Can You Identify the "Mystery DJ" from WMBR Cambridge Spring 1989?

I made this aircheck almost 23 years ago. I was living in Boston, and was amazed to hear a 90-minute show devoted to my hometown of Seattle's burgeoning music scene. I pressed "record" on my boombox as fast as I could, and got most of the show on tape.

The file posted on YouTube is audio only, and is "scoped" so most of the music is gone--I tried to post the entire 90-minute recording but got flagged for copyright issues and so went back and trimmed the file (I did leave a VERY LONG weather forecast for Boston, for some reason). The DJ obviously knows his Seattle bands and Seattle music venues circa late 1980s (and is fairly prescient in his pronouncements about "grunge"), but I have no idea who he is--though I assume he was from or had spent some time in Seattle.

Anyhow, I haven't done any "investigating" (such as contacting WMBR) to try and figure out who mystery DJ "Dara" is, but it would be interesting to know what became of him after his radio career at MIT. Are you Dara or can you identify Dara? If so, please leave a comment below.

Sound Effects for War Horse

The New York Times yesterday published a Carpetbagger blog post about the lengths to which filmmakers went to create specialized World War I sound effects for the recently released movie War Horse.

The film's sound designer Gary Rydstrom says it best, and could easily be describing an approach to sound effects for vintage radio dramas:

“What I usually do, out of laziness, is I do a lot of my recording around my house. The golden rule of sound design is, it doesn’t matter what a sound really it is, it matters how it works in the movie, how it makes you feel. It doesn’t matter that it’s a vacuum cleaner.”

Makes me want to fill a sock with corn starch and squeeze it repeatedly until I think I'm out for a snowy walk.