Resistance Radio
Why do we keep coming back to this anachronistic side project of broadcasting a radio show?
We host a live radio show on Sunday nights — somewhat remarkable we’ve kept it up this long, honestly. At times we have chafed at maintaining our broadcast schedule every week for the past four years. Our listenership is devoted, but it’s low.
And yet, we come back to it each week, without expectation of return or renown; a one-way transmission to the great You-Out-There.
Electromagnetic Radio is a decentralized, global community radio station managed by a former boss of mine, as a passion project. He is the sort of once-tightly-wound New Yorker who now seems like he’s always been better suited to a pastoral, upstate setting, living out his rock-n-roll destiny running community radio. He’s happier, more jovial, and has grown out a flourishing, un-corporate beard.
Not long after he hired me in 2011, Bill and I bonded over our shared history as college radio DJs, and his blurrily documented, signature Gen X stint in a grungey 90’s band. Bill’s band photos and tales of radio glory indicated not much had changed in the college radio ethos from his era to mine.
My own college radio program was co-hosted with my good bro Jesse, who had a predilection for deep indie cuts and only the lightest disdain for my more pedestrian pop picks. He used to make me mega-mix CDs featuring British Sea Power, Stereolab, Sunset Rubdown, Band of Horses, and a whole host of other, less knowable and forgotten bands that only lasted a flash in the early 00’s, and would surely now be looked upon with museumlike reverence by Gen Z’s “indie sleaze” adherents. Even the name of our college show was plucked from indie obscurity – an iconic line from from a cult classic 2004 documentary about the Dandy Warhols and Brian Jonestown Massacre.
It’s a delight to observe that college radio ethos STILL hasn’t changed much – I follow my former college radio station on instagram and love seeing the throwback, collage-style promotional posters they post. I was contacted by a student DJ for an oral history project a couple years back, and the interviewer was audibly astounded by my Methuselean tales of mixtapes downloaded from Limewire, and physical media mailed to the radio station library. While the method of music transmission has changed (and their posters are probably all-digital, now), the manifesto they mean to telegraph is clearly one of scrappy DIY, punk community-building, on the airwaves and the dancefloor.
That’s still the underlying energy that brings us to live radio, and keeps us there, albeit in a cozier, grown-ass-adult idiom these days. We, Andrew and Amrita, call our show “Assisted Living” – helping you live your best life straight from our dining room table. We use our stereo system for playback, instead of headphones, so that we can be surprised by one other’s selections in realtime. It’s always a nice window into the other’s interiority that week. You’re having a riot grrl kind of week? Who made you mad? Okayyy there’s been Trina in your headphones? Who knew?!
Our show is often punctuated by the oven timer while we prepare dinner, and by our tiny “intern” —as we refer to him on the air— navigating his scooter over the aux cord, as he’s been carefully trained to do.
Sure, there’s much to be said (another time!) about the power of human curation in a world of algorithmic slop. There’s also plenty of warmth in being in community with the other DJs on the station. On Sundays alone, we’re sandwiched by a DJ who provides elegies for near-extinct species; a live broadcast from a boat in Alaska; afternoon soca; us; Bill; the impeccable Bee-Sides! All by and for real humans.
Our radio show’s first and foremost community-building point is much closer to home, in the physical space of our dinner table. One thing that keeps us coming back to the niche quirkiness of live radio is the way it creates an open door policy in our home on Sundays. Our friends always know exactly where we’ll be on a Sunday night at 6pm. There’s nothing better than when they text to invite themselves over, impromptu, and turn up on our doorstep bearing snacks and their woes of the week.
We know that there’s something fundamentally anachronistic about live radio, and that its format is out of step with how most people listen to music, or consume any kind of media, these days. You can’t replay our show at your convenience. You can’t rewind to catch what we said on-air about seeing Titus Andronicus play in a parking lot at CMJ in 2013, or our fave and least fave band names from great artists of the past year [for the record: Geese and Fcukers, respectively].
A real-life timeline means… you just have to be there. The show happens once, and it happens live. And that’s it. You have to be present. Even if it’s not in tangible, corporeal space. You may be listening from Detroit, or the East bay, but you are here, we are here, and we are experiencing this passage of time, together. Temporal synchronicity.
As much as we may sometimes wonder why radio?, our show reminds us: Whether there are 5 people listening or 50, or 500, community does NOT have to be scalable. The revolution will not be on-demand. The revolution will not be asynchronous. Not everything can be replayed, not everything can be replicable; not everything can be consumed on your timeline, at your convenience. You won’t be alone, but you have to choose to tune in.
This past Sunday’s playlist (list updates weeky):