KZSU 90.1 FMKZSU 90.1 FM

Stanford students put a carrier-current signal on 880 kHz in 1947, running it through the university's own power lines out of the Department of Communication, and it stayed that way for seventeen years. The FM licence arrived in 1964, and a jump from ten watts to five hundred in 1978 pushed the signal off campus and across most of the Bay Area, from Oakland and parts of San Francisco down to Gilroy. Ownership sits with Stanford's Board of Trustees; the staff has never been anything but volunteers.

Zookeeper, the station's own logging system, records every spin, and recent weeks have run indie rock and indie pop through Tuareg desert blues, hip-hop, drone and a good deal of the frankly unclassifiable. Wednesday Night Live brings bands into the studio to play, and Day of Noise hands twenty-four straight hours to live improvisation with not one recorded track in it.