Life On Air

In the middle of the night, on the way to indecisive when faced with your own music collection—The Voice of Florida State, aka V89 or WVFS, can be heard anywhere, anytime. The station is completely volunteer-run, incredibly diverse in its musical programming, and will celebrate its fortieth anniversary in 2027.

Four student writers have made the trek to where The Voice originates: the top floor of the Diffenbaugh building at Florida State University (FSU), where on-air personalities let loose their own individual sounds. Let’s join them for a slice of life at the station.

Photo by Erich Martin

THE Staff Meeting

JASE JERALDS

Walking through the doors of WVFS is like walking through a time capsule. On my way to the meeting room in the back, I move slowly through narrow, endless hallways that open into recording studios, DJ booths, and a physical archive housing over 30,000 CDs, from War by U2 to Caroline 2 by Caroline. Trust that if the top shelf is dusty, it won’t be for long. I sit in a knit-brown chair tucked in one of four colorful corners of the meeting room and wait for everyone to arrive.

Converse and band T-shirts fill blue and brown couches, wooden chairs, and white leather stools with writing scribbled all over. The meeting opens with general announcements: event planning, applications for summer DJs, and preparation for the upcoming week. I thought back to one quote Sharpied on the wall at the entrance of the station: “There is nothing quite as magical as walking into V89 for the first time.” They were right.

It’s clear from the meeting discourse that uplifting underground artists from all over the world is one of the station’s top priorities. Commercial radio plays what people expect to hear; WVFS deals in surprise. There’s a different kind of beauty in the unexpected, like when I looked up from my computer to see a glue stick clinging to the ceiling right above me. What a wonderful place to live—hanging above the heads of the people that make magic happen, forever observing.

On walls and doors and ceilings, in the air circulating the studios, in the meeting rooms and archives, the WVFS is making a mark. It’s like a trade; each person leaves a version of themselves behind and takes another one with them as they gain experience with the station. “It gave me the first sense of purpose I ever had,” shares alumnus DJ Kevin Hutcheson.

As the music director pitches DJ time slots for the week, the room’s energy lifts all the way up to the ceiling with that glue stick. Hands rise with each call, and even those who don’t raise theirs offer ideas of their own. Those ideas are met with open-mindedness and immediate approval.

Reflecting on her years of dedication to WVFS, general manager Misha Laurents says, “It’s been one of the greatest joys of my life to watch people come together to work on a common cause with energy, creativity, passion, and kindness.”

As wired headphones and those clusters of Converse meander from the room, I’m overwhelmed with what WVFS offers its members: friendships, jobs, passion, guidance, experience, and most importantly, a sense of family and community. The voice of Florida State rings through my ears as I leave, and what a beautiful song it sings.

Photo by Erich Martin

THE Morning Shift

MICHAEL MERLO

It’s 5:45 a.m. on March 31, 2026. The moon is still out. The birds are beginning to chirp in CollegeTown, and the WVFS studio is empty except for one DJ. Christmas lights hang from the ceiling and shine over a mixing table and a microphone. Years of graffiti—mostly DJ tags—and old posters cover the walls. This is the segment from 6 to 10 a.m. is Caffeine-a-Go-Go, “Music to get your day started!”

Camila Ureña, a 20-year-old student in the Digital Media Production program at FSU, thumbs through what seems like an endless archive of discs. Each move she makes is calculated. She’s queuing CDs mostly but then pulls a Bob Dylan vinyl record out of its sleeve before placing it delicately on a turntable. All the while, she checks and makes notes to the traffic log, which is the oratorical schedule of what’s to come, from weather to promotions and announcements.

It’s like a busy kitchen. She watches the time and the levels of the music, all the while picking songs. It’s a mix of being in the moment and preparation, and she doesn’t stop moving until it’s time to go live. She puts on the headphones slowly and lowers the volume knobs before pressing the red button and becoming DJ Camila.

“Keep it tuned to The Voice. We’re gonna keep it moving with Bob Dylan,” she says. But the turntable isn’t cooperating. She remains calm. “Let’s see if we can get this thing going,” she adds.

“There it is. I hear the sweet voice of Bob Dylan.” Crisis averted with the gift of on-air gab and improvisation.

Today, Ureña is picking songs on a whim as well as highlighting new and rotating albums. There are some parameters. For instance, the morning shift plays upbeat music for listeners on their way to work. They try to stray from anything in the contemporary top 40.

“It’s one of the challenges I have, being on this shift. I usually like things that are a little slower paced,” she says, but it’s also a driver for exploration.

