Bill Kay finds internet radio not so luxurious

In a shabby house on the other side of the tracks, a 66-year-old man hunches over a briefcase and mutters haltingly about his past life, as if in a latter-day confessional. He speaks in the cultured English accent of a minor public school, of the sort the BBC prized 40 years ago, but has long since been downgraded in favour of less educated regional tones. Stumbling occasionally, he corrects himself without apology or embarrassment, as if trying to fix his memories in his own mind and only incidentally for the benefit of his audience.
He has maybe 100 people silently attending his mantra, like devotees of an obscure cult which claims no religious or ethnic status. They are mainly from Los Angeles, but some are thousands of miles away, actually as well as in spirit.
For this is the bizarre world of internet radio and the speaker is Ian Whitcomb, doing his weekly show for luxuriamusic.com. This is a very different Whitcomb from the song-and-dance man who can hold a live audience in his hand at one of his gigs, singing and tapping and playing the ukulele or the accordion with only an occasional interjection of vitriolic opinion about the decline of modern mores. This is radio, a one-to-one medium, where the balance is reverse and generous slabs of reminiscence are punctuated by an eclectic selection of music from the first half of the last century.
Money is scarce for fringe radio, especially something as experimental as internet radio. So Luxuria is broadcast, if that is not too grand a term, from a house on a rundown industrial estate in the LA suburb of Silver Lake, between the 5 freeway and the Los Angeles River. Potholes and puddles mark the side street down to the unprepossessing building. Push open the unlocked door and you walk straight up a short set of steps to what must once have been a living room. A sofa reminds you of its former role, but the room is now otherwise littered with detritus: broken chairs, piles of cardbox boxes overflowing with records and books, a discarded restaurant sign. To one side is a tiny kitchen with a lavatory off to the left.
Beyond the main room is another, smaller, one - the studio. Just enough room for a console and a desk with a couple of computer screens, and a few chairs round the side. A torso displays a luxuriamusic t-shirt, standing next to a plastic blowup dog.
Chuck Kelley, who lives in the house and runs the station, operates the console for Ian, who sits behind the computer screens, almost an afterthought with a microphone hanging over him. In front of him is a collection of records, tapes, CDs, the tools of his trade. He hands them to Chuck, one or two at a time, barking track numbers to be played on each one, and they briefly work out the order of play and when Ian is to come in with a link. The links are often longer than the music, as Ian replays his life for the benefit of his tiny audience.
Many of them amuse themselves by writing into the online chat room, which sometimes discusses what is happening in the studio - particularly if Ian makes one of his gaffes - but otherwise has a life of its own, picking up themes that have nothing to do with music or radio or Ian but just take on a life of their own, like a session among a bunch of friends and acquaintances who come and go and are vaguely connected by a common interest.
It is a truly weird way to spend a couple of hours. I suspect it is very much of its time and will eventually evolve or die. But it also fulfils a basic human need, to communicate, talk, bounce ideas around, put those ideas into some sort of coherent order - much as this blog is trying to do. We need to make sense of our lives and what is going on around us, and it might as well be at luxuriamusic.com on a Wednesday night (Thursday morning in Europe) as anywhere else.