All Summer No Bummer with Radio K and WKNC

WKNC 88.1 FM at NC State and Radio K, student-run radio at University of Minnesota, have joined forces to release “All Summer No Bummer,” a collaborative mixtape featuring 20 summery songs from North Carolina and Minnesota. Last week the stations premiered two tracks each day selected by the other station and then released the whole set for free download on Bandcamp on May 22.

Radio K began its music exchange program with Radio UTD at University of Texas at Dallas in 2011 and hosted a “foreign trade” with CJLO at Concordia University in Montreal in 2012.

“I’d made friends with some of WKNC’s current and former employees through CMJ and their positions at promotion companies, and I was texting now-graduated Program Director Walt Lilly a few months back when I realized that WKNC would be the perfect partner for a new music exchange, considering how great all the WKNC alums I’ve met are and how passionate they all are about the local music scene,” Ross Koeberl, music director for Radio K, said. “I pitched it to Walt, he was beyond enthusiastic, and we’re both super proud of the resulting compilation and lovin’ each other’s local scenes that much more!”

For its part, WKNC selected songs from Family Bike (Wilmington), Naked Naps (Raleigh), Lonnie Walker (Raleigh), Astro Cowboy (Wilmington), Docking (Raleigh), Body Games (Chapel Hill), GRRL (Durham), Sunshine Faces (Chapel Hill), Ghostt Bllonde (Raleigh) and Less Western (Raleigh).

Radio K included tracks from Social Disaster (Duluth), Frankie Teardrop (Minneapolis), What Tyrants (Minneapolis), The Velveteens (Minneapolis), Har-Di-Har (Saint Paul), Glow Mechanics (Minneapolis), Bae Tigre (Minneapolis), Treading North (Minneapolis), William Within (Minneapolis) and Joey Joey Michaels (Minneapolis).

“WKNC loves North Carolina music so we jumped at the opportunity to share some of it with another college radio audience,” Matt Brown, WKNC general manager, said. “Only one of the bands from Radio K had been played before on WKNC, so this project also brought some great new tracks to our listeners.” Brown selected WKNC’s half of the mixtape with Lilly, current Program Director Jake Phillips and Operations Manager Jake Davis. Koeberl curated Radio K’s portion.

“All Summer No Bummer” will be available for download for the next two weeks at http://radiok.bandcamp.com/album/all-summer-no-bummer-a-radio-k-wknc-tune-trade.