As gratified as I was to see my LinkNYC number-crunching get some respect I took even greater satisfaction in seeing Payphone Radio get a very generous and thoughtful writeup by Peter Skiera, at the Como Audio website. Payphone Radio was number 7 in Tech Rap: Station Spotlight, an occasional feature at Como Audio which calls out interesting or bizarre programming found in the seemingly endless terrain of Internet radio. Not only are Mr. Skiera’s comments insightful and prescient, but I find myself, a bit of an outsider in the bigger world of radio, in good company with the other radio streams featured in the article. Here is some of what Mr. Skiera had to say:

Mark Thomas, who is also a classical music pianist/composer, randomly calls in to a recording device from various payphones memorializing certain aspects of his life. Think of it as a spoken private journal, broadcast for the entire world to eavesdrop on. Some of these one-way calls are rather pedestrian, such as how his day went at work and tossing his baseball cards. Other calls are more remarkable, like the call in which he recounts the 9/11 terrorist attack (one of the jets flew over his head that morning), recollections of his time working at CNN, and apologizing to his parents for making a painful decision he knows will hurt them. These “confessions” quickly become addictive, like a kind of one-man telephone reality show, and a part of me felt guilty for listening in. The meta data shows the phone number of each payphone he calls from along with a summary of each call (e.g. “Rockefeller Center Rambles”).

Thomas is well spoken, has a pleasant voice, and speaks in a monotone, occasionally letting loose with an unexpected expletive or two. His down-to-earth, unscripted calls make you feel like you are really listening to a call from him. Oftentimes I find myself wanting to talk back. Call quality varies from remarkably clean to just audible, and often abruptly ends with the classic loud noise of the receiver being hung up. His spoken entries are occasionally interrupted by a recorded message from the female operator prompting him to deposit another twenty-five cents. Perhaps she is Alexa or Siri’s grandmother.

Because someone else who read this asked me, I’ll clarify that the “female operator” heard demanding more money near the end of some calls is not a live person, but a synthetic voice.

I laughed outloud at my last comment, having completely forgotten I wrote it in the email Q&A:

I will never use those stupid LinkNYC kiosks for this.

Looks like I got my digs in about how horrible I find the experience of making phone calls via LinkNYC, the “payphone of the future” expected to replace and supplement the remaining quantity of 3200 payphones in New York. When all the payphones are gone we’ll see 10,000 kiosks and 20,000 ad screens blinking 24 hours a day, every 50 feet as far as the eye can bleed.

Assuming the LinkNYC plan follows through it will likely mean the end of Payphone Radio as I now know it, in which virtually all content is recorded using public pay telephones in New York City and occasionally elsewhere.

In the 9+ years I’ve been doing this I have used a cell phone but only on very rare occasion, under circumstances suitably out of the ordinary to justify breaking protocol. I used a cell to call in with comments about the east coast earthquake back in 2011, when long lines of people waiting to use payphones made my non-emergency use seem frivolous. I also called in via cell during an emergency room stay, at a hospital with zero working payphones.

Out of college my career path was supposed to be in radio, or so I thought. Anyone I talked to in professional or alternative radio expressed positive sentiments about my prospects, but one after one the possibilities never came through.

Over time I came to feel that never finding a solid opportunity was for the best, since the world of commercial radio in the early 1990s probably would have chewed me up and spit me out, especially if I somehow managed to get a spot in the cutthroat New York City market. The rise of streaming services and Internet radio basically made a job in “real” radio unnecessary, and for my purposes æsthetically undesirable. I don’t think you will ever hear something like Payphone Radio or my other streaming projects at WSBJ.com over traditional radio airwaves, and that’s fine by me, though I admit to having made failed attempts to connect with programming directors at a number of freeform and alternative stations.

Still, I maintained my interests and influences in traditional radio. As mentioned in Mr. Skiera’s column, I kicked off Payphone Radio thinking I wanted to be the next Joe Frank, one of my many all-time radio heroes. It didn’t take long to discover that there will never be another Joe Frank, and even if there is it won’t be me. My other radio icons include Paul Harvey, Danny Stiles, Garrison Keillor (I know, it’s not fashionable anymore, but still), and Matt Drudge, whose Sunday night program was one of the most underappreciated radio shows I ever heard.

My continued and almost exclusive use of traditional public pay telephones in this pursuit has become something like an antidote to today’s always-connected world in which the hyperventilated pace of communications has rendered peculiar the former behavior of stopping, standing in one place, and formulating your thoughts concisely before establishing a telephone call.

I also just find that the call quality from a payphone is superior to any cell phone I have ever used, even as most of NYC’s phones now connect via Verizon’s cellular network. Progress comes with compromise, of course, as evidenced by the undeniable convenience of mobile phones at the expense of call quality of traditional landline connections.

You can still find old-style landline payphones, and to my ears the call quality from those devices is positively glorious. But such phones are becoming scarce in these parts.

My Internet radio projects are not for everybody, and by my estimate most observers seem to find them puzzling, a negative kind of weird, or even creepy. So it is especially gratifying to connect with someone out there who gets it.

There is more to Peter Skiera’s review of Payphone Radio, check it out at the Como Audio website.