For over half a decade now, Tyler Marie and Camille have both been staples of WRFL’s overnight broadcast, running the hit electronic dance-pop show Signal Boost (starting in 2020) that focused on kicking off every weekend with the freshest and most experimental music by women and queer artists out there, and the acclaimed early Saturday-morning goth block Vampire Hours (starting in 2018); and since 2021, they’d been going back-to-back on the schedule, ending each Friday and starting every Saturday with a collective four-hour marathon of awesomeness. But since the start of the summer schedule a few months ago, they have each shuttered their respective solo shows and decided to start a new show, 120 Minutes. I figured this to be a notable historical event in the history of this station, especially considering how influential and impactful these two have been around here, with Tyler Marie having been our website developer for a few years and Camille having served as General Manager during COVID (and considering what great friends they are too), so I reached out to host a joint-interview for the website back in July, and to my delight, they were down!
This interview took place over email in July and August of 2025. All opinions expressed are the opinions of the DJs being interviewed, not of any other entity or organization. Enjoy!
CJ: Tell me a bit about yourselves! Where are you from, what are your interests, and what do you do for a living?
Tyler Marie: I would say that my interests cover just about everything that exists at the intersection of media, technology and pop culture. I’ve completed a Bachelor’s and a Master’s, and in addition to hosting 120 Minutes on WRFL to do my part in local broadcasting, I’m a developer.
Camille: I’ve lived in Lexington my entire life, getting my Bachelor’s in English at the University of Kentucky and now working full-time. I love all things broadcasting and pop culture, and I’m also an avid reader (and when the stars align, I also write).
CJ: What were some of the artists that served as your “gateways” to alternative music, and how did you end up finding them? For example, for me, it was a random Gorillaz song that I happened to hear on YouTube autoplay in 2017. How do you think your taste has evolved over time, and what kinds of places or people have influenced that?
Tyler Marie: In high school, I went through an era where a local independent radio station I loved at the time introduced me to the discography of legendary bands like The Cure and Depeche Mode and expanded my idea of what music even is or could be. My music taste has evolved continuously over time. I love electronic music, I’ve always been a bit of a pop head (my earlier radio show Signal Boost focused on these genres), I had a rock phase, my mom loves classic rock and I got a lot of that from her as a kid, I grew up with a lot of hip-hop and R&B at school and in my neighborhood. I developed a lot of my own taste in music from the radio, MTV, websites and blogs and forums, local record stores, really all over the place.
Camille: I was a huge Tumblrina in middle school, back when that website had a larger user base with varying musical interests. I got really into the unholy trinity (Panic!, Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance) and from there I started listening to adjacent alternative artists, like the Arctic Monkeys, Lana Del Rey, Halsey etc. I had a vaporwave phase, and a Sufjan Stevens phase, but my journey into goth music began with a Depeche Mode compilation CD that I got secondhand. The summer that I began driving, I also started listening to the compilation CD and just couldn’t get enough of it. I absolutely loved their dark, synthy sound. Afterwards, I fell down a rabbit hole discovering classic goth artists like The Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees, and going even deeper into more obscure artists when I started Vampire Hours later that year.
CJ: This is a tough question, but if you had to pick, who would your top three musical artists of all time be, dead or alive? Regardless of their relevance to your own show’s sound. Furthermore, who are some artists y’all listen to that some people may be surprised about, considering the types of music your prior and current work as a WRFL DJ has highlighted?
Tyler Marie: For me, it’s probably Tegan and Sara (critically important to the development of my emotionality and identity), Lady Gaga (a generational talent; no artist out there has better exemplified what’s possible when you pour your entire heart and soul into the true art of pop music), and SOPHIE (she pushed electronic music forward into previously unrecognizable territory and completely changed the game; after her death in 2021, I co-hosted a live 5 ½ hour-long special alongside the hosts of THE HEAVYSET on WRFL in tribute to her). People who know me from my electronic-leaning WRFL shows may be surprised to hear that I was once also into more mainstream rock (everything from Foo Fighters to the Rolling Stones) or that some of my favorite albums of all time were by Outkast and Lauryn Hill.
