Chapter 2: Radio as Resonance Chamber
Remapping and Unmapping Bloomington Through Sounds in Spaces
Remapping the Radioscape
Everyday Programming
Scenes from the Northern Lights
Programmer John Westhues has been a non-commercial radio programmer in Bloomington since 1981, first on WQAX and then WFHB. I first met him around the time I joined the on-air team of Planetary Caravan, WFHB’s Sunday afternoon “international music” show, in 2013. By reputation, I already knew that he had a vested interest in music from Finland. This was thrilling to me. My father has lived and worked in Helsinki at various points, first in his youth and later as a computer programmer and musician and inundated me as a child with recorded music by Finnish artists. This was a significant contributing factor to my choice to pursue a degree in the Scandinavian department of my university and, in doing so, to formally study the Finnish language. Through these studies, I met my now-ex-spouse, whose work first brought me from Helsinki to Bloomington in 2011. When I explained to John these lifelong investments in Finnish music and media and their impact on my life, it forged an immediate bond between us.
John’s relationship to Finland is a topic he loves. Whenever artists from Finland come up in conversation, his usual shyness disappears. He happily reminisces about where he’s been in the Nordic world and the music he’s encountered. He becomes downright effusive when I recognize the names and styles he mentions, everything he says a gentle exclamation. In the years since my introduction to him, I’ve found John to have an exceptional repertoire of knowledge on a wide range of music from Finland. Community radio has been the main medium through which he shares it. Over his years on the air, John has accumulated a wide-ranging personal archive of paper documents—letters from musicians, producers, and promoters of Finnish music and culture, some thanking him for his broadcasts and letting him know about upcoming releases; newspaper clippings; and other files related to his radio programming—and cassettes. He graciously allowed me to examine and digitize many of these items, not for public consumption but as part of my research and for his personal use. These, along with more recent programs of his I have heard, have given me deeper insight into how John’s performances of expertise and access to radio have enabled him to activate imaginative circuits that connect WFHB, Finnish music industries, and Finnish diasporic communities to engage listeners within and beyond those categories. The knowledge he brings to his curation allows his narratives of Finnish music to resonate differently and, I argue, with more breadth and nuance than many narratives that have been transmitted from the top down in popular culture industries through press and publicity.
John’s journey, as documented in local press, began in the 1970s with a move to Sweden that allowed for him to make visits back and forth to Finland. From the outset, this trip had musical aspects; John’s brother Mike moved to Helsinki in 1971, guitar in tow, and started recording his own music and touring both as a solo artist and with various bands. At various times in the 1970s, Mike lived in Helsinki, Uppsala, and London. When John visited him, he was inevitably exposed to local performances. A self-professed lifelong music lover, John became especially enamored of not just the sounds but the scenes he encountered in Finland and Sweden and forged his own connections within Nordic music industry networks. Even after Mike returned to Indiana (with his Finnish wife and their son) at the end of the 1970s, John maintained his contacts and continued to travel back and forth.
In 1981, when John lived around an hour’s drive from Bloomington in rural Greene County, he joined WQAX with a proposal for a show called Scenes from the Northern Lights, dedicated to music from Finland and, to a lesser extent, Sweden and Norway. Throughout 1981 and 1982, it ran every week, returning in 1985 after a several-year period spent out of the Bloomington area. For the most part, John played music from his own collection of commercial releases.
Most of the cassettes John let me borrow and digitize are promotional spots and show recordings from his work at WFHB, but one is from his WQAX years. Both sides of the cassette are mostly comprised of airchecks from four 1991 and 1992 programs, recordings of John announcing songs and reading public service announcements and underwriting copy between music excerpts. His tone is casual and conversational, occasional filler syllables a part of his flow between the scripted content he is required to read during each break, the information he gives about each band (“legendary Finnish guitarist Hasse Walli and the band from Senegal, Asamaan”), his personal comments on the music (“it gets zany, I should say,” he notes about the Zappa devotees of Swedish prog rock/jazz group Samla Mannas Manna), and the occasional moment of amateurism (“Mispronounced, I think,” he says with a bashful chuckle after introducing folk ensemble Norrlåtar almost correctly, save for the å). The tape serves as a demonstration of his on-air personality and a tool to help him listen and refine his announcing technique after the fact, rather than to preserve the entirety of a program. Only snippets of music are captured as he pauses the recording between his spoken segments. This makes for an even more vivid and multitextured interweaving of the different strands at play: new year’s wishes; thanks to sponsor Full-o-Pep Rental; mbira; the electric guitars of Von Zamla’s “Für Manju/Indojazz;” phone numbers for regional elder-focused transport agency Rural Transit; pulsing synths from Thomas Almqvist; “be sure to tune in to WQAX for Random Animal Parts with your host Eric;” Janne Schafer’s guitar twang; more sponsors; prog rock; “legendary” Finnish, Swedish, and Senegalese artists (in the case of Finnish guitarist Hasse Walli’s aforementioned work with the Dakar-based artists of the band Asamaan); reggae; see you next week; and goodnight. The tape ends with an unexplained excerpt of a pre-produced environmentalist segment offering statistics about the impact of American meat consumption on the tropical rainforests.[1] It is a recording rife with aural imaginaries of politics and place all mediated through John, whose expertise and personal experience with much of this music are made more approachable by his relatively unpolished delivery. His Scenes are sonically diverse and accessible. These are important characteristics that allow his show’s seemingly narrow focus to resonate more widely in practice.
When WQAX shut down, John moved his show to WFHB. Scenes from the Northern Lights aired every Friday night for eleven years on WFHB, during which time John expanded the transcontinental circuitry he had built over the decades. Several of the documents in his collection are related to grant applications. John received at least two for his work, both from the Finlandia Foundation, a California-based non-profit organization founded in 1953 that describes itself as “the leading, independent source of support for Finland in America.”[2] One, awarded in 1994, gave John funds that, in a meeting with WFHB staff, went toward both home studio setup for John and equipment for the radio station, including its first mixing board. A second, awarded in 1997, helped fund John’s trip to that year’s South by Southwest music festival. John was personally invited by Jari Muikku of the Finnish Music Information Centre (Fimic, which has since merged with another organization to become Music Finland[3]) to attend concerts by three Finnish acts, each very different. The first was fiddle-forward instrumental folk group JPP from southern Finland, which had by then already played at Bloomington’s annual Lotus World Music and Arts Festival at least once. The second was Anglophone band Plum, who hailed from Turku, on the strongly Swedish-influenced west coast of Finland. A third was punk rocker-turned-country singer-songwriter Gary Heffern. A fixture of 1970s San Diego punk scenes, Heffern was born Veli-Matti Tervaniemi in Ivalo, Finland, before being adopted into a family in the United States.[4] Grouped together in Muikku’s invitation simply as “Finnish bands,” this short list of performers offers a broad array of musical genres standing as representations of Finnishness in keeping with first Fimic’s and then Music Finland’s mission of promoting and connecting “the entire Finnish music industry, spanning across all genres and sectors”.[5] This is a concept of national musical styles that fits well with John’s own work in presenting a wide range of Nordic music to his radio audiences. This range is especially noteworthy when John’s work is understood against the backdrop of aural imaginaries about Finland circulating through major international music industry powers in the 1980s and 1990s. Before returning to a discussion of John’s impact as a programmer, I first explicate some of the dominant phenomena at play in the musical transmission of Finnish imaginaries at that time.
[1] This excerpt, indicative of social issues circulating in Bloomington-based discourses in the 1990s, resonates in its own way as I listen in the 2020s. Donoso et al. (2024) note that since the 1990s, international exports of meat from areas in the Global South have increased exponentially and have resulted in corresponding increases in deforestation.
[2] https://finlandiafoundation.org/about/
[3] https://musicfinland.fi/fi/kuulumisia/music-finlandin-juhlavuosi-kertoo-suomalaisen-musiikkiviennin-kasvusta
[4] Heffern’s journey back to Finland was documented in Erkki Määttänen’s 2010 documentary Veli-Matti ja Ankara Äiti (literally “Veli-Matti and the Strict Mother,” English title “Sweet Kisses from Mommy”) (Bertin 1997; West 1997)