Keeping it Locked: Transgressive Practices in the Independent and Online Radio Community in Amsterdam 

introduction (access full work + thesis here)






NTS (short for ‘nuts to soup’) is one of the most expansive non-commercial radios currently broadcasting. Whilst the Hackney-born online station is still not for profit and mostly funded through a voluntary membership service starting at 2.99£, it now has studios in Los Angeles and Manchester, two live streams operating 24/7, a seemingly endless archive of shows and genres and more than 1.5 million monthly listeners in early 2020 (Stassen, 2020). In the following months their listenership almost doubled (Gavin, 2020). Independent online radio had steadily grown in the years since NTS started streaming both in and outside of the United Kingdom. In the Netherlands, Red Light Radio (RLR) had actually been broadcasting a year longer than NTS, starting in 2010. For ten years, RLR had been broadcasting daily shows out of a former sex work window spot in Amsterdam’s (in)famous red light district. With the rapid gentrification of and subsequent hike in rent prices - 2021 marked the highest increase in rent in Amsterdam in eight years (Remie, 2022) - in the neighbourhood becoming more and more amplified during the Covid-19 pandemic, many of the surrounding artist studios had to leave the location. Ultimately, the radio station at the heart of the city and members of the adjacent electronic dance music scene found themselves looking for a new space too. In June 2020, they were set to move, but due to allegations of racist and other discriminatory behaviours against their sex worker neighbours and visitors by the owners and studio veterans, the station stopped their daily programming and focused exclusively on their record label (Hinton, 2020; Pisart, 2020).
 



During the various lockdowns in the following years, many music aficionados across the city were aching to fill the gap in the city’s musical landscape that RLR had left behind. A gap to share music, explore music preferences and practice and/or showcase radio-making skills. Elsewhere in The Netherlands, other radio stations had also been active for years, but the landscape of broadcasters grew exponentially - especially in Amsterdam - throughout 2020 and 2021. I emphasise the notion of a landscape here as many of these stations brand themselves through their physical location (i.e. the street they are based on or the neighbourhood) in the city and through the genres and languages they facilitate that have strong associations with Amsterdam. They collectively build a sounded landscape of what the city has to offer musically and how this differs across the city. Similar to a landscape which is composed out of various different layers of geological and manmade materials, the station’s contributions engage with and build upon each other rather than competing for the best programming or most output. Programmers, technicians, DJs and hosts all move between multiple stations based on their non-exclusive relationships. There is a type of cross contamination occurring parallel by the individual approaches of each radio station. Some stations had a presence before and expanded, like Tempo Não Para (TNP), others where covid inspired projects to give employees and DJs something to do when everything else was closed, like the temporary stations from clubs like Lovelee, Bret (Muto Studio, now a general creative platform), or the still ongoing projects of the brewery Oedipus (Radio Oedipus) and club Radio Radio (RadioRadioFM, short: RRFM). Less formal and often student-led stations that started through Facebook or Youtube livestreams like Spuistreet Records, Slim Radio and Radio Weesper existed before covid but gained more attention alongside the other stations. In summer 2020, roughly a month after RLR’s shutdown, radio Echobox started broadcasting.


These stations, whether still broadcasting or only accessible through archives, can be categorised into three groups. The first are those exclusively producing electronic dance music content to expand DJs portfolios like Spuistreet, Lovelee, Muto and Weesper. The second also has a focus on electronics but is not afraid to venture into other genres but overall focusses on set-style shows with very limited talking. TNP and RRFM are the frontrunners of this broadcasting style in Amsterdam but Oedipus and RLR fit into this category too. Slim Radio and Echobox are playing more left field shows, they are likely to be conceptual, more talking (both scripted and chatty) and musically almost anything goes. JajajaNeeneenee is the outlier amongst the stations, they have short-span residencies by artist and only broadcast once or twice a month.


Together, all these new stations created a new audio landscape in the city of Amsterdam through collective effort and online broadcasting practices. This thesis will explore how they are reinterpreting the medium of radio and what independent online and community broadcasting looks and sounds like in the Dutch capital today. To do so, the first chapter will provide a definition of radio as a medium in constant transition from traditional am/fm and state-subsidised broadcasting to online and independent radio stations accessible beyond borders, with new elements such as archives and video streams. The notion of transgression will be introduced and theorised here in order to address those changes in practices and then applied to the ethnographic findings of my fieldwork period. The second chapter contextualises these findings in the anthropological discourses surrounding radio and urban anthropology. Lastly, the third chapter will be a reflection on my multimodal exhibition. As this written thesis cannot provide an auditory experience, the exhibition will give space to the makers’ actual voices about their varied approaches to radio making. It will also be location-specific to Amsterdam and explore why they chose radio as medium and what type of radio they listen to themselves. It also showcases and interlinks them and the different stations and other external spaces related to radio in the city through a collage-style, multiple-exposure photography series that underlines the transgressive community-making efforts beyond physical stations and national borders. Together these three elements produce a work that address radio making in Amsterdam on a theoretical, personal and collective level. Each medium is utilised to highlight a different aspect according to their affordances, following the line of thought of the different, transgressive approaches to radio making for different purposes in Amsterdam.


Before presenting and analysing my research I would like to acknowledge that this work has been produced from a position of both an insider and outsider of this community or music scene. As a former worker in the club culture (a scene broadly overlapping with the radio makers as will be shown in the later passages) of Amsterdam and current avid visitor, or dancer really, and trained musicologist, a great deal of my informants have been long-term friends or acquaintances before this research. My access to many of these spaces was eased because of these contacts and prior knowledge of the community. Additionally, my fluency in Dutch and English, the two main languages of this community, have enabled me approach a variety of makers. Nonetheless, my status as an International migrant/student always shapes my interactions by blending in easier in equally international crowds. It also draws my attention towards those who may be Dutch but have more international experiences than the average citizen. I actively tried to work against this personal bias but I cannot claim that my selection of informants was always truly objective because of this. Coming back to my prior training, the conversation I had were influenced by my theoretical training in cultural musicology and personal love for music practices. I would therefore say that my analysis is neither exclusively anthropological nor is it a fly-on-the-wall research style. I strongly believe that having access to a community prior to the research is beneficial and that drawing from multiple disciplines whilst actively reflecting on these influences helps diversify the perspectives on my ethnographic findings. Thus, these disclaimers are aimed to work as contextualisation of myself, the researcher at heart of this project, not to diminish its credibility.

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read the full thesis here
+ listen to the soundscape snippets here
+ look at the phototgraphic works here