crowd noise matched with someone banging a pot really loud over and over. The only thing certain is that none of the music heard will be be popular music, and that the same song will never be played twice a day. Most of what they play you've never heard of; the closest you come to a "well-known" band is going to be something like Portishead or King Missle, and bands that common are heard only rarely. Overall, KTRU is the only station i even try to listen to anymore. A lot of what they play is unlistenable, but on those times the dj is playing something even the least bit good, it is always the coolest stuff in the universe. The only problem is that their transmitter is not very powerful, and in certain parts of the city the reception isn't great.
If you are ever in Houston, there are three specific weekly shows on KTRU i think you should try to catch: The ambient show (monday nights after 10), the really really obscure hip-hop show (tuesday nights after 10), and the electronic music show (friday nights after 10; style of electronic music varies from week to week). If your tastes don't match mine, they have a schedule (and realaudio streaming) at ktru.org.
One odd thing that's sprung up is a ritual most of the people who listen to the station has performed. The ritual consists of taking a whole bunch of the station's bumper stickers, which say "ktru 91.7 fm : rice radio", then cutting the bumper stickers up and rearranging the pieces into new bumper stickers that say totally different things. A lot of these look surprisingly realistic, as if they had been printed that way. Examples i have seen prominently displayed in different places include "ktru 91.7 fm : godhead" or "nobody understands house music", although the best i have ever seen would have to be the one on the back of st3o's suburban. He actually managed to spell out a sticker that said
ktru 91.7 fm
#!/bin/bash
I really like listening to a radio station where you can almost never tell whether that sound you hear is static or actually part of the song.