“I’ve found a lot of music just searching the catalogue,” she says, adding that sometimes the discovered artists will have fewer than 5,000 listeners. She plays everything from The Red House Painters to reggae and Brazilian music.

After 40 minutes of her shift, she reads the weather like a poet and makes a few announcements.

Just take a breath and let ’em hear it, a sign reads in front of the soundboard— a slogan to lower the nerves for the hosts

feeling any.

The DJs range in age. Not all are students, and the station hires at the beginning of every semester. The one qualification? An ability to translate one’s passion for music over the air.

DJ Camila signs off and picks her last song, “People” from The Silver Jews, before turning it over to the next DJ, reorganizing all her CDs and returning to her other life—the one with classes and assignments. As she steps out of the studio at 10 a.m., it will be the first time she has seen the sun since arriving.

Photo by Erich Martin

THE AFTERNOON SHIFT

OLIVIA LUNSFORD

Not one surface on the ceiling and walls is empty. Music resonates even from the hallway, and stepping inside amplifies

that messy, stripped-raw atmosphere.The station is chaos in the best, most human way.

In a span of six hours, between noon and 6 p.m., three DJs cycle through their shifts: DJ Ivy, DJ Grim, and DJ Maripilled. It’s a busy time at the station, and even the simplest parts of the job are handled uniquely between DJs, from introductions to choosing songs to how they project their voice when on air.

DJ Ivy’s shift is an extension of the station’s transportive vibe, an experience of working in the dark. The sound equipment is illuminated by dramatic neon lights, and she sends heavy bass and synth pounding through the walls. Her CDs are laid out in rows across the soundboard, like a physical queue. Losing myself in the music for these first few hours feels like a creative reawakening.

Then, the lights flash on, and a spell is merely interrupted. DJ Grim, both a regular DJ and WVFS’s program director, is here to take over. Unlike DJ Ivy, Grim toils with the lights on and CDs strewn about the workplace. Her musical profile shifts between vocal-heavy bands, organic instrumentals, and smooth transitions between disparate genres.

About an hour in, I ask her what it was like to be a new DJ at the station.

“Starting out,” she says, “you learn that you know way less about music than you thought you did. You can’t be a good DJ by only sticking to the genres you know.”

Last but not least, DJ Maripilled dives into the massive music archive, plucking out CDs completely at random. The result is a baffling, exciting tone shift with each changing song. Game soundtracks, jazz, songs both old and new—it’s a variety you simply cannot find intentionally.

It’s so easy to lose track of time and yourself in the heart of WVFS. When you can’t turn off the radio or tune away to something else, your horizon of music broadens beautifully.

Photo by Erich Martin

THE NIGHT SHIFT

GRACEANN EUNICE

I did not expect the fourth floor of the Diffenbaugh building to garner so much excitement, but the WVFS station feels like a ’90s grunge bedroom stretched across the entire floor, preserving nearly 40 years of human expression. It’s hard not to be thrilled.

After my initial wandering, I meet up with DJ Tawny, who shows me around the booth where we’ll spend the majority of the night. Her shift starts at 7, though Tawny arrives 15 minutes early to pull music from the catalog and check on the machinery. This shift was schedule  as regular programming, which allows Tawny the freedom to pick her favorites regardless of genre.

“I thought I knew a lot of music,” Tawny says about her days before the station, “and then I joined, and was like, I don’t know nothin’.”

During DJ Tawny’s shift, the space settles into an evening rhythm. Beneath our conversation, Tawny moves easily between songs, controls, and commentary. She later turns off the lights to reveal a cascade of color: the signature string lights, the mixing console glowing beneath contrasting spotlights of red and green, and the clock suddenly blooming with luminescence.

While the feeling is laid-back, Tawny says that her first time on air was anything but.

“Getting on air for the first time, I was petrified,” she says. Still, she explains that WVFS isn’t strict on perfection or popular music, and that imperfection is a part of why people listen.

She recalls accidentally hitting dead air after a CD failed to work. “I freaked out,” she says. In the silence, she just sat for a minute and reassured herself despite the delay. What started as a panic became a soothing experience.

She tells me it was “kind of the best way to relieve [her] anxiety on air,” and that she still carries that moment with her in stressful situations.

As the night carries on, the booth takes on a rhythm of its own. Heavily instrumental tracks give way to Japanese city pop, then Brazilian indie bands. It’s a nice divergence from predictable playlists and repeated hits that usually fill life’s background.

As Tawny’s shift comes to a close, the next DJ isn’t far behind.