By Cassy van Eeden

The local rock and indie music scene is suffering, and as radio professionals, Graeme Raubenheimer and Francois Nel know this all too well. “You see a lot of the big guys fall,” says Nel, “so we need more people just pushing so that there is something to support.”

“[Radio Spookasem is] pretty much a platform for us to showcase less-established bands,” says Nel in the second edition of season 2. “[It] is about the little guy and the bands that are trying to find their way in the local music scene,” Raubenheimer adds.

What makes Radio Spookasem work, is that it’s all balanced. The content itself is the perfect blend of local and international, music and talk, opinion and fact. Similarly, the guys behind it are ever humble but with just enough cockiness mixed in to make you believe in their product.

Sprinkled in between the ‘little guys’ are features with “big names”, as they like to call them, such as Yvonne Chaka Chaka, Rob van Vuuren, Johnny Clegg and (by far their favourite) Riaan Cruywagen.

This recipe seems to be working.

Right from their very first episode, in September last year, the guys drummed up a solid following. And their numbers continue to grow. Strikingly, regardless of how self-confident the two may seem, they have both been surprised at the amount of support they are getting. “So far the response is really cool and it’s keeping us driving,” says Nel.

Back to that smoke break. Raubenheimer and Nel are chatting outside the local Cape Town radio station that they work for. Raubenheimer mentions desperately wanting to start a podcast. “Literally, I was going to do it in my kitchen,” he says. Nel jumps in: “And I was like, ‘but dude like I’m a sound engineer, I can hook us up some mics … and it’ll sound cool, don’t worry I’ll do everything from the audio point of view.” And then it became a family affair.

Everything from the name to the people that make it happen, Radio Spookasem is more than just a partnership between two guys. A while back, Raubenheimer and his brother Rob joked that they wanted to do an Afrikaans over-dub of Ghost Adventures and that they would call themselves Spookasem Productions. “It’s an inside joke,” laughs Raubenheimer.

The Spookasem family consists of Raubenheimer’s brother doing the Gig Guide; their girlfriends helping with audio and social media; their mate Alex van Niekerk, who “designs all our pictures”; and Andrew MacFarlane who “writes random lines”, says Nel. Finally, there’s Raubenheimer’s journo buddy, Daniel Nene, who is responsible for most of the voiceovers.

With superior sound quality, exciting line-ups and clever punch lines, the troop may make podcasting look easy, but it’s not. “Not on our kind of level,” says Nel. Each edition takes about a week and a half to produce from start to finish. “A lot of time does go in and we work many hours,” he adds. But both guys agree that despite the long hours, it’s all worth it.

They hope to one day make money out of the podcast too. “We want to be self-sufficient,” says Nel. Raubenheimer interrupts, “so that we can cover our own costs at the end of the day”. Right now they’re doing it for the love of alternative music.

A new edition of Radio Spookasem goes live every second Thursday. You can listen to and download the podcast via YouTube or SoundCloud.

For more information, visit their page on Facebook and follow them on Twitter.