Jolt Radio’s Sweet Fifteen

The gate of history turns on small hinges, they say — and so, too, apparently does the radio dial of destiny.

Picture this: It’s 2004, and John Caignet is a student at Miami Dade College, planning to study psychology or maybe sociology. It’s all semi-on track. The thing is, this ramp near the cafeteria keeps catching his eye. “Where’s that go?,” he wonders. Finally, one day, he surrenders to his curiosity and goes up the ramp and through these doors, and there to his left is the college radio station.

“I’m not a big believer in destiny,” Caignet will say two decades later, “but…”

But…Caignet enters the station, for reasons he can’t even fathom, to paraphrase James Earl Jones in Field of Dreams. And there was the student station manager, Mike Colacurto, who told Caignet he was looking for deejays. “Do you wanna start a show?” And, though he had not considered it until that moment — despite the fact that he is the great-grandson of Cuban poet and radio broadcasting pioneer Felix B. Caignet — the answer was: “Yes.” Yes, he did. Before long, Caignet was hosting the Alternative Hub, and everything had changed. 

Caignet tells this story to New Times in the Jolt Radio’s studios, the nonprofit online station he founded in 2010 to deliver “eclectic music and content to your ears.” It’s the eve of the Jolt’s quinceañera party at Gramps in Wynwood on November 15, which, like the station itself, will be a wild and wildly diverse alt-culture smorgasbord of DJs, bands, synth battles, live radio broadcasts, food, tea, and record store popups, and more. 

“For how diverse Miami and South Florida are, things can still be pretty tribal — people have a tendency to stick to their own scenes and circles,” Jolt’s current Studio Manager Nick Matthews explains. “At Jolt, none of that really exists. It boils down to one thing: ‘Do you love music? Come as you are.’” 

Jolt is a Journey, Not a Destination

Born in Miami to a Cuban father and a Colombian mother, Caignet and his brother, Pedro, grew up steeped in sound. First, in the Magic City, where they would make curated mixtapes for their grandmother, and then in their mother’s native Colombia, where they went to school from sixth through twelfth grade. It was also in the latter that Caignet’s love for punk rock blossomed. (Fun fact: Alex Okendo, singer of Medellin extreme metal legends Massacre, used to tattoo Caignet.) “Our friends and us had all these little bands and my mom, who worked as a psychologist, would insist we practice at her house,” Caignet said by way of illustrating the supportive environment. “A lot of rock bands that played in my mother’s basement now tour the world.”

In 2000, Caignet returned to the U.S. for college. After graduation, he tried the straight and narrow, working “like a mule” sunup to sundown for UPS, but even with the security and pay, the lifestyle didn’t stick, and he headed back to school to study communications. “I decided to follow my passion,” he says, “without looking back.” 

Caignet wanted to start his own station, but, to him, the regulatory and corporate side of traditional terrestrial radio was (apologies to Ben Franklin) two wolves and a deejay deciding what to have for dinner. During a trip to Colombia, however, Caignet ran into a guy who had hosted a big heavy metal show and was now streaming his show for a modest fee. Back in the U.S., he was introduced to a web designer. The potential for a radio station suddenly seemed within grasp — if he could just teach himself how to connect the backend server to what he had queued up to play. (He did, with only a relatively minor loss of sanity.) He built the station out in his college dorm, bought a cheap podcasting kit with a mixer, christened it Jolt after a line in an Edgar Allan Poe book — “a small but potent or bracing portion of something,” decrees Merriam-Webster — and started curating songs and conducting interviews. 

He quickly came to understand he could not realize his vision alone.

“John and I met through friends at every random music event around 2010,” Stephanie Sarria says. “One day, while at Fox’s in South Miami, he told me his bedroom project, Jolt Radio, was taking off and he needed someone to help him host shows to diversify the catalog. So, given our friendship was founded in music, I accepted and became the first radio host.”

