Once upon a time, in a shitty city far, far away…

Well, no, it was Vancouver, which is about 4 hours away, give or take traffic and ferry delays… but it is shitty there.

Anyway, the original incarnation of The Vampire’s Ball was on CiTR Radio in Vancouver.

The first version of the show was on Friday nights/Saturday mornings from 4-8am, and began in 2002. It eventually shifted up to 2-6am and ran through about 2006, I think, and was fairly eclectic, although I did a weekly rotation through genres including goth, industrial, melodic metal, and swing revival.

Then life got in the way and the show went on hiatus for a couple years, coming back as a strictly goth and industrial show in 2009, when it started at 2am on Friday nights before eventually moving up to the big midnight slot… and then eventually the show shifted to Wednesday nights at midnight after the great Hans von Kloss Misery Hour (which was one of CiTR’s longest-running shows).

It eventually turned more eclectic as well as I found my own listening tastes changing.

The CiTR version of the show ended in the spring of 2015 for a variety of reasons that can mostly be summed up as “politics” (personal, interpersonal, campus, and other).

I had been doing a version of the show as “Mind of maQLu Radio” on Mixcloud wherein I incorporated more commercial music into the mixes and frankly made them weirder. Y’know, things you can’t play on college radio. You can find episodes of both shows on the maQLu Mixcloud.

Well, time moves on but nostalgia is forever and I got to thinking about reviving my old show somehow. There isn’t college radio where I live now, but I wouldn’t want the restrictions that come with college radio anyway.

So… we’re back. With a new website (I think the old one was actually called thevampiresballoncitr dot whatever, but in any case I deleted it years ago) but I think the format will be the end-of-days Vampire’s Ball eclectic and weird format from the CiTR days, but with some of the bigger bands as per Mind of MaQLu radio. And who knows, I might add in some spoken word or improv’d noise or whatever here and there (there was a time when any and all new maQLu releases were premiered on The Vampire’s Ball before public release, and even a time in 2012 when I would spend my Saturdays whipping up an hour of new experimental music for the following week’s show… but don’t get your hopes up quite yet because that only lasted like 2 months, lol…)

Later in 2022, I might well start doing some live sets for the show, maybe even livestream it on something like Odysee, I dunno yet. (I’m a Luddite and would need to learn how to do that; spinning for radio isn’t like club spinning and I tended to have everything pre-programmed as much as possible unless spinning stuff from the old vinyl library at CiTR.)

Anyway, as with the original website, I will post Mixcloud embeds and track listings here. Check back on Saturday nights for new shows.