When I first started playing music in my early twenties, I was mentored by the wonderful Joanna Barker. Together, we created all sorts of worlds, shapes, containers, and rivers for our creative collaboration to flow through. Bending and twisting, I got to learn about community organizing, songwriting, live performance (Joanna invited me to play my first ever show at Afterwords Bookstore on Duckworth Street!), and college radio. 

We hosted a show on Tuesday nights at CHMR called “Nightswimming”. I would pick Jo up in my little Mazda and we would drive in the freezing cold, walking up the salted steps of the student centre, down into the warm belly of the sound proofed studio. No one was around. The space was lit by a little orange lamp that thrummed in the corner of the booth.

We would come prepared with a script, sometimes a prerecorded interview with a local or touring musician, a list of local resources or events, and a playlist of songs that reflected a theme or a feeling we were experiencing that week. We had different women in music cover REM’s “Nightswimming” as our introductory song. We giggled when picking our favourite recurring ads.

Joanna taught me how to orchestrate the show, which felt very scary and live, and simultaneously it felt sort of freeing, like no one was watching. To just be heard, without the volatility of being seen. The stakes felt high in that we were making something very unedited, and I generally had no idea what I was doing, but also low stakes in that Joanna very much knew what she was doing (she learned what she did while volunteering and then eventually working at CFXU at St FX!) and it was a late night college radio show about a niche music community in St. John’s, Newfoundland. 

It was a profound experience for me. Not just being in a completely new environment, learning all sorts of new skills, but because I got to broadcast my stories, my opinions, my ideas, my feelings - my voice. And in our short tenure at CHMR, I saw so many others who otherwise would not have had a platform to share their stories or explore their voices. Seeing the schedule light up the gigantic desktop in the radio booth,  with a very weird and bric a brac array of 30 minute shows, it felt like so many different perspectives refracted through the prism of this warm, tiny, orange radio womb, on a cold island in the Atlantic Ocean. 

Last week, MUNSU decided to pull campus radio funding, igniting a maelstrom of action, insight and conversation about the impact of independent media and the role of college radio stations. 

Something I really love about radio is about the texture of audio transmission, about it’s embededness in social change and conflict, it’s DIY origins, and the moments of incredible intimacy - almost diaristic at times. That convergence between being heard and not seen. Something so disembodied and at the same time, allowing someone so impossibly far away to be felt, sensed and presenced with you.

I am also interested in the ways that radio is a technology entangled with war and colonialism, as well as resistance and rebellion against such structures. I am drawn to these kinds of sites and materials - where things are contradictory, sticky, entangled, tense, and difficult to easily categorize. I find myself bringing in memory as a way to understand radio, local organizing, and the academic institution. I also wonder what shapes my relationship with radio could take.

Some frequencies I’m tuning into to answer these questions are:

• Reflecting on my relationship with CHMR, and radio more broadly. My Pop was a radio operator in WWII, for example.

• I really love reading encyclopedia entries. Read about radio here. I liked learning words about the anatomy of radio technology, including transistor and antenna.

• I’m  exploring the MUN Folklore and Language Archive, which has really fascinating entries such as https://capelin.library.mun.ca/v/folklore/14209. It’s open access, I encourage you to explore it, and send me anything you find! I especially find  the history of personal message broadcasting in Newfoundland really fascinating and would love to hear a recording. 

• Reading “Radio” by CM Burroughs:

  Radio

  I needed something beyond or not

  Myself that could get me         there.

  I tried—

  To imagine the distance or how

  To breach but I couldn’t

               Save for a machine

   

               That worked upon something

  I couldn’t see. May call it mystical. My

  Turning on and tuning to

                             Otherwhere’s air. Fictive gap

  Between places what had names.

               It wasn’t magic,     no, part mechanical

  Part me; worked mindfully out what I needed

  Then need met me there.

  The radio was just

               A way to figure the figureless.

  Way out of

              No way, you know? How I could prove

  I was doing it          if none could conceive.

• Listening to Quest Radio. My daughter LOVED sitting on the couch at LVHQ breastfeeding, holding the sound level meter, listening to Cuerpos. You can listen back here - https://www.lawnyavawnya.com/quest-radio 

• Listening to “The Fisheries Broadcast - An Archival Special”
  

  

  It was called The Fishermen's Broadcast back then. 1951.  The year The Broadcast first hit CBC radio air waves.

  It wasn't long before that program became a radio ritual in Newfoundland and Labrador. A voice for this province's fishermen...a forum for fisheries debate. Fishermen and their families depended on the show...for information crucial to their industry, and their safety on the water.

  Fishermen depended on The Broadcast, and they befriended it.  And this year, the program celebrates 60 years of success.

  The fishery has changed, as so has the show. But its importance to its audience has stayed the same. In this archival special, we look back at the early years.

• Watching “Why rez radio has our hearts”

• Browsing “Communities of the Air: Radio Century, Radio Culture” and “Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound” 

• Listening to “Transmission” by Joy Division

Do you have a memory about radio?

Kate