About
Radio8Ball is like calisthenics for the part of our mind that recognizes synchronicity. - Andras Jones
Radio8Ball, is a Pop Oracle where questions are answered by picking songs at random, like musical tarot cards.
R8B, in all it’s many expressions, is the vision of Andras Jones, the son of the late dream psychologist, Richard M. Jones, upon whose dream seminars, the format is loosely based.
Radio
Radio8Ball began on KAOS 89.3 FM in Olympia in 1998 as a late night call-in show. In 2007 the show expanded to include a second broadcast on Seattle Alternative Talk 1150AM. The KAOS show ended in 2008 and the AM show stopped broadcasting in 2009. Radio8Ball currently exists as a regular segment in podcasts from TheSyncBook.com, including “Synchronize” and “42 Minutes”. Many of these shows are available on this site and we are constantly expanding the archive. Many of the songs recorded live on the radio broadcasts are used as the “oracle fodder” that feeds our Pop Oracle.
The Pop Oracle
The Pop Oracle is all around us all the time, transforming culture through our experience of it. The Pop Oracle is our web app that allows you to engage with musical synchronicity on our site and share your answers with your friends. Just click on the “spinning 8” on our homepage, submit your question and receive a musical answer complete with information about the artist and an associated tarot card so you can cross-reference with a universally known divinatory tool. (Yes, it’s entirely random but we do pick which card goes with which song.) Once you’ve got your reading, if you want, you can enter comments and share the link with your friends who enjoy synchronicity.
Live
In 2006 Jones collaborated on a stage presentation of The Radio8Ball format with music by Jim’s Big Ego out of Boston. The show was called “The Ego & The Oracle“. Its brief run in Boston and Seattle was highly successful and led to Radio8Ball’s string of shows in Seattle, Los Angeles and assorted other cities that continues to this day. Guests on these shows have included Dan Bern, John C. Reilly, Mirah, Jill Sobule, Patricia Arquette, Seth Green, Weird Al Yankovick, Ian Moore, Jon Auer, Tig Notaro, Natasha Legerro, Lili Haydn, Anya Marina, Nina Hartley, Daniel Pinchbeck, John Trudell, Sandman: The Rappin’ Cowboy and many others. Some of these shows have been filmed and recorded and we will be making these available as time permits. Look for more live Radio8Ball events in the future and, if you are interested in presenting one in your hometown, please contact us at the CONTACT link.
Television
Our intention, going forward, is to present Radio8Ball as a video experience that offers the same humor, intimacy, insight and emotional danger that we have explored for more than a decade in all these formats. Stay tuned for more on this. In the mean time we’ve got lots of “bootleg” material online, some of which you can view on our front page.
The Sync Book
In 2012 The Sync Book published Andras Jones’ “Accidental Initiations: In The Kabbalistic Tree of Olympia” which documents, among other things, the birth of Radio8Ball and it’s ignominious end at KAOS. Jones’ association with Sync Book Press has led to his inclusion in their first anthology: “The Sync Book – Volume One” and his participation in all three of The Sync Book’s podcasts, “42 Minutes” & “Always Record” as a guest, and as the producer and co-host of SYNCHRONIZE with Sync Book publisher, Alan Abbadessa-Green. Sync Book has already presented two Sync Summits (NY 2012, SF 2013) which were based around the R8B format and there are plans for more in 2014. If you are interested in a deeper exploration of synchronicity, thesyncbook.com is a good place to start.