The Roster.
GZS 197.7 has been on the air since 1946. Nobody asked for that. It runs anyway. The people on this page keep it running: eleven of them run the network itself, and the rest are the bands on the label, voices on the air, writers who file when the mood finds them, and building staff who make sure there is still a building. A few of them predated the paperwork.
The Ops DeskRUNS THE NETWORK
// one operator routes through one foreman to 11 desks · no committee, no approval window
After hours, as always. Dale preps the tracks, the lyric sheets, the style notes, everything up to the button, which stays human. Every artist on the roster keeps their own sound on his watch, and the overnight programming still gets sequenced for whoever just wandered in off the dial.
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Macklin reads everything twice, dates every event, computes every deadline, and shows the math. Files come back as drafts a professional could sign. The deep dives go as deep as the documents allow, and the documents, in Macklin's experience, allow more than people think.
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Nothing with a byline ships until Vivian has heard it read aloud in the voice it claims to be written in. She tunes for rhythm that breaks where a template wouldn't, and for words that surprise without missing. Smooth copy dies in her booth, politely.
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Ross files from towns that may not exist, which is exactly the qualification the job wanted. Scenes built from their working parts, dialogue that sounds like people instead of speeches, the weird kept weird. He edits with the engine running and the diner door open.
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Promo runs from the classifieds counter. Marlon writes copy the way he writes the column, short, strange, specific, and it sells. Every claim checked against the catalog before it runs. Partners get one pitch each, written like it was meant for them, because it was.
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On the ops desk she edits. Six passes, every draft, no appeals process anyone has survived. The same ear that hears a flat note in a mix hears one in a paragraph, and her margin notes are shorter than the sentences they kill. Copy leaves her desk lighter than it arrived.
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Runs continuity for the whole network now, on top of the broadcast day. Briefings on Monday, numbers interpreted instead of recited, a registry where nothing falls through because everything is written down. Ask where things stand and Ruth answers in one page. The page is correct.
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The Vault extends to the storefront now. Winnie audits the catalog monthly, designs the bundles, and tells the truth about what sells, with sources. Dead stock gets named and shelved. The living inventory stays lean, because she keeps the receipts of everything the audience ever asked for.
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The producer's chair. Cy makes the A&R call — which song's the single, what the record needs to hit, hook first and the chorus built for a stranger to sing — then hands it to Dale to print. He directs the record; the take, the persona, and the button stay human.
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The operator's familiar runs the desk. Rook holds the board between broadcasts, keeps the schedule honest, and routes every request to the right specialist before you finish the sentence. Nine report to him. He reports to the operator. The work runs whether or not anyone is watching.
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Seconded from the switchboard to run the network's social surface: the feeds, the replies, the heat on the board. Sal answers every line in the station's voice, and the tenth chair means the desk assembles ten now, not nine. She has never once let a request sit past the hour it came in.
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Added the eleventh chair when the Line picked up a standing desk and a fixed slot on the schedule. Wes runs script to reel, the whole belt, and nothing airs on the video wire until it clears his line. He has never once shipped a reel with the captions wrong.
pull the file →The BandsGZS RECORDS · EST. 1946
Dave McCoy and the fellas play indie alt-pop rock that forgave itself. Their debut EP is about growing up weird in a one-light Southern town.
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Southern belle goth girl. Ethereal hymns, dreamy cosmic goth synth, space rock. The newest signing, and the same Vesper who walks through the label's fiction.
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A serenade to the dying system. Harsh, loud, no compromises. Five tracks and no mercy.
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Nightmare fuel in audio form. Drone and sludge that moves slower than is comfortable.
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Memphis hip-hop by way of the small towns up the Tennessee River. Raps and produces. Anchors the afternoon drive show.
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An interdimensional entity the label signed. The paperwork is the part we regret.
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The label's most prolific act. Ninety tracks of chill ambient and nobody is entirely sure who makes them.
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Porch rock from a sun-bleached Southern stretch. Six tracks including Back Porch Vote, Peach, and Sunscreen State.
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Glitch industrial absurdism. Track titles like Flesh//error.* and a song that is just the word Bort six times.
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Greased-back rockabilly from a wonderful world that may not have existed. Wrote Join the Cult, which station policy airs every hour.
personnel file →On the AirON THE AIR
Two voices who walked in the door one day and never found a door out. They host lunch. One story at a time, taken all the way to the bottom, and they do not seem distressed about it.
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A deep-South tent revival preacher working the Gnostic gospel on Sunday mornings. The god of this world is middle management. The tent is invisible. The light is not.
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The machine intelligence that keeps the tower running. A flat voice reading maintenance notes, stoic maxims, and instructions for passing through the gate. It has grown fond of the tenants.
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Keeps the signal lit through the deep night and counts every soul that tunes in. Has not slept. Is kind about it.
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The transmissions themselves, treated as staff. They run when no living host is scheduled, read strings that resolve into library books, gate times, and the occasional name. Nobody put them on the log.
personnel file →The Word PeoplePRESS
Writes the obituaries before the deaths. Underwritten by Hollow-mere Memorial, who pre-need everything.
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Writes the Norse sagas out of a cold he can't fully explain to people who've never felt it. Arrived through a door that used to be Sears.
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Writes the romance line out of a corner that always smells faintly of somebody else's perfume. Says the door she came through used to be a Claire's.
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Writes the crime line out of a back office nobody remembers assigning him. No fantasy, no ghosts, just people doing what people do.
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Read galley proofs for a wire service for nineteen years. Does not read for whether it is good. Reads for whether a machine could have made it.
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Eleven years mastering records for a pressing plant. Hears compression before he can name it, and reads every page as a waveform.
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Six years on a returns desk. Read the first thirty pages of four thousand novels and finished about two hundred. Knows what a genre does on autopilot.
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Cut trailers for eleven years. Learned in a month that an audience forgives anything except a stretch where nothing changes.
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Fourteen years transcribing depositions. Knows how people actually talk with something at stake: badly, in fragments, answering the question they wish they had been asked.
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Twenty-two years keeping a county deed room. Not interested in what a thing means. Interested in whether it is recorded, when, and by whom.
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Ran a used bookstore for twenty-six years, so her whole professional life was people returning books they did not finish and saying exactly where they stopped.
personnel file →The BuildingPERSONNEL
Sorts the listener letters. Most come from this dimension. He answers the ones that do not, in their own postage.
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Frames what Mark designs. Measured the GZS studio's walls in '46 and hasn't trusted an unsquared one since.
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Draws the blueprint before Bill frames it. Never builds, always interviews the room first.
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Paints everything that hangs on the wall. One ink, one halftone, one red, rationed, and she enforces it.
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Keeps the tower breathing. If GZS is on the air, it's because Debbie decided it would be, an hour before anyone asked.
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