The dorm got cramped quickly, however, and the Jolt crew — which also included Pedro and Jonathan Suarez — rented a space over a porn hotline and sex toy operation in Tamiami by the airport for five hundred bucks a month. “There are a lot of crazy things about that story, looking back,” Caignet says. “We were basically still kids doing everything for the first time, so we assumed it was normal at the time.” Serria, who eventually slid into a role as a jack-of-all-trades event coordinator, adds: “We barely had money to decorate it, but we gave it all our love. Our first logo was hand-painted by me, and the décor was a bit of all our homes. The recording studio was the size of an elevator, but against John’s will, I managed to get full local bands, with drums and all, inside the tiny space during my radio show.”

The landlord eventually offered them the whole building when the sketch sexters downstairs absconded in the middle of the night and left behind their wares, but the drive out to Tamiami was already getting old — especially now that the Jolt crew was regularly DJing at Electric Pickle and Gramps — so they took up a space at the multimedia Gab Studios in Wynwood.

There was a lot of beautiful synergy and cultural crosspollination there, but, well, everyone knows what happened to Wynwood. The posh transplants moved in, the rents went up. “It seemed like one day we’re doing our shows in band t-shirts and shorts then going to Wood Tavern for a drink or doing taco Tuesday, fitting in,” Caignet says, “and the next everybody on the street is looking at us like, ‘Who the hell are these bums?’”

Jolt moved into an abandoned Western Union space in the back of an Allapattah bodega. Caignet launched a show, Behind the Bodega…which kept its title even when the bodega gave way to a gaggle of small art studios. It was an idyllic setup — and hardy. “We barricaded ourselves in 2017 during hurricane Irma and broadcast throughout the hurricane until the power went out,” Sarria recalls. “Fun times!” Alas, this being Miami, Jolt got hustled out to make way for a restaurant. (Boo.) But! An artist living essentially next door had a kid and decided to move to Key Largo, giving Caignet a heads-up. (Yay.) Jolt immediately gutted her beautiful apartment and transformed it into its endlessly cool, ultra apropos iteration that would make the perfect set for a film about broadcasting — think WKRP in Cincinnati meets High Fidelity. 

Think Locally, Broadcast Globally

At 15, Jolt Radio has more than ninety shows on its roster and a global audience. It has nurtured and raised up a generation of passionate broadcasters and shone an ever-brightening spotlight on Miami artists. “I want Jolt to be a place of no pretense,” Caignet says. “I want it to be a place where, for one hour at a time, people come in, hang out, be creative, and introduce the city and the world to their perspective, because that’s the space where cool and unexpected things happen. It’s a vast world of music — share your piece of it.”

“Jolt has always been about sharing music and contributing to this scene so it can stand alongside the best in the world,” adds Enzo Picardi, who joined the station as a resident in 2021 and hosts the soulful dance show Working Nights. “As for the local community, I’d say Jolt carries a lot of it on its shoulders, both as a physical music hub and an overarching platform for shows and other projects. We need spaces like this more than much of what we’re getting in Miami these days.”

The Flame Still Burns

Do things change? Of course. Adult life creeps in, however young the day job. Caignet’s brother, Pedro, has a wife and child. But the pair have recently been working on a short skit —aliens are en route to earth to stop this persistent, gleefully anarchial frequency that is driving their boss crazy a galaxy away. 

The transmitter of that frequency is — you guessed it — Jolt Radio. Which is a roundabout way of saying the Jolt community still sees new frontiers to conquer.

“What started as someone’s passion and hobby turned out to be the link to establish a community in Miami based in our love for music,” Sarria says. “We are so happy to have shared the studio with so many great hosts, DJs, bands and guests. It fills us with excitement to craft new products, spaces, shows, and events for the community to enjoy and be part of.” That will include the 15^th anniversary show, she notes. “You’ll definitely find me at Gramps running from room to room to dance to a bit of everyone’s sets.”

Jolt Radio 15 Year Anniversary Party. 5 p.m. Friday, November 15, at Gramps, 176 NW 24th St., Miami; gramps.com. Tickets cost $20 via eventbrite.com.