Starting in Seattle 2005, RBMA Radio has grown into a vast online archive of audio treats that is now even available on your iPhone. In this article from the Academy’s little paper brother, the Daily Note, (get the full issue here) Emma Warren turns on and tunes in.

You’d think that after writing about music for millions of years, radio would be a cinch. Just play some records and chat about stuff. Easy. Er... not quite. The difference between writing about music and communicating radiophonically is like the difference – to paraphrase Antony and the Johnsons' delightful 2005 Mercury Prize acceptance speech – between oranges, spaceships and a potted plant.

I began to realise quite how different when I started doing radio back in 2006 at the Melbourne Academy. It was the first time I’d switched from typing on screen to standing in front of a microphone and I was game but nervous. Especially when the engineer casually mentioned three seconds before we went on air that we were broadcasting on the city’s main independent radio station. I thought it was only going out in the building.

The radio was a smart addition to Academy runnings. I shared presenting duties with hip hop authority Jeff ‘Chairman’ Mao and Deviation don Benji B. We began creating radio shows, interviews and mixes that then went through some invisible, incremental massivisation. It would just have been us talking to ourselves were it not for the expert help of people like Gerd Janson, Running Back’s house maestro, Karen P, formerly Gilles Peterson’s producer, and grand overseer Yannick Elverfeld. There are now in excess of 2,500 shows on RBMA Radio, including what we call a ‘fireside chat’ with The Roots, a mix from Toronto by Theo Parrish and a live mix from Ricardo Villalobos, to mention just the three currently most streamed shows. You might get the Animal Collective talking about their favourite tunes, or DMZ’s Mala taking you on a sonic meander around his London. These days, it’s a serious collection of music that would take you lifetimes to listen to.

That first time in Melbourne was a very funny experience. After Bristol junglist DJ Krust did his couch interview with Benji B (expertly covering both the expected ground, and Krust’s revelation that he was studying “hidden knowledge”), we invited him into the studio for a mix. I was sitting around the corner, tapping away on something or other, and waves of bass kept making my cup of tea wobble. Krust had brought the ground speakers up to head height, like the world’s biggest personal stereo, and it was so loud the engineer was wearing industrial headphones just to keep the noise out. Or at least down a little bit. Hip hop producer Just Blaze came in to reveal a love of ’90s Belgian rave, doing an impromptu performance of the rap from the ultimate Belgian hoover track, Dominator by Human Resource.

The radio was now a regular feature of the Academy, something that allowed us to interview participants and lecturers, as well as getting guest mixes in. The studio manager in Toronto was in what you might call a bad place, tripping over cables and reaching volcanic levels of fury in 0-60-type timescales. The content was similarly hot. Benga hopped off the couch into the studio to record a mix with his hilariously scratched and battered dubplates; Martyn Ware of Heaven 17 stopped metaphorical traffic with his stories about layering 120 voices over each other on Temptation; and I realised that burning CDs of music to play while counting down the seconds before going live is a bad idea.

The following year we broadcast live on local BCN radio, Scanner FM, with the first hour in English (sorry, local Catalan speakers, I’m just going to roll in and talk to you in English for a bit), then the second in Catalan. We did a funny little handover between myself and the local presenters before switching up the linguistics, but it worked. I spent most of that Academy trying to find a way to play Charles B’s stupidly energetic acid house tune Lack Of Love. I also realised that opening with Count Ossie’s mystical rasta album Grounation was just showing off.

And this year in London, which goes out on NME Radio and on rbmaradio.com, has already had its moments. Industrial bad girl Cosey Fanni Tutti finished her interview with the uncharacteristically cute: “It was great!” Not what you’d expect from the woman best known for her part in Throbbing Gristle’s “civilisation-wrecking” Prostitution show. James Pants recorded a confession after pouring coffee over a participant’s computer and then returned daily to further unburden himself. It reminded me of when I used to make up sins just so I had something to tell the priest. By the end he was confessing to having picked up his wife from the airport in a company car. Call the IRS! James is also the only person I know who would write a punky electro tribute to his new baby called I Live Inside an Egg. Fellow studio team member João Barbosa, aka J-Wow from Buraka Som Sistema, came in to do a mix but had to re-do it after being told he couldn’t play tunes with swearing on national radio in the UK. He sat behind his laptop previewing them on his headphones, occasionally peeking out to ask, “Is ‘slap your ass cheeks’ OK?” Anyone who’s ever seen Buraka’s electrifying live sets or João’s DJ sets will know what a challenge we posed. He stepped up to, and beyond, the mark. Oh, and ‘ass cheeks’ was fine.

RBMA Radio broadcasts live on NME Radio and rbmaradio.com, Monday-Friday, 10pm-12am until March 14. Check out the site over at www.RBMAradio.com, or just click on some of the red links above to sample some of the delights in store.