Trent Radio wants your music. This is a directed article. I’m writing this to the dorm room producers, the basement jam masters, the cell phone demo singer/songwriters. Trent Radio wants your music.

Local music has always been a priority to the organization. Recently, it has officially become our only archival priority. We maintain a current and historic audio archive with a vision to collect and render accessible all musical artifacts that were produced within our region or produced by artists with a lasting legacy upon our community’s collective imagination. Being Trent alumni makes you a local for life as far as I’m concerned. I want your music now, because we want to show your music to the future versions of you that are sure to pop up around campus over the coming decades.

One of the practical applications of an active collection of regional art is that the creative history of a community can be accessed to speak to current young minds and say some pretty basic and comforting words: “You are not alone.”

This is a small pond. Some of you students will have come from larger communities, and some from smaller. Peterborough sits right in the middle. Too big to have nothing and too small to have everything. We have a bit. A bit of culture, a bit of wildlife, a bit of commerce. One thing we have in droves, however, is turnover. You, the students, keep Peterborough fresh. Not because you come in and shake up the community, but because you are the community. You are. And I can prove it.

I can prove it because when I look over the past 50 years of recorded music in Peterborough (and I try to do that at least once a day) I see familiar faces. I see current Trent Chancellor Don Tapscott writing hippy ballads as a part of Jeremy Doormouse in 1968, recorded on campus. I see beloved local radio personality Del Crary (after whom our waterfront park and concert venue is named) reciting tongue-in-cheek poems to college failures in 1962. I see the first rendition of Canadian balladeers The Burning Hell. I see your English professors being punk rockers, I see the student generation before you hitting #1 on the college charts, I see Trent rappers and metal-heads, I see relationships formed between student and local communities and I see the lines blurred until they no longer exist. And I see you, because I probably already have your record (but please call and check!)

We don’t live in a vacuum, and we are so blessed to have a constant influx of new ideas coming through the pipe and also a home guard that wants nothing to change. Because I truly believe it is the tension that makes this place special. We have different ideas and the place is too small not to bump into to each other and be forced to talk about it.

Trent Radio wants your music because we are trying to get a snapshot of Peterborough, and that’s you.

My name’s Matt Jarvis, I take care of music here for the moment.

You can reach me at 705 741 4011 (10am-2pm Mon-Fri)

mjarvis@trentradio.ca

or just drop by with your records and a thirst for coffee at our world headquarters 715 George St N just north of downtown.