Echoes celebrated its 17th birthday, last week, but Star’s End celebrated its 30th Birthday. Philadelphia space music fans know Star’s End for it five hours of space and ambient music every Saturday Night/Sunday Morning from 1-6AM on 88.5, WXPN. It’s one of the reasons Philadelphia is considered such a hotbed of electronic music. I created Star’s End when we started enjoying the first wave of space music with Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Jean-Michel Jarre, Cluster, Neu and Kraftwerk.
I was joined back then by Steve Pross, a Penn student who later changed his air name to Roid Kafka and with the late-Lee Paris launched Yesterday’s Now Music Today, Philly’s first punk show.
The name Star’s End came both from David Bedford’s composition of the same name and its source, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy. 
Star’s End was the location of the Second Foundation on Trantor. “All roads lead to Trantor, and that is where all stars end.” Listeners often thought it was called Star Zen, which is pretty good, too.
All road’s led to Trantor, but interstellar transport departed from the studios of WXPN in Philadelphia where Star’s End was created. A dozen or so jocks have come and gone, but the show continues to thrive under the steady hand of Chuck Van Zyl, who I met in a seedy record store and convinced to come join the station. He’s been pretty much the sole host since 1995, with occasional substitutions from Echoes’ Jeff Towne.
I guested on Chuck’s Star’s End this past Saturday night, my first time on the show in over 20 years and along with Gino Wong, another former Star’s End pilot, we tripped down memory lane for an hour.
Star’s End. A journey through your aural universe. A catalyst for your fantasies. A soundscape for your dreams. It’s part of the roots of Echoes.
Comment posted by
at 10/15/2006 7:19:43 PM
Perhaps, since you guys have been around for quite awhile, maybe you know the answer to this?
Back in the early to mid 80’s one of my first new age albums had a song on it that eventually was used in a Nationally televised wine commercial. On the cassette there was the title of the song and then in parenthesis it said (the wine song).
Thank You,
Donald