Flip the dial to 90.3 FM anywhere around Montreal at noon on a Friday and you’ll hear the smooth voice of Tony “Butcher T” Scharschmidt (a nickname he earned from ‘slicing up’ music and intercutting tracks on the air). This has been true for over 30 years. The longtime jockey slices up a mix of assorted “Noon Time Cuts”—reggae, RnB, soca, hip hop, and often just what he’s feeling for the day—in between his upbeat interjections and song IDs. It’s always a sunny jolt of pre-weekend optimism.

“It’s my own self-inflicted musical medication that I enjoy playing for myself – I spread it out there for people,” says Scharschmidt. “So I think that's what CKUT has done for me, allow me to spread that.”

Tony “Butcher T” Scharschmidt reviews his notes for his weekly show, Butcher T's Noontime Cuts, in CKUT's studio.

Scharschmidt is among over 300 volunteers that make up the diverse patchwork voice of CKUT. For almost 38 years, the campus-community radio station has played an important role in the cultural ecosystem of our city, acting as a mirror reflecting it back on itself. The station broadcasts grassroots news, spotlights local music, arts and culture happenings and more, 24/7, 365 days a year.

You’ve always been able to tune in via radio in and around the Montreal metropolitan area, but since the early 2000s, it also streams live online from anywhere in the world. Perched in an old building overlooking McGill’s campus, sprawled across two floors that used to be university dorms, voices weave in and out of the studio at all hours of the day. There are still bunkbeds in the offices. Even after the office lights flick off, the “ON AIR” sign glows red all night.

Elnathan Amdetsion, CKUT's Music Librarian, sits at her desk in the music office (left) and stands in the stairs leading up from the studios to the offices (right).

A 70,000-strong music library

On a warm afternoon in September, Music Librarian Elnathan Amdetsion is perched at her desk at the foot of the bunkbed stairs. She’s a third year physics and religious studies major at McGill, and has held this coveted student job for the past year – but it feels like forever. Her first week on the job, a fresh volunteer asked her how many years she’d been working here. She has felt at home ever since.

“I got into campus radio in my senior year of high school back home in Winnipeg because my car didn’t have Bluetooth,” Amdetsion explained. “One day I broke my CD changer—I think I jammed two discs in there—and ended up channel surfing on the radio, which I normally didn’t like. I found the two campus stations and was like whoa, these are awesome.”

Amdetsion tracked down CKUT during her first year and soon started volunteering where many eager radioheads start: a show called William Shatner’s Whiskey Tears. The 4 to 6 a.m. late night radio slot is where new volunteers are encouraged to dig into the music library of over 70,000 CDs, records, tapes and more, playing freeform selections and getting comfy on the mic.

The door code didn’t work at first. The mics were off for the first 10 minutes of the show. Her friend initially forgot what buttons to push. But slowly, the panic melted away and the two volunteers steered the graveyard shift audio ship. They were shocked to remember strangers were out there, actually listening. Someone named Dave commented “Loving the 70s sounds” in the chat.

“You get a lot better with making mistakes and learning from them,” says Amdetsion. “I'm not so scared to screw up anymore. Most of the time.”

On the left, Dykes on Mykes was a groundbreaking Lesbian program on air from the 80s well into the 2010s, recently revived with a new team. On the right, West Indian Rhythms is a longstanding appointment radio show for Montreal's Afro-Caribbean communities, hosted by community figure Howard "Stretch" Carr.

One scrappy group of students

CKUT is a learning environment at its heart. The seed of that actually began when it was McGill’s radio club in the 1920s. That club grew and evolved alongside radio as a medium, becoming a bustling student radio station around the 1960s, where you could listen via closed-circuit headsets on campus and via cable. CFRM-Radio McGill boomed through the 70s and 80s, reaching a turning point in 1987 when a rare call sign opened on the FM dial.

The story goes that a scrappy group of students at the helm decided to pitch their best proposal to the CRTC, the federal broadcasting body in charge of airwave decisions. Competition for space on the dial in a bilingual city was fierce, but what won CKUT the prized 90.3 spot was a promise that it would not be just a campus radio station, but a community one too. This is a promise the station has sincerely kept.

