Now you know: Radio Bandiego

“The live performance piece is the key, and one of the main reasons we waited a year to start,” says Florentino Buenaventura, host of Radio Bandiego: Your Bands Revealed, a new talk show featuring local music figures every Sunday afternoon at wsRadio.com. “There was a piece of gear that we were waiting to be invented, Presonus’s Studio Live RM32AI live and recording mixer, and it wasn’t available until November 2014. We knew it was what we wanted to deliver, a state-of-the-art, full band, completely amped live-performance experience.”

Launched on March 6, the next acts to be featured on Radio Bandiego will the Joseph Luna Band (May 24) and Da’rrel Dexter (May 31), with upcoming episodes to include the Sickstring Outlaws, Seventrain, Sister Speak, Lyrical Groove, and Chris Leyva’s Falling Doves.

“We see ourselves as more than online media,” says Buenaventura. “We’re looking to be in the community as well, putting on events, sponsoring shows, and working with the bands to help bring a higher-level attendance to clubs and concerts.”

Buenaventura’s background includes playing bass with indie soul band Curbside Vinyl and producing the group Fourth Phaze, the latter being an ultimately unsuccessful endeavor. “I found myself humbled by the biz, so I packed it all in for a few decades and became a technologist and worked many years for Microsoft.” After meeting the owner of wsRadio.com network, “He asked for some consulting help with marketing and business development for the station. In return, he provided my band some space for practice, in what is now the Radio Bandiego live set. One of my consulting recommendations was to start a show about the music business.”

The program is open to all musical styles and band configurations, although Buenaventura notes “I personally think there are a couple of emerging sounds coming out of the city that are starting to swell, which I call ‘indie blues’ and ‘indie soul.’ Those genres combine the traditions of the foundation genre with the unique flavors of today’s indie sound.”