Chapter 3: Radio as Collective Improvisation

“Put Up the Antenna”

In 2025, punk artist and community organizer Erica Dawn Lyle spoke to the importance of quotidian improvisation in empathetic acts of care during a live session I hosted on WFHB (WFHB 2026a).[1] Erica was at the station to promote a performance at local community venue Redbud Books. She started her on-air session at WFHB with a fifteen-minute improvised cover of Black Sabbath’s “Hand of Doom.” Using loop pedals, she recorded and played back her own voice singing the song’s refrain (“There’ll be no return”) as she recited a spoken word piece written just prior to the session. In her piece, she reached out to imagined audience members living in fear of the current social situation and proposed new ways of thinking as her singing (represented here in oblique type and in parentheses roughly where each iteration started relative to her spoken words) echoed:

How much (There’ll be no return.) of your current fear and confusion and loneliness (There’ll be no return.) do you think could be attributed to your (There’ll be no return.) attachment to seeking individual solutions (There’ll be no return.) to collective problems are there things that you fear (There’ll be no return.) that you cannot live without? (There’ll be no return.) How long have we already been living without them? (There’ll be no return.) Are there things (There’ll be no return.) that you have to do alone all the time (There’ll be no return.) that are so difficult and you wish that you could just share (There’ll be no return.) that load with others? (There’ll be no return.) I sense that many of you out there are longing right now (There’ll be no return.) to find ways to offer (There’ll be no return.) meaningful care to others. (There’ll be no return.) What would a society organized on care look like? (There’ll be no return.) How would you have to transform yourself in order to participate in it? (There’ll be no return.) Allow yourself to dream. (There’ll be no return.) (There’ll be no return.) (There’ll be no return.) (There’ll be no return.) (There’ll be no return.) (There’ll be no return.) (There’ll be no return.) (There’ll be no return.) Allow yourself to breathe. (There’ll be no return.)

Following this, she improvised a wordless passage of rhythmic breathing, looped percussion, and electric guitar until returning to the microphone for a final, breathy chant of “Transistor radio / Trans sister radio” in what I interpreted as a message of trans power amid the same increasing political and existential threats Lyle referenced in her spoken word.

With only a few minutes left of the scheduled twenty-minute session, I asked Lyle to discuss what audiences at Redbud could expect from her set that night. Her answer brought together radio, community, care, improvisation, and society:

It’s like radio, put up the antenna and see what you pick up, so a lot of it will depend on what people bring to the room, I think… I find that there’s a lot of desire to connect, you know, and there’s a lot of uncertainty about how to start, but the spirit of improvisation is also, for me, it’s just about starting. My strong feeling is that we are going to be able to find our way out of this mess as a resistant culture only through improvisation, and not through some sort of programmatic revolutionary thing that we’re going to, like, have handed to us or read in a book or that a party is going to recommend to us or something. The best way is for people to start coming together around their affinities and desires immediately.

In many ways, WFHB does just that, and its mediative and communicative specifics allow for improvisation to happen immediately, even when that improvisation takes time. Katie Moylan writes that “community radio’s value—cultural, expressive, societal and political—transcends its constituent parts… Actively listening to a given community-facing show immerses the listener in an intimate structure of feeling” and that during COVID-19 isolation and anxiety, “the intimacy of the radio voice, speaking directly to the listener, became newly valuable, perhaps because more expressive than scrolling onscreen updates” (2023, 245-247). As I listen to the sonic details of the broadcasts and understanding firsthand the complexity of the operational shifts WFHB’s personnel devised and executed during the early days of COVID-19, what emerges for me in these expressions meant for intimate consumption is a sense of improvisation based in values of relation and experimentation that works toward care, something vital not only during the acute crisis of a pandemic but also in maintaining radiophonic community every day.

In this chapter, I have drawn on jazz discourses, representations of radio practices in popular media, complexity theory, and my own experiences as a community radio participant in the United States in the 2020s to underscore the regimes of value and layers of significance that inform and emerge from decisions to improvise—or not—in broadcast media. I have specifically invoked Ornette Coleman’s philosophy of Harmolodics to explore the place of relation as a value of improvisatory musicking and Hermeto Pascoal’s belief in música universal to understand the generative potentials of expansive sonic experimentation. Understanding WFHB’s shifts in practice and subsequently in aesthetics during COVID-19 as emerging from these values complicates the apparent divide between practices of improvisation and automation and frames them as equally capable of comprising radiophonic acts of care.

In her on-air spoken word piece, Erica Dawn Lyle asked two questions that stand out in considering WFHB’s collective creative decisions during the COVID-19 crisis and amid the escalation of political threats to non-commercial radio culminating in the elimination of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting: “What would a society based on care look like? How would you have to transform yourself in order to participate in it?” For her presumed audiences, made up of people experiencing acute situations of oppression and day-to-day fear of further authoritarianism, these are thought exercises that ask them to reflect on their core values and consider the practices that might emerge from them in the service of care in a radical revision of society. She alludes to the need to shift away from individualism and toward collective solutions and to create a new sense of improvisatory, resistant culture. Radio often feels as though it favors the individual, creating the sense of a person-to-person connection in largely private spheres. The individuals, though, are bound together in a collectivity. At the beginning of this chapter, I quoted one of my WFHB colleagues as describing jazz as “an ensemble. But you’re individual. So you maintain your individuality” (Interview 22). Community radio is always ideologically built on principles of collectivity within which individuals express their own ideas and conduct their own experiments knowing they are in relation to one another. Not every improvisatory act works out as imagined, but each adds to the complexity of the system and makes audible the values of care that underpin community radio missions of accessibility and diversity.

[1] Audio embedded in companion webpage.