Where decades ago the station may have called itself the voice for the voiceless, today it prefers a “mic for the mic-less.” The station exists to boost the voices of communities historically under- or misrepresented in commercial media. Some iconic programs past and present have included Voice of the Poor, Native Solidarity News, Older Women Live, West Indian Rhythms, Dykes on Mykes, Prison Radio, and more.

Music Coordinator Alex Moskos sits at his desk, with mustard.

A massive musical footprint

CKUT has also played a huge part in nurturing the local music scene. Music Coordinator and experimental musician Alex Moskos first got wind of CKUT in the early 2000s. “I had a job working late nights at a muffin factory, wrapping muffins on this disgusting plastic melting machine, and started listening to late night radio,” says Moskos.

He blinked and was working at CKUT in Music Resources, tending to the library and music industry PR people in the leadup to Montreal’s 2000s-2010s indie music boom. While CKUT was certainly a major player in that era (with Grimes even interning at the station in her early days), CKUT’s musical footprint goes way wider. For decades it was the only place you could hear obscure artists and genres you couldn’t hear anywhere else, courtesy of passionate programmers nerding out.

“These people are not fucking around with music, and they're doing it in a way that's really about the music.” says Moskos. “It's not fetishized. It’s not about collectability. It’s not about hipness and cultural capital.”

In fact, CKUT was the first radio station in the city to ever play hip hop music. Butcher T was largely responsible for that wave, lugging hip hop records up from trips to NYC and into his job at Howard “Stretch” Carr’s record store. Carr brought him on as a DJ on the legendary (and still running) hallmark show of the Afro-Caribbean community, West Indian Rhythms, and shortly after Butcher T’s Noon Time Cuts was broadcasting hip hop across the island.

Butcher T is pictured here working at Stretch's Record Store in the late 1980s (left), and an early promotional poster for Butcher T's Noontime Cuts (right).

CKUT's physical music library is home to over 70,000 pieces of physical media, available for volunteers to peruse and play on their shows (left). Elnathan pulls out an Afroman CD in CKUT's Music Library (right)

That homemade sound

In the music library, Amdetsion has been working on a personal project to label Black artists and make them more discoverable in the catalogue. I follow her down to the basement, where we pry open the heavy door. As I’m snapping pictures of her with CDs towering around her, she squeals, “What?! Afroman! I haven’t seen this one before. I’m playing that on my next show.”

This is how you stumble upon music at CKUT, through something catching your eye in the music library or ear on the radio. It’s an increasingly rare and authentic form of music discovery in the age of streaming platforms. It’s something worth preserving, an ethos that staff and volunteers fight to save every day. Outside of student fees, the nonprofit station is largely kept alive by donations.

“That's the important thing, how it sounds in the airwaves. At the end of the day, when you turn it on, is it good?” says Moskos. “But I love it when it sounds a bit busted. That homemade sound is really important.”

In an age of overly produced, perfectly sounding and looking media, a visible human hand is a rare comfort. It’s also the humanness of CKUT that keeps volunteers involved for decades on end, and listeners invested long after they move away from Montreal. It’s a place where you can relax, nerd out, and be yourself. “You meet some people and you're like, I can't believe this person is real,” says Moskos.

Longtime programmer Margo Lane (left) and the legendary station manager Nadine Gelineau (right).

“The first time I met you, Alex, you were in a fully turquoise outfit,” Amdetsion chimes in. “You were in like turquoise shoes, turquoise socks, turquoise sweatpants, turquoise sweatshirt. And I was like, whoa, this is a lot.”

Stay at the station long enough and it begins to feel like family poking fun at each other, and everyone is welcome. The door is open for visitors most weekdays. Stick around and you’ll come to know the cast of characters, and if you’re lucky, you’ll become one yourself.

“So many people come through CKUT as volunteers or working in administration, then branching out to better careers for themselves,” muses Scharschmidt. “It’s nice to see. And I'm still the same furniture sitting here, like a comfy musical couch, in this musical house.”

Student interns Amelia McCluskey and Lake Liu sport merch (left) and listening parties at the backyard of CKUT, where volunteers lend their ear to recent mailed-in CDs to decide what makes the music library (right).

“That's the important thing, how it sounds in the airwaves."

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Madeline Lines

Inside CKUT, Montreal's 38-year Experiment in Community Radio