Above you see Radio Free Charleston 155, “Love Robot Shirt,” featuring music is from The Amorous, Godmode Broadway and Dual Core, plus the return of Stark Charleston. Host segments were shot in the parking lot of the WV Division of Tourism in South Charleston. Our title shirt is a TeeFury design by artist, Rebekie B.

Our first musical guest on this week’s show is Clarksburg’s The Amorous. An indie-pop band with spiritual leanings, they will be recording their first full-length album this summer. You can catch them next weekend in Wilmington and Bellbrook Ohio, and at the end of the month they’re doing a three-night stand at The Horizon’s Church in Lost Creek WV. We recorded the band live during Charcon last year, and assembled this video using audio enhanced with a studio recording.

We had recorded Miniature Giant earlier in the late-October evening (you saw the results of that taping on RFC 147), then we headed out to to The Charleston House for CharCon After Dark, the late-night activities during Charleston’s annual gaming convention. After a quick session of Dr. Sketchy’s, we wound up at Windows on the River, where we lucked into The Amorous who were just setting up. The band was amazing, but we didn’t have all of our audio gear with us, and after I got home, I discovered that the sound would need a lot of work, due to us just having camera audio to work with. Loyal RFC fans may remember that we had a similar problem with the footage we shot at Mission Coalition.

However, I recently discovered that The Amorous has a really good studio recording of one of the songs we shot video of, and the live video and studio audio synced up almost perfectly. You’re getting a combo mix, that’s about 90% studio recording and 10% live audio. I think it came out remarkably cool, and I’m glad that we get to bring this great band to our RFC viewers. I hope we get to see more of The Amorous in Charleston soon. Oh, and apologies to the band for leaving out the “The” while recording our host segments. It’s not like I rehearse those or anything.

Our Animation this week is a new installment of “Stark Charleston.” This time our high-contrast black-and-white trippy travelogue through town is hindered by a soundtrack by yours truly. You’ll probably be seeing more of these, since the original idea was to do more than one installment every fifty-five episodes.

Godmode Broadway is an exciting new band that’s hard to pigeonhole, musically. They jump between progressive rock, metal, reggae, surf and any other style they feel like playing–sometimes during a single song. The band is made up of Billy Freedom on vocls, Will Smoot on guitar, Steve Walker on bass, Ben Lamb on drums and our old friend, Synth-master,David Synn.

They haven’t played out much yet, but have several shows coming up in April and May, which we will tell you about in PopCult. The current plan is for them to show up at the Wednesday Night Jam at The Blue Parrot on April 18. We recorded them in their rehearsal space in South Charleston, and came up with a pretty cool video.

For “Surfboards and Broadswords,” due to the small confines of their rehearsal space, I came up with the idea of setting up four cameras and just letting the band cut loose. The band and I bounced ideas around and came up with the security camera gimmick for the beginning of the video, and I have to say that I got a real kick out of recording and editing this video. A cool trivia note: This is the first four camera shoot that we’ve done for Radio Free Charleston where the light source was a single 100-Watt Bulb.

Playing us out this week we go back to Charcon, more specifically to Hack3rcon, for nerdcore rapper, DualCore, with “This One’s For You.” We previously brought you this rap duo (well, half of a rap duo, one guy raps and goes on tour, the other guy composes the beats in the UK) on RFC 147, the same show with Miniature Giant. Because sometimes you have to let the video age six months before it’s just ripe for inclusion in the show.

Next week’s RFC will include a great West Virginia music film by Stephen Schmidt, and a couple of other surprises.