The station that began as a student radio club celebrates 40 years on the FM dial this February—with a party and a call-out for memories.
What started as a radio club in 1964 began broadcasting five years later from what was then the brand-new Dalhousie Student Union Building, but that broadcast was just within the building’s speaker system. Ten years later, the club became CKDU and aired through a closed circuit into Dal’s student residences before landing on the FM dial on Feb 1, 1985, after the students voted to make it so, at 97.5 FM. In 2006, the station increased its broadcasting power and moved to the new frequency of 88.1 FM—where it can be found today.
CKDU is a storied campus-community radio station that has grown alongside Halifax’s music scene. Through its mandate, projects and programming, CKDU is committed to playing 35% Canadian content weekly and providing an alternative to public and private broadcasters, by being a place for diverse and underrepresented voices, music and news. CKDU still resides in the Student Union Building on the fourth floor, where it broadcasts 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
CKDU remains a student-levied society, meaning it’s partially funded through student union fees paid by all Dalhousie and University of King’s College students. The station has a board of directors and a team of four permanent and one part-time employee on staff, plus a massive team of volunteer hosts and programmers bringing a wide range of hand-picked music—deep funk, grunge, classical, spoken word, tropicalia, garage, acoustic and more—to the airwaves.
Kheaven Brasier is CKDU’s programming director. “You don’t have to convince people who listen to the radio of this,” they say, “but there’s a lot of people that don’t listen to the radio—and it’s that the radio can give you a thrill.”
Brasier hosts The Morning Show every weekday from 7-9am and takes requests on Fridays through the Friends of CKDU Instagram account. “The Morning Show gives people a thrill because it’s unexpected, or they can get their request in and it gives people that thrill.
“With Spotify, there’s no thrills,” says Brasier. “It’s just you. You choose, you pick the songs, and that’s fine. I love picking songs I want to listen to when I want to listen to them, but there’s no thrill there. With radio, you get surprised and delighted, and the unexpected happens.”
Brasier says listeners remind them of the importance of radio’s ability to thrill all the time through feedback on their show. “And that goes for any host or anyone doing radio in a live way: anytime you take a chance like that on the radio, it’s a great reminder of why radio is important.”
Brasier says they’ve invested much of their life into “learning about and obsessing about all sorts of genres and music,” and put that care into their work at CKDU. “Anyone involved in CKDU puts in decades of music knowledge, even if it’s a brand-new host who’s 20 years old,” says Brasier. “They still bring years of experience, so when they’re on the radio, you want to listen to them because they’ll show you this band that you never heard before and that might be really important to you.
“The algorithm isn’t gonna surprise you. It’ll give you what you think you want, but the radio host gives you what they think you need, and that’s where the thrills are.”
For those without radios, CKDU-FM can be listened to live online here, or on-demand through shows archived on its website and Mixcloud.
As the station marks 40 years on FM, CKDU’s music director, Ra’keem Simmonds, is asking former and current volunteers, hosts and staff to send in audio clips of their favourite memories, funny stories or an expression of what CKDU means to them. Simmonds hosts The Warmer Side of Cool live from the station every Tuesday afternoon from 3-5pm. He’s also responsible for uploading shows to the station’s Mixcloud so people can listen back in full.
The audio memories project is something Simmonds wanted to do to honour and celebrate the station’s history. Simmonds says he’s a “big CKDU history fan” and is very “invested in what we used to do, what we used to play and who used to be at the station—so I wanted to get a better view of how the station used to be through stories.”
Simmonds has already received a few submissions and says it’s been “cool to peek into the mind of different hosts or CKDU people because “you never know what the station means to certain people or what they’re thinking about when they do their show.”
One clip Simmonds has shared with The Coast is from a volunteer, Megan, who hosts the show Moonwalk every Tuesday evening from 10pm-12am. Says Simmonds, her audio clip describes how “she judges cool radio shows by what she calls the ‘driveway factor,’ meaning when you’re driving home listening to the radio, and you pull into your driveway and when you get there—instead of going into the house like you should do—what you’re listening to is so engaging and you’re enjoying it so much that you just sit in your driveway and listen.”
In Megan’s audio clip, she shares that she recently discovered someone had that experience with her show—she gave someone the driveway factor.
For current and former CKDU hosts, staff and volunteers with stories or audio clips to share: don’t worry too much about the now-looming Feb 1 deadline, says Simmonds. “CKDU on FM will be 40 for the whole year.”
Another way to celebrate this is with a party. On Feb 1 at the Propeller Arcade on Gottingen Street, the CKDU team is throwing a celebration show from 5:30pm until late, with all ages welcome until 7pm.
It’s $10 or pay-what-you-can entry; there’s free pizza and loonies for playing arcade games (care of CKDU’s operations director, Megan McCracken, who will be appearing as a winged loonie fairy) and music all night, beginning with CKDU’s own RS Smooth followed by the bands norc and Sleepy Kicks. There will also be CKDU merchandise at the show, including a limited edition 40th-anniversary tee to help support and celebrate 40 years.
In the meantime, tune in and discover a new thrill.
This article appears in Dec 19, 2024 – Jan 31, 2025.
