Shedding Corporate.

A Former CBS Radio Producer Helms Deep Ellum On Air's New Dubstep Program.

Jedi Jantzen has a striking thing to say about his former job as a producer at CBS Radio:.

“I felt like I could have lost my job on any given day,” he says, sitting in the green room/kitchen of new Internet radio start-up, Deep Ellum On Air.

That's not the case here, he says. Here he feels comfortable.

Needed.

Wanted.

That's in part because it's his venture. The former “The Jagger Show” producer at 105.3-FM The Fan has branched off on his own in a space on the third floor of the 3200 Main Lofts in Deep Ellum to start, with a foray of other radio dreamers, an Internet radio station free from the ties of any corporate chokehold.

It's a Tuesday night and the environment, consisting of a studio room comparable to what any national radio station consists of (large boom mics, computer monitors and even a separate video mixing station), is teeming with fans of the new station's most popular niche show, “Going Dub: The DUBSTEP Show.” Most of them sit silently in strewn out chairs in a crescent surrounding the main desk. A young couple lounges in embrace. Another single male stares off into the wall in a trance.

The studio welcomes first of four DJs that night, Trevor Slaughter, who spins for 30 minutes straight, commercially uninterrupted, with the aid of a full scale PA blasting the room. In Slaughter's face, as he huddles over his turntables, two video cameras on boom stands document the show.

“Deep Ellum On Air” broadcasts all of its radio shows with live video in studio, and it makes all of them available on UStream so fans can watch these clips after each live broadcast. Most video editing is done live, and “Going Dub” is aided by blending in stock footage to match the in-studio feed, making it feasible to show live at house parties.

Drew Maggs, a future developer of a sketch comedy show on the network, relaxes in the green room away from the booming dance music.

“It's interesting what the live visual adds to most of the shows,” he says, pondering just how far the station can blend a radio comedy program and a full-scale visual production. “We're currently writing characters for ours to act out live on air for our sketch show.”

Currently, Deep Ellum On Air is running 15 different reoccurring programs — some weekly, some monthly, and all of which are archived on the station's site following their broadcast. The station is in the process of planning more shows to add in the near future, as well as some live events to be announced soon.

“I never really thought of this being sort of a hybrid between radio and TV,” Jentzen says, noting the cameras surrounding him. “All I know is that everything is going to the Internet, and we want to be able to say in five years that we were here doing it right now.”