"I think we all wish that we could take over a radio station, but unless you have a group of militiamen at your side, it's pretty hard to do." So says Butthole Surfers drummer King Coffey, who recently teamed up with Austin-based company Monsterbit Media to create his own radio show (called "Brainwash" after an early punk song by Flipper) on the Web. Although he had no previous DJ experience, Coffey got the idea for a Web-based radio show after he heard that urban radio station K104 in Dallas had their programming simulcast on the Web. Wanting to hear a variety of music that he couldn't find on local radio, Coffey became intrigued by the concept of online radio.

"I wondered what would happen if you had a radio show playing on repeat 24 hours a day, where people could hear it all the time. From there," recalls the drummer, "I thought, What would happen if you recorded a bunch of shows and had a multi-disc changer playing shows that you've programmed? It's a radio station at that point, and I asked some friends of mine in Austin who run an Internet company if it was possible and they said yeah, and as far as they could tell, nobody was really doing anything quite like that."

With the help of the folks at Monsterbit, who also handle Websites for the South By Southwest music conference, Indigo Girl Amy Ray's Daemon Records, and Sister Ruby Records, Coffey quickly ironed out plans for what Monsterbit's "Chief Executrix" Mellie Price calls "the equivalent of pirate radio on the Internet." He began recording one-hour Brainwash shows at his home studio, mixing together diverse selections of music from his personal collection.

"I live underneath a flight path, so occasionally you can hear planes flying overhead and dogs barking in the background," admits Coffey with a laugh. "I try to keep it pretty eclectic and fast-moving. I'll play everything from '60s soul to obscure noise from New Zealand to Ethiopian pop -- anything that rules my world. The idea is to keep it fairly obscure, because if it's something you can hear all the time on conventional radio, there's no point to it."

Some of Coffey's playlist, which includes everything from Future Sound of London and DJ Spooky to The Dicks and Land of the Loops, is reminiscent of European radio, which is known to switch from genre to genre with each song. He admits that Brainwash was modeled after British DJ John Peel's infamous program for BBC radio. In fact, King Coffey is such a fan of Peel's that he trades tapes of the BBC shows with a guy in Scotland.

"I think that style makes for better listening, and I think that's what most true fans of music want to hear," he says. "I like switching gears a lot and mixing all kinds of different stuff into a coherent thing."

Indeed, Coffey's shows appear to be not only unique in their diversity, but also more listener-friendly than commercial radio, with request lines, songs that are announced both before and after they are played, and a playlist posted on the Website so that listeners can track down the often obscure records for themselves.

The Brainwash show began running on a 24-hour basis as of February 1, with 15 different one-hour shows scheduled to be running on a shuffled mode within a few weeks. The drummer is noticeably excited about his DIY radio experiment, and plans to get more involved with it as time goes by.

"I look forward to getting more and more new programming on there. Who knows? Maybe one day we'll take it to some sort of live thing. It's a lot of fun though, and for the time being it's pretty cool," he says. "Anybody who has a computer can tap in and hear some interesting music ... At least the world of music as I like it."