Podthoughts by Colin Marshall: Urban Coffee

Posted by Maximum Fun on 26th April 2010


Vital stats:
Format: high-tech, segmented TTWGBAC; or “banter-cast”
Duration: 1h-1h30m
Frequency: fortnightly, at least
Archive available on iTunes: all

Moan as I may fact that the medium of podcasting hasn’t produced quite as many minty fresh new genres — or as many ungenrefiables, for that matter — as I’d hoped, it’s still early days. Early-ish days, anyway. But after hearing Urban Coffee [RSS] [iTunes] after No Agenda, which I Podthought about nearly bang on one year ago, I can confirm the existence of at least one more. I’m just not sure what to call it.

Like No Agenda‘s Curry and Dvorak, Urban Coffee‘s Dave Koss and Seth Falkner, the latter of whom is a musician and the former of whom seems to do something with animation, normally operate in different domains but regularly come together for a heavily-segmented show that touches on technology, politics and their own lives’ streams of victory and frustration. The main differences are generational — these guys seem substantially younger than the middle-aged No Agenda-ers — and geographical. Whereas I believe Curry and Dvorak host the show from different locations via Skype, it sounds as if Koss and Falkner only resort to that when something goes logistically wrong and they can’t be in the same room.

The similarities come as no surprise, since one of this podcast’s hosts is such a No Agenda fan that he brings it up in almost every episode. But if Koss and Falkner are relatively young and not nearly as eccentric as their models, isn’t their show just another TTWGBAC? In some senses, yes; in others, no. The two programs share a tech-intensive setup (by podcasting’s somewhat laggy standards) that allows listeners to tap into audio streams, video streams, a chat room and lord knows what else during recording and a reasonably organized structure of predefined compartments. I guess that’s simply a holdover from “regular” radio, but combine it with the freewheelingness of the TTWGBAC and you have something more interesting than either.

So instead of a couple dudes happening to wend their way from song recommendations to complaints to (my personal favorite) the reading out lout of narcissistic tweets, you have the routinely scheduled features “Seth’s Music Café”, “Bitch of the Week” and “Narcissistic Tweets”. In between, Koss and Falkner work in quite a lot about new developments in computer and other electronic gear, the clashes between corporate/governmental entities and what might loosely be termed tech culture, the challenges of new fatherhood and, of course, Pedobear. The more like these guys the are, the more into your their show you’ll be — and I suspect there are boatloads of people who share their interests hanging around the net.

One iTunes reviewer calls the show a “banter-cast”, and, though it doesn’t capture quite as many nuances as I’d like, that’s about as serviceable a name as we’re going to get today. There’s something about podcasts like this one, and this podcast in particular, that eludes precise nameability. The title itself is a case in point: it feels a little misleading, but I’ll be damned if I can tell you what the name Urban Coffee would seem to lead to, falsely or otherwise. Could the the vagueness be an advantage? Got me listening.

[Want to hire Podthinker Colin Marshall to Podthink at your box social? colinjmarshall at gmail.]