If this post was a comic book, this would be what collectors call the “origin” issue.

The first episode of Magic Junk Radio launched on August 30, 2005. Now a year later, I’m taking a look back at how it all came to be, as well as the new direction that the podcast is headed in months to come.

I will begin honestly: podcasting and sampling came to me by accident. While I was always interesting in making compositions, I always lacked the knowledge to do so. Then in July 2005, I had written a post for the multimedia website Blogcritics.org called “iPod Death Scenarios” and it was here that a comment and response started it all. Here was the exchange:

Lisa (7/6/05, 01:12 PM): Hilarious, Mark! This was too funny.
Have you considered podcasting this post….?

Mark Sahm (7/6/05, 02:03PM): Lisa, if only I knew how.

When I reread my comment the next day, I didn’t like that I did not know how. At the time, I thought podcasting required some type of code to write, like CSS or some other difficult webform that I didn’t have the patience to learn. But after a little research at your friendly neighborhood Wikipedia, I realized that podcasting was actually quite easy, and a cheap artform at that. I bought a $20 USB microphone, plugged in, and went to work in GarageBand.

I offered up my first podcast as a ‘creative crossover’ to the Blogcritics community. Despite bracing for an onslaught of flames, surprisingly no one told me that the podcast sucked. So I decided to make another, and the rest is now history. My efforts (with some help from the lovely Ms. S. Rod) ended up stretching into the interesting capture of a year in the podcast life that you see below.

While other podcasters produce an episode every month or every week, my construction is a little more labor intensive, since each track takes me anywhere from 2 days to 2 weeks to finish, depending on the complexity. That and being able to get 5 different samples to sync right!

Still, to have produced 7 full episodes (or 86 tracks worth) in a year’s time is pretty good for me. Knowing that (a) there are about 30 unfinished/unrefined MJR tracks sitting around my archive, and (b) I took a break of nearly 4 months between Episodes 5 and 6, I’m happy with what I produced.

But like Tyler Durden recommends, may I never be content. While getting better at the audio craft (or whatever you’d like to call it), S.Rod and I have concluded that we needed to refocus our future digital music efforts into strengthening the front:

• Magic Junk Radio will now focus not only on our sample-based tracks, remixes, and our mini-dialogues, but houses all of our more original and lyrical tracks.

All in all, I don’t know what the future will hold for music in my arsenal of creative efforts. But no matter what, I know I enjoyed making the close facsimiles that I did, and I hope I can polish them up to be presentable on a professional level one day. Thanks for listening. Peace.