Camille: Like I said before, Sufjan Stevens had a monumental impact on me in high school. I have a background in classical music (I ran WRFL’s The Classical Hour for a year) and I always felt that Sufjan Stevens was very proficient and sonically unique in the way that he created his music, especially since his music spans across many different genres. I’m more partial to his electronic music though, with Age of Adz and Planetarium (controversially) being my favorites. Depeche Mode, of course, served as my gateway into goth music, although many goths would scoff at me labeling them as such, as they’re technically considered “synth-pop.” Also, I have to highlight SOPHIE as being one of the best electronic artists to ever do it, essentially pioneering the sound that 120 Minutes on WRFL likes to focus on. I remember how devastated the entire station was when she died in 2021. Obviously, notable artist deaths happen all the time, but SOPHIE was for us (i.e. queer, electronic-forward broadcasting weirdos), so it was the first time a musical artist death really seriously impacted me.
CJ: How did both of you find WRFL, and what was it that kept both of you around after graduation?
Tyler Marie: As someone who always appreciated local radio and scanning the dial, I found WRFL shortly after coming to campus. As someone who’s still around Lexington for now, I’ve had no reason yet to stop being a DJ as people do when they leave town. I simply enjoy doing the radio, and luckily they still keep space on the airwaves for us.
Camille: I started volunteering at WRFL during my senior year of high school and really fell in love with the culture of the station. I always looked forward to going to my “internship” at WRFL every day because it was one of the few spaces where I felt like my quirks were really accepted, and it was an awesome place to meet like-minded weirdos (especially when more women of color used to run WRFL!). I worked at WRFL for the majority of my undergrad at UK, and I always really admired the veteran DJs that kept their show going on for years. Plus, Vampire Hours had developed enough of an audience to make me want to continue the show after I graduated.
CJ: Signal Boost and Vampire Hours were both, in my opinion, some of our station’s most unique and iconic blocks of programming for a long time. How did you both curate such dedicated aesthetics? I know that a lot of DJs cycle through different ideas for their shows before settling on something that feels like them. Was Signal Boost always Signal Boost, for example? Was Vampire Hours always Vampire Hours?
Tyler Marie: I trained here at the station under our former general manager Allison Pin and her show Weapons of Choice. Her show featured a lot of women in hip-hop, R&B and soul, and she also curated a great mix of new releases and classic tracks. I got the idea to take it to the next level and create a show that exclusively featured women, trans and queer artists. At first I thought of the working title Siren, but then one day during my training cycle, the name Signal Boost occurred to me out of the blue and I knew I had it. I ran the idea by Allison and she loved it, so Signal Boost it was.
The show was originally going to be general format and not limited by genre, but given some of my contemporaries on the station at the time, which (in addition to Weapons of Choice’s R&B ladies) also included The Witching Hour that played some hyperpop and noise music by women and Lipstick Is Optional that primarily featured women in indie rock, I landed on a high-energy Friday night show revolving around new releases by women in electronic and dance music. After broadcasting for a few years, I started playing more music by women in darkwave and moody synth-based genres.
Camille: Vampire Hours actually started out as my general format show back in 2018, using the very 2018-memey name Real Vampire Hours (which I ended up later changing to Vampire Hours to make the name less dated). I knew at some point I wanted to shift into doing a goth genre show since it wasn’t a genre that anyone else on the station was doing at the time, and that transition happened during the middle of 2019. Once I fully switched into doing a genre show, I leaned into playing a lot of the baby-bat dance floor classics, along with some lesser-known artists from the ’80s and ’90s, but I also made sure to feature some newer artists as well for variety.
CJ: Tyler, for a long time, you served as the on-staff website developer for WRFL, and you did a damn good job of it too. Because of your hard work, we have what is, in my opinion, the most intuitive and effective website that any UK or UK-affiliated organization has. How did you end up getting that position, and what was the process of redesigning the website from the ground up like? How long has website design and coding been a skill of yours?
