The Signal Architecture
Community Radio Beyond the Algorithm
As in all things, there is a hierarchy in the rarified and esoteric world of experimental radio.
Tier One—the visible international layer—includes NTS, Resonance FM, WFMU: institutions with foundational infrastructure, sponsors, and mythologies. Tier Two—the invisible local stratum—is made of college and community stations like XRAY FM in Portland, dependent on volunteer labor and annual fundraisers. The assumption is that tier one represents the apex of adventurous sound. The reality is that much of the real experiment happens in tier two, unheard by the systems that decide what counts.
Over literally decades, DJ Gilliflower has developed and nurtured a continuous architecture of sound and image that has migrated across the map of community broadcasting. The creative journey began at Duke University’s WXDU, then UNC’s WXYC, moved to Austin’s KOOP, to Rice University’s KTRU-FM in Houston, to Freeform Portland, and now with Turtles Have Short Legs at XRAY FM. The stations changed; the methodology didn't. Turkish psych into Finnish drone, pagan folk into minimal electronics, Belle du Soir into Lucrecia Dalt: a topology of correspondences assembled with architectural precision and care. Each episode carries a handmade collage, the visual corollary of the mix. Together they form a dual practice—audio and visual—governed by the same grammar of juxtaposition and resonance. This isn’t hobbyism; it is design made real as sound.
Last year she guested on Jack Rollo of Time Is Away's Early Bird show for NTS—a meeting of peers, curator to curator. And every week she returns to XRAY FM. That isn’t a failure to scale; it’s a choice to maintain infrastructure. Where the Tier One stage curation as aesthetic performance—DJ as auteur, mix as art object—Turtles Have Short Legs manifests curation as maintenance, the slow discipline of keeping a fragile frequency alive. Both are valid and crucial; I humbly and biasedly maintain that one is more durable.
Community radio sustains itself through extraction of skilled labor, primarily from women performing care work that gets coded as “passion.” The same qualities that make practitioners essential—persistence, attention, refusal to self-brand—render them invisible to economies that reward novelty and performance. DJ Gilliflower’s