William Goldsmith wasn’t sure why he’d signed up for a music theory course. As a teenager, he wrote songs as a hobby, without much ambition. He kept playing keyboards and guitar but didn’t aspire to virtuosity. In his mid-30s, after enrolling in community college on a whim, he followed a fellow student into a class: ‘She was signing up for things that looked like fun; she was signing up, so I signed up, too.’ He ended up committing to four full semesters of theory, as far as he could go without formally entering the school’s music programme. The next step would have required piano fluency and sight-reading.
‘Yeah, that’s not me.’
What captivated Goldsmith was how music fit together: the relationship between major and minor keys, the way shifts in modes and intervals alter a listener’s mood, the coherence that emerges when songs share a tonal centre even when they span genres. Only later did the pattern in his own choices begin to reveal itself. ‘I was struck by how many interests I had pursued or skills I had acquired that made absolutely no sense at the time,’ he says. ‘There was something larger at work here – my unconscious, some outside entity, fate, or something. There was intent and purpose behind those odd little callings or passing fancies I felt.’
It’s August, and nearly 40 years have passed. We’re ensconced in Goldsmith’s weathered RV, parked in Reno a few weeks before Burning Man, where he will help run the festival’s radio station. A Day-Glo tapestry screens off the cab; shades are drawn. A thicket of electronics crowds the narrow space: a Mac workstation, two squat servers, a boom-mounted microphone, KEF loudspeakers, and a basket of headphones. The air conditioner drones against the desert heat. Goldsmith, long white hair falling to his shoulders, leans toward the screen. The vibe is equal parts Mad Max and Marconi.
For the past quarter century, Goldsmith has been building something deliberately irrational: an internet radio station curated by a single mind. Launched in 2000 and known to its worldwide fans simply as RP, Radio Paradise came online when the music industry was in the throes of disruption: the rapid rise of MP3s and peer-to-peer file sharing, the subsequent collapse of CD sales, and the unbundling of albums through iTunes would soon lead to instant access to virtually all recorded music. Fast-forward to the present: 100,000 new tracks are released to music streaming services each day, and the global music catalogue now exceeds 250 million songs. As our collective library grows faster than our ability to absorb it, automation via algorithm might seem rational. But Radio Paradise and its founder are committed to a different ethos: deciding what song comes next should remain an exercise in human judgment.
Goldsmith was born in Los Angeles in 1953, the eldest of four brothers. His father, Glenn, was a pioneering flower breeder whose award-winning hybrids – marigolds, petunias, snapdragons – spread across fields from Guatemala to Holland to Kenya.
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