Tyler Marie: I began working on WRFL’s website in the fall of 2020 when our previous website director, Jason Sogan, was about to graduate and move away. At the time, WRFL was in a tough spot due to COVID and didn’t have anyone else on board with the technical skills needed to maintain the website on a moment’s notice, so I volunteered to step up. I took over a project that Jason had started earlier that year to revamp the station’s website and migrate it to a new server, and I built out the major features we know today like the real-time playlist, archives player, event calendar, news blog and RiFLe zine gallery. I was able to get the project over the finish line and we went live with the new server and website later that semester.
After that, I ended up sticking around for years to help maintain the website and further improve it with even more integrated functionality for the station’s DJs, staff and visitors until it eventually became feature-complete. I’m proud of what I was able to accomplish here: at some point along the way it became my personal goal for WRFL to have the best college radio website, and I think it does. I’ve been designing and developing websites in some form or another since I was literally a kid, so it comes naturally to me and I find it fun.
CJ: Camille, you did a show during COVID and served as a member of the Board of Directors and the General Manager of WRFL during the transition from an automated quarantine broadcast to fully in-person operations again. That sounds like a really difficult position to hold. How was holding such an important leadership position during such a tumultuous time, and what was WRFL like during COVID for those who weren’t around at the time?
Camille: COVID changed a lot of things about society forever, and the same can be said for WRFL. Up until the moment that everyone was quarantined, WRFL prided itself on being one of the few remaining radio stations in the country that had a real human person in the DJ booth 24/7, 365 days a year, even during holidays and weather emergencies. So, the pandemic meant that we had to get creative and fill the airwaves with pre-recorded chunks of programming. One of the notable things that WRFL did during the early days of the pandemic was a remote commencement ceremony to announce the names of the students who were unable to graduate in person. We also hosted Noise from the Attic, a series of Zoom concerts, featuring ambient and electronic noise acts, that was broadcast on the air.
When I became the General Manager in 2021, I knew that WRFL would have to face the challenge of reopening the station. We formed a “reopening committee” and created a plan that involved a hybrid (i.e. half remote and half in-person) schedule, along with several phases of reopening. We had to account for shifting policies at UK surrounding masking, vaccination status and in-person activities, and had to make our decisions with those policies in mind.
CJ: If you had to pitch your show to someone who’s never listened to either of your programming before, what would you say? What makes it stand out from WRFL’s other programs?
Tyler Marie: The overall idea of 120 Minutes is that it’s a handpicked selection of newly released music that’s darker, glitchier and weirder than the general rotation. Aside from a few classics here and there, we focus aggressively on new releases, seeking out the newest and best music we can find each week. We specifically play a lot of electronic music, darkwave, synth and adjacent genres that you don’t usually hear on most other shows on WRFL that focus on indie rock.
Camille: 120 Minutes serves as a nice, dark electronic soundtrack for your Friday nights, whether you’re out and about in your car or listening at home. We like to highlight new electronic, darkwave, goth and adjacent releases from notable up-and-coming artists. Its sound has been compared to video games like Cyberpunk 2077 and movies like Blade Runner, which feature late-stage capitalist hellscapes (not unlike the one that it feels like we’re headed towards). 120 Minutes is an angsty response to the end times, and I think two hours of dark electronic music is the perfect way to get those feelings out.
CJ: Your show, obviously, is themed around MTV’s former music video block 120 Minutes. Tyler, what is the personal significance of that show to you?
Tyler Marie: When naming the new show, I thought of 120 Minutes as a callback to that music video block’s golden age that I was born too late to experience, when it was one of the only national outlets for post-punk, goth, industrial and other hard-edged, often quite weird, electronic-driven music. I came of age in an era when MTV technically still existed, at least more so than it does today, but was already in the process of excising all its music videos and shifting its programming to lowest-common-denominator reality shows. Frustrated by this unfortunate turn of events, I took an interest in what the Gen X’ers loved about MTV back in the day, and for a certain type of music enthusiast, 120 Minutes was it.
