Kingston12 Digital Radio: live radio from Silver Spring

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Dusting off the needle…

Kingston12 Digital Radio

Playlists that ignore the chart.

Reggae classics and dancehall, cut with Afro-beat.

Sydney White spent seventeen years at National Public Radio and another two decades in television and station management before putting Kingston 12 Media behind a reggae channel of his own, run out of Maryland with engineer Jake Tremper — who built the four digital channels at WMNF in Tampa — keeping the stream on the air. The name belongs to a postal zone in west-central Kingston, next door to Trench Town: the few blocks that held the Ambassador Theatre and sent reggae out to the rest of the world.

Reggae runs the clock, adult classics next to contemporary dancehall, and the playlist deliberately ignores Billboard formatting — ska and mento records surface, so do soca, amapiano, Afro-beat out of Lagos and Accra. Hosted shows have come and gone around that rotation, among them a Friday new-music hour with White himself and a late Saturday session from the King Viper Sound system.

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Silver Spring, United States

Kingston12 Digital Radio

Playlists that ignore the chart.

Reggae classics and dancehall, cut with Afro-beat.

Sydney White spent seventeen years at National Public Radio and another two decades in television and station management before putting Kingston 12 Media behind a reggae channel of his own, run out of Maryland with engineer Jake Tremper — who built the four digital channels at WMNF in Tampa — keeping the stream on the air. The name belongs to a postal zone in west-central Kingston, next door to Trench Town: the few blocks that held the Ambassador Theatre and sent reggae out to the rest of the world.

Reggae runs the clock, adult classics next to contemporary dancehall, and the playlist deliberately ignores Billboard formatting — ska and mento records surface, so do soca, amapiano, Afro-beat out of Lagos and Accra. Hosted shows have come and gone around that rotation, among them a Friday new-music hour with White himself and a late Saturday session from the King Viper Sound system.