Readers of Perfect Duluth Day know I am enchanted with International Falls and the Icebox Radio Theater. I write about it for the Duluth News Tribune too. For more than a decade, the Icebox Radio Theater has focused on the theater experience. The audio dramas developed under Jeffrey Adams’ artistic direction have been funny, moving, and technically well-executed. Some have won awards, including the Ambie Awards for Excellence in Audio. But, in many ways, as a podcast, the Icebox has focused on the theater and missed out on the charm of radio.

The charm of radio is back in the Coffee Landing Radio Hour, a program created by the Icebox Radio Theater, which debuted at the Coffee Landing in International Falls and online on May 22. The Coffee Landing Radio Hour is a gentle mix of music, brief and often funny radio dramas, spoof advertising, and banter with the in-person and online crowd.

In many ways, the show demands comparison to A Prairie Home Companion, the Garrison Keillor variety and radio hour that dominated public radio in the 1990s and early 2000s. The sense of humor overlaps, though at least in this episode, the music felt deeper and more meaningful, thanks to Darcy Sullivan.

I like to think of Coffee Landing Radio Hour as reviving something we haven’t seen in radio in ten years, since A Prairie Home Companion and Whad’ya Know and Car Talk slipped away from the air. That’s patience. Modern public radio, including shows like Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, is frenetic, at least in comparison to the radio giants of a decade ago. There is barely a moment of dead air, of space not filled with a quick-talking personality, a music bed, or laughter.

By comparison, the Coffee Landing Radio Hour is spacious; if anything, I wanted Adams and crew to take even more time between segments, more time for them and for me to breathe, which is also time to appreciate their craft.

But the Hour was already 90 minutes.

The ending meditation, on melt, on the space and time between winter and summer, was refreshing. Of late, I have strangely found myself drawn to Adams’ solo podcast, The Crisper. While I have long enjoyed his genre inventions, his playful humor and his scary frights, I have found myself looking for flashes of a different, in a way more authentic, writerly voice. The meditation on melt, I think, delivered (in ways that the News from Lake Wobegon rarely did, encrusted with Keillor’s performance, seemingly less authentic every year). With quiet intensity, it delivered. Give it a listen.

For more information on Icebox Radio Theater visit iceboxradio.org.