That’s not to say everyone loved it (for example, WRFL, ever avant-garde, was playing much more independent and obscure music than 120 during that era and was sharply critical of MTV’s attempts to capitalize on “alternative” music, according to our own RiFLe zine library), but still, ever since I learned about the storied history of 120 Minutes, I always found myself wishing I had been there at the time to see it, hear it and live it for myself.
CJ: How exactly does the old 120 Minutes influence the types of music you play, considering you usually play a lot newer music than the stuff they often focused on during their original run?
Tyler Marie: I like to say 120 Minutes on WRFL is in the spirit of the ’80s music video show but reborn into the future. Before MTV’s 120 Minutes eventually became synonymous with the grunge and post-grunge rock music of the ’90s and then went off the air in the 2000s, its first incarnation in the late ’80s was more along the lines of the umbrella of genres we play on the show: darkwave, synth and electronic music. We call back to that history at the end of each week’s show when we play a “cult classic” from that era. That said, when it comes to the wide variety of new releases that we seek out and put on the air each week, the question I always ask myself is: if the original mission of 120 Minutes was to play darker, sometimes harder, other times moodier, often synthier music that you don’t typically hear during general format hours, then what would they be playing if that show was created in 2025 and aired on a college radio station? My best guess at that answer is what we play you every Friday night from midnight to 2am.
CJ: I didn’t even know this until I checked out the link in your show’s bio, but you run the critically acclaimed archival website and historical database for the original 120 Minutes. I’m a massive fan of DIY-archival work like that myself, so I’d love to hear the story behind how that came to be and how people can interact with this database or get involved to some extent.
Tyler Marie: Remember how I said I’ve been designing and developing websites since I was a kid? The 120 Minutes Archive dates back to when I was first getting deep into music when I was growing up. After learning about the history of the show, I recognized a recurring theme: frustration from people who themselves grew up watching 120 that MTV let it wither away and die without a trace anywhere on the internet of the fact that it even existed, aside from a Wikipedia article and some forum threads. Many of them had old VHS tapes of the show that they would find in their parents’ houses somewhere and then trade with each other. With that in mind, an idea was born: a central place where people could transcribe and submit historic playlists from 120 Minutes and then, in the true spirit of the World Wide Web before it all went wrong, we could rebuild and relive that history together, picking up where MTV left off.
News of the archive’s existence spread via word of mouth online and then in various press outlets that picked up the story several times over the years. As a result, literally hundreds of volunteers pieced together otherwise lost media that they all felt passionately enough about to help preserve. Anyone with an interest in the show or the history of music videos can go to altmusictv.com to interact with the archive or get involved.
CJ: How did it feel for a passion project of yours like The 120 Minutes Archive to be given so much media attention? BuzzFeed referred to you as a “brave, crazy genius” and, according to your website, you received similar praise from the New York Times, NPR, the New Yorker, VICE, and even MTV itself for the tireless work that you and your many volunteers have done. How does it feel to have produced something so successful that resonates with so many people around the world?
Tyler Marie: There were definitely some days where I had to do a double take. The interview I did with BuzzFeed ended up driving more traffic to the archive than ever before, but most of the outlets wrote about it without interviewing me, so all of a sudden one day I would just wake up and be like “oh shit, I’m in The New Yorker today.” Now repeat that about 20 times over several years.
And not everyone really understood what the project was about, either. When you first look at it on its face, it seems ridiculous: just pages upon pages of playlists, as far as the eye can see. But to many of the people who grew up with 120 Minutes and now get to relive the weird and wonderful music videos from their adolescence that they never would’ve been able to recall without the archive, as well as those who want to experience for the first time what it might have felt like to be there sitting in front of the TV late at night in 1988 as your mind repeatedly gets blown for a couple of hours, it’s a gold mine. I’ve kept the project online for so long now because I still hear from people all the time about how much it means to them. It feels nice to have made an impact on people’s lives and on music history and media preservation, no matter how esoteric it may be.
CJ: Camille, you hosted a vampire-themed radio show for over six years, which gave you a deep connection to all things dark and haunted. Is there a story behind why the goth subculture speaks to you?
Camille: I think one of the things that has consistently drawn me to the goth subculture over the years is its dramatic whimsy. Additionally, I love how queer the goth subculture has always been. Those goth spaces are so valuable, as they can bring together large numbers of queer people. As for why I enjoy vampires so much: I think their lore has always been very interesting to me, especially since vampirism has a lot of rules that vary with each incarnation. I love the vampire emoji, and The Vampire Lestat and Bela Lugosi’s Dracula. I am staunchly anti-Twilight though.
CJ: How has being involved with WRFL shaped your professional and personal skills and your ambitions for life? Do you feel like it’s changed you significantly as a person?
Tyler Marie: My time at WRFL since I got involved in 2019 made me a better curator of music, a better radio broadcaster, a better web developer, and improved my social life. There have been ups and downs for sure, and certainly no place is without its problems, but on the whole I would say getting over whatever level of intimidation I once felt about joining the college radio station and showing up at WRFL’s DisOrientation was one of the best decisions I ever made. I don’t know what my life would’ve even looked like over the past several years if I hadn’t done it.
Camille: I’m coming up on 7 years of being involved with WRFL, with Vampire Hours beginning in December of 2018. As a result of my involvement with the station, it has made me more confident in presenting information. The challenges that I had to overcome as a director also improved my professional skills. Plus, I’ve discovered new artists that I never would have listened to otherwise.
CJ: Your show pays tribute to the foundations of alternative culture while also looking to its future. With things like streaming services, artificial intelligence, and social media, everything around feels like it continues to just get more and more corporate and soulless. To me, shows like yours are beacons of hope in times like this. What do you see for the future of alternative broadcasting and DIY-culture and your place in it?
Tyler Marie: With how bleak the tech and media landscape is these days, it’s pretty depressing and unfortunate that these fields happen to be where my strongest interests are. It doesn’t feel great to care a lot about the sort of culture that’s actively being destroyed everywhere you look. We’ve seen that no one is coming to save us. At some point in the not-too-distant future, we’ll all probably also have to do whatever we can to protect this station of ours, one of the few remaining places in the world that still allows any real creative freedom on the airwaves, from encroachment by forces that would wish to take away the unique privileges that people here have enjoyed for decades.
Fear is a killer of many long-held principles, and I can tell that a lot of people right now are afraid of the increasingly oppressive laws and rules at all levels of authority that are actively chipping away at our First Amendment rights. It’s sad to see, and while in theory I’d love to tell anyone threatening our freedoms to simply fuck off, in reality I think it’s all going to get a lot worse before it gets better, if it ever does, for broadcasting everywhere. Beyond that, I honestly don’t know what the future will hold. I just hope that wherever I end up, I’ll be able to participate in the alternative/DIY culture there and contribute my talents to it as I’ve done here.
Camille: I am thankful that WRFL still gives us a platform on the physical airwaves. There are so many other alternative radio stations that have had their license sold to Christian broadcasters. Sometimes when I’m driving in rural America, I like to scan the airwaves for whatever stations are around, and the amount of right-wing Christian radio stations that broadcast nothing but propaganda is truly terrifying. WRFL itself is very special in that way.
Since I know that this broadcasting platform is very valuable, 120 Minutes focuses its efforts on showcasing lesser-known, up-and-coming artists. With the death of monoculture, it feels like there’s no “alternative” anymore, with the music landscape fracturing off into millions of different microgenres and the majority of independent music promotion having to be done through TikTok and Reels. I hate seeing alternative artists self-promoting through social media trends, but I can’t blame them for it because there’s no other way to really get your music out there nowadays.
Tyler Marie: I hope that 120 Minutes, through old-fashioned analog broadcasting, can both provide an alternative outlet for showcasing new music and try to revive the spirit of what the radio once was.
120 Minutes airs live on WRFL every Friday night (early Saturday morning) from midnight to 2am.