Chapter 4: Radio as Collage Art

Sound Objects

A third system of representation centers on the sound object (or, often, collection of sound objects) used in and/or archived from a radio-related performance event, be it a material sound recording (vinyl record, cassette tape, compact disc, etc.), paper document (press clipping, program schedule), digital file, or other tangible or intangible item. Though seemingly more concrete, the sound object in the context of an archival assemblage can be steeped in ambiguity. These objects vary in what and how they represent, their relationships to space/place and time may or may not be known by the time they reach the archive, and their uses may or may not be materially indicated.

The 78s in the Vrabely Collection, as mentioned earlier, came to the Archives of Traditional Music in sleeves hand stamped with specific dates, the exact meanings of which were unknown to the Vrabely family. One theory among archive employees at the time was that Reverend Vrabely may have stamped the sleeves with the dates on which he played the record in the sleeve in question. There was, though, nothing in the inventory I was working with that confirmed (or contradicted) this; even if there had been, most of the records were in plain brown sleeves, and could easily have been moved from one sleeve to another at some point in their lifetimes, making the date stamps unreliable.[1] What they did provide were the rough outlines of a Hungarian Hour era, information that could, for those familiar with histories of diaspora and migration in the Calumet region, offer the program some broad context—or, conversely, add to an understanding of the mediascape of the mid-20^th century Calumet region. However framed, the 78s themselves are important in understanding specifically how Reverend Vrabely represented and performed Hungarian American identity to the community he served.

The physical media items we found at WFHB (i.e., not solicited from participants) were unevenly documented. Some were clearly marked with titles, production credits, and/or air dates. Labels on skits scripted for the station’s semi-annual fund drives, set spans of time during which programmers ask station listeners for the financial donations that sustain them, set a range of expectations. Many implied particular political orientations, such as the audacious “In-Your-Face WARNING! Outcue: ‘…Reagan’s a scumbag!’” from May 1994 (Figure 4.4).

Figure 4.4: One of the more insistent cassette labels in the WFHB archive.

Others were simpler and vaguer, like the undated “Mila’s Pitch.” Pre-produced segments related to healthcare, Health Break among them, were tagged as being on topics like skin cancer (November 1997), cervical health (October 1997), acupuncture (August 1997), and Alzheimer’s caretaking (June 1997). Tags on other tapes reading “The official WFHB ID done by the Kaisers!!!” (undated) and “Friday night/Saturday morning/#5 is awesome (Chet gets on his knees)” (undated, but likely from the early 2000s given its MiniDisc format) offered anonymous opinions on content even before I had a chance to play the media back myself. Dozens of producers and programmers were represented in the mix, as were their opinions. Some cassettes made for interesting aural-visual palimpsests, as in cases when tapes had been reused and label information crossed out in pen or pencil so that new label information could be written on to match the new contents. A recording of local poet Chris Green reading his work in 1997, for example, was made on a professionally labeled tape of band The Sundays’ album Static & Silence. Whether this tape was chosen simply because it was available or because it was specifically disposable to the person making the recording is unclear. In any case, it is one of many such material repurposings present in the WFHB archive.

A sound object is technically detachable (though never fully extricable) from its original context, portable through space and time, and, in the case of recorded sound material, schizophonic (Schafer 1994 [1977]). Further, though Benjamin argues that “the whole sphere of authenticity eludes technological—and, of course, not only technological—reproducibility” (2006, 253), a sound object is not without auratic dimensions. The time and place of a singer’s performance in a sound studio, for example, is not fully present in the recording of that performance in the Vrabely Collection or the WFHB archive. Adorno might even argue that the reproduction process has destroyed the Now and Here of such a performance. Even so, the object has spatial and temporal dimensions as a piece of radio history. Rey Chow has written that in the age of personal musical devices, “the emotions [stored in music] have become portable” (1990-1991, 144). Each record in the Vrabely Collection has traversed decades and many miles along a unique and often international trajectory from production plants into Vrabely’s hands and onto the Calumet airwaves, eventually finding themselves on the shelves of the Archives of Traditional Music. Each node along this route offers a worthwhile new context.

The systems of knowledge production I have pinpointed here as interconnected within radiophonic archives account for bigger pictures and minute details alike. From institutional histories to individual diacritics, radio archives, defined broadly, can produce specific knowledge about how broadcasters and listeners use and have used radio to express and build senses of the world. Only those that are known and recorded in such a way that the information is preserved, though, can be represented in an archive. The question of what is archived and how takes on particular significance in cases in which archival materials are reused. In the next sections, I explore the metacommunicative phenomena of (de/re)contextualization and nostalgia through case studies of repurposing and mobilizing the WFHB archives.

[1] I do not present this possibility to single out the Vrabely collection as especially unreliable. Indeed, there is every possibility that deeper research into this collection could support the idea of the discs, stamps, and sleeves being meticulously matched. The hypothetical scenario here is based more on my own tendencies as a DJ who sometimes spins vinyl to, over the course of a set, inadvertently lose track of which blank inner record sleeve originally corresponded with which record, simply because the liveness of a DJ set (or a radio program) demands that I prioritize getting records in and out of sleeves quickly rather than meticulously.