KEIR Radio

Tune In:

Tillgrove’s Number One Favorite Radio Station…

The fog is thicker than soup tonight. You feel the familiar click as the selector switch awakens your fog lights, though you cant imagine how they earned the title. The fog almost has a way of dampening the very world around it. Only the outlines of darkened buildings indicate you’re even in a town, though it feels as though its shunning your very presence. The silence of the night is almost uncanny, as though all the life has been sucked from the world and you’re all that remails. Your radio beckons you like a siren of nostalgia, and as you flip through ad reads and dead static, an unfamiliar voice catches your ear. You’re listening to to Tillgrove’s number one favorite radio station, KEIR…

It is an unavoidable experience, while road tripping in the United States, to encounter a town that feels as though it has died and reached purgatory long before its privy to the fate. Buildings run down and forgotten after the wealth that maintained their allure has abandoned them. A population who move like ghosts through the quiet streets, always surviving but never thriving.

The shutdown of a local mine, the introduction of a new interstate, the opening of a new Shopping Supercenter. Events that announce themselves as a greater good for the whole, but the seemingly innocuous acts always hold the devil in the details. For every thriving community that makes sacrifices for their persistence, there is another that sold their soul for convenience. The cruelest fate befalls the residents of these Faustian townships. Where there is no opportunity for growth, there is no room for hope. Rot doesn’t happen over night, it begins at the core and rots everything around it from the inside out. A virus of culture, carried by the host of greed. KEIR is a love song to these small towns, a reminder that we can thrive even without the blessing of corporate America. When you pass through your next limbo town keep a keen eye out for where the wealth went, but show kindness to those who remain.

Lore:

The closing of Tillgrove Cove’s local cannery is an event that every resident can remember, though non can recall the details behind the fall that followed. A certain unspoken feeling is shared among its remaining residents, though in a town as small as Tillgrove Cove, no one wants to be the first to address the unexplained events that have shook the community. Members of the public that once held respect and busied themselves in their daily responsibilities, now have nothing but time to allow the mystery of the pacific northwest reveal itself. Through necessity or fate, all have found a single radio station to cling to as the basis for maintaining sanity and peace in their shrinking world. Being the only remaining station broadcasting in the cove, KEIR has naturally become a town center of sorts, allowing the residents to call in to explain away their strange happenings and fears around the towns future. Our host, Chip Halloran, is a man broken most by this shift. Above all else, the show must go on in our protagonists mind. To acknowledge the state of the town is to confront entropy itself.

KEIR isn’t just a proof of concept, it is an entire world that is continually changing and building on itself every single day. Once minute Chip announces a local food drive for the Tillgrove Community Center, the next you are hearing a interaction between a local resident explaining their cryptid siting to a bemused but unbothered host. An entire world of interactions and story driving events are recorded in the KEIR lore bible. As characters complete their stories or fall to unknown fates, new characters are generated, assigned a new voice, provided a new storyline, and are recorded in the lore bible. This maintains continuity while ensuring that all events follow the guidelines I’ve laid out.

Technical Details and Features:

KEIR is a fully autonomous radio station. Every aspect including the song lineup, world building, character creation, and content are all controlled by Gemma 4 12b. All aspects of this project are being ran completely local to my lab environment, using only music from my collection.

Gemma 4 is kept in check by a world building bible that contains all rules and regulations for maintaining the radio station. This gives guidelines around how often a break should be in the music and what the general vibes should be. Gemma is provided a list of available music and builds out a DJ set list based on the theming. In between every 10-15 minutes there is an intermission where Gemma provides an update on the local happenings in Tillgrove Cove. This can be something as simple as a lost and found announcement to a full conversation between residents of the town.

For controlling the station itself and adding manual additions I have created a management dashboard:

This allows you to add in new voice clips that will be used for training AI for new character, build out more aspects of the world, or steer the story in a new direction. This portal also allows you to review the content that Gemma is planning on playing so you can stop anything that would conflict with the world before it is spoken.