My first blog was all about music I liked and girls I thought I loved; interspersed across long rambling complaints about the injustices of high-school life, and how my parents just didn’t understand me 
Later I eschewed all references to my personal life and started afresh with a new blog, Fuck the Radio. Inspired by the local music scene I was stepping into at the time- FtR was at first a series of short-form (two or three sentence) posts, each with a Soundcloud link to an artist, and a MediaFire link to a bootleg download of one of their tracks. Later I started doing gig reviews, artist interviews, and eventually took on some friends as contributing writers.
Offline, I gathered a group of local producers into what I dubbed the ‘Fuck the Radio Collective’ (artist collectives were all the rage back then) and started organising my own gigs, with a rotation of collective-members filling out the lineups.
By the time I graduated University, I was already having the time of my life throwing FtR parties and working as a DJ. I didn’t once give pause to consider the tenuous sustainability of living such a lifestyle. Eventually I would put my sound-system and performance skills to work running Trivia nights too. Editing together content (ie. a round of twenty song snippets for a ‘music round’) was well within my technical abilities, and the ‘events management’ side of it was no different from my music gigs.
My calendar started to become crowded with quiz-nights before the DJ gigs could get their foot in the door. I was getting too old for the nightclub scene, and the dinner sets weren’t paying anything that could compete with a Trivia gig. These days, I still love getting behind the decks- but you’re only able to see me play to the public once every couple months or so. It’s been almost a decade since I’ve had a solid six or so sets every week.
My connection to music does still remain. Since 2010, I had been hosting a weekly community radio show alongside one of my closest friends. Being that FtR was an early future-beat/lo-fi collective –I’d like to take a moment to humbly-boast of being an early-adopter when it came to the then-impending lo-fi music craze– we played lo-fi on the radio (no we did not name the show ‘Fuck the Radio Radio’ 
).
Lo-fi music is big on cassette tapes…. you know… these things:
We noticed most of the lo-fi tapes we were playing on the show seemed to come from the same manufacturer, even if the record labels that had released them were from different parts of the world. This led us to contact the tape manufacturers out of curiosity… and to cut a long story short; we ended up launching an Australian subsidiary, Dupeshop.
I still run Dupeshop and Good Time Trivia to this day, and I like to think, that in some round-about way- it all stems from starting that first blog in high-school.
What about this blog?
This isn’t intended as a space for me to reminisce; but starting FtR all those years ago (in-fact, we’re a couple of days away from its twelfth birthday as I write this) was some kind of… creative flash point for me. My mother died around this time of my life- and pouring myself into my music blog was how I managed to keep myself ‘attached’ to the world. The roads & opportunities that I was able to open up for myself through blogging ended up being the roads that carried me through life to the place that I am at now. Its one of those, “the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” things.
Now, I’m not going through anything remotely comparable to what I was when Mum was dying. I just want to harness that creative forward-momentum that blogging provides me again.
So here we are.