Chapter 4: Radio as Collage Art

Past as Future

As an aesthetic, collage has been critiqued and celebrated in almost equal measure, derided by some critics as indicative of societal disintegration and put forth by many proponents as a creative and multivocal purpose for salvaging what is left behind in a disintegrating society. In radio, collage in its loosest sense—things of disparate sources put together in a new whole—is all but de rigueur, a primary technique for the medium. When approached with a sense of deliberate creativity, with attention to the archival nature of the sounds used, art emerges from these collaging techniques. Engaging with and activating archives in creating radio collage can be in and of itself a means of knowledge production. Listening to and repurposing recordings for WFHB Rewind taught me things about Bloomington that I had not otherwise learned in 14 years of living here and being involved with WFHB and various community segments. As I listened to collages with my radio colleagues in the WFHB Past and Present context, the sounds triggered memories that they shared with me and each other, further expanding my knowledge of local events and figures. In conversation with John Vochatzer, Matt Gonzalez talks about his methods of finding collage materials as a way of knowing the city. “There’s a lot of candy wrappers and beer packaging South of Market and in the Haight,” he says, “wonderful gold in Chinatown. I’ve had good luck finding silver in Potrero Hill.” It’s not all luck, he points out; there is effort and agency involved. “I don’t typically buy paper,” he explains, “but I have been known to pick out a brand of toothpaste or garbage bags and light bulbs because I like the particular packaging color” (2023). Thoughtful collage art is selective in what it takes, what it moves, and where it moves it. It is reflective, the artist pondering the significance of even the most sweeping nostalgia.

The relationship between community radio archives and community radio sustainability is a challenging one to navigate, complex in often undesirable ways. At WFHB, paid and volunteer personnel (myself included) have mobilized the affective power of archival materials to connect the community’s past, present, and future with WFHB Rewind. At WFHB Past and Present, we used archives in celebration of the relationship between WFHB and South-Central Indiana and to ask for the audience’s present and future support in the face of unprecedented federal rescissions.

To thoroughly and professionally maintain formal archives, though, takes more resources than community radio organizations often have available to them. Exactly two weeks after Steve Volan asked the audience at WFHB Past and Present to call their legislators about saving the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Rescissions Act of 2025 was signed into law. The station lost a quarter of its funding and thus a quarter of its staff. Josh Brewer, the operations manager helming the formal WFHB archiving initiative, lost his job at the station beginning that October. Every remaining staff member has been stretched thinner. In a post-CPB existence, archiving is a luxury relative to the urgent day-to-day needs of the station. It would be difficult to justify allocating staff time or station budget to digitizing cassettes while eliminating jobs.

There are nonetheless compelling reasons to maintain archives of sound and popular music. In his 2017 TEDx Mogadishu talk,[1] Ostinato Records founder makes one such case:

In whatever format you might find it—vinyl, LPs, cassette tapes, master tapes, master reels (these are the best) and even compositional notebooks—once music is recorded, that’s it. It is forever immortalized. A collection of these recordings forms… a still water reflection of the social and political happenings of the day. You can quite literally feel history in music. Its ability to transport time and place is quite frankly unrivaled.

An independent record label, Ostinato specializes in carefully researched reissues of archival music with an emphasis on music from countries narrativized negatively in dominant global imaginaries. His TEDx Mogadishu talk focuses on the release Sweet as Broken Dates: Lost Somali Tapes from the Horn of Africa. He notes that many of the 1970s and 80s cassettes the label sourced for this album survived only because radio personnel sent them abroad from Somaliland to Djibouti and Kenya when civil war in Somalia (beginning in 1988) seemed imminent. “One radio operator told me he even buried them deep under the ground, so that air strikes could not hit them,” continues Sohonie in the talk, “because he understood the value of these cultural artifacts.” Thus far, the existential threats to WFHB’s social worlds have been economic and sociopolitical, rather than based in physical violence.[2] Even so, Sohonie’s belief in the “unrivaled” reflective power of sonic and especially musical objects is one that many radio enthusiasts hold, perhaps with more nuance than Sohonie had time to express in a 14-minute talk, and which informs an array of off-air radio practices.

There is more to radio than collage, and more to collage than what I have pinpointed in this chapter as analogous to radio. The artistic techniques and aesthetic logics underpinning visual collage, though, strongly parallel many radio practices. The arrangement of existing material is typical of music radio. As examples in this chapter have demonstrated, archival materials beyond music and even beyond sound can also make for vibrant radio-related collages capable of producing affective responses in service of various goals. Deep and creative engagement with a range of radiophonic archival systems yields new knowledge of radio communities. While it is not always feasible for community stations to invest time and other resources in formal archiving practices, theories of community archiving present grassroots avenues for more multivocal archives that may be more sustainable as initiatives for small organizations. For as counterintuitive as archiving can seem to the logics of live broadcasting, strong community radio archiving practices can yield exciting possibilities for relistening and repurposing.

[1] TEDx is an offshoot event series of the TED Conferences series, for which organizers can obtain a free license so long as they agree to certain terms and conditions, including giving TED Conferences, LLC, the right to edit and distribute talk videos, which they do under a non-commercial Creative Commons license. TED stands for “Technology, Entertainment, Design.” In Mogadishu, such events have been intermittent based on resources and political stability; Sohonie’s 2017 talk took place at Peace Hotel, which, four months earlier, had been the site of a car bomb attack (Hiiraan Online, 2017).

[2] Physical violence against U.S. community radio stations is nor without precedent. In 1970, the far-right, white supremacist extremist hate group Ku Klux Klan bombed Houston, Texas-based Pacifica station KPFT twice in an attack on Pacifica’s progressive values. The same individuals convicted in the KPFT bombings was also convicted of planning to bomb Pacifica stations KPFA in Berkeley and KPFK in Los Angeles (Schaffer 2023). Longtime WFHB participants have explained to me that the insistence on double-paned, bulletproof windows in the air room is related to this event.