The musical ghosts of Frank Zappa, John Cage and Captain Beefheart will be present during WSLR’s 3rd Annual Lumpytunes! Live experimental music festival, taking place on Friday, Oct. 19 from 8 p.m. to 1:30 a.m. at Growler’s Pub, located at 2831 N. Tamiami Trl. in Sarasota. Benefiting Sarasota’s community radio station, Lumpytunes! Live is the brainchild of Lumpytunes! radio show host and experimental music aficionado Rob “The Head Lump” Demperio—Sarasota’s demented doctor of “definitely difficult listening,” who said, “The purpose of the event is to draw awareness to the genre [...]

Raising awareness of Sarasota’s sound regulations has been quite an experience. Initially, I hadn’t expected to receive such an outpour of emotion, whether positive or negative. But in the last five months, I’ve been called everything from a muckraker to a phony to a progressive to a snotty kid. I’ve navigated aggressive phone calls, outcries from business owners and verbal threats. Whereas I thought most downtown merchants would support change, I learned many are afraid to publicly admit it. There is a tumultuous history regarding “sound” in Sarasota. In the [...]

When I heard that this month’s End of the Dial Tone would take place upstairs at the Gator Club, I got a particular kind of excited. Aside from the fact that the antique moldings and old-style decorations provide a strangely perfect backdrops for the always fresh, always weird and unpredictable sounds of the Dial Tone’s “organized chaos,” this show would mark a full year since my first Dial Tone experience, which happened in this same place. So this year-marker seemed a good opportunity to write a kind of retrospective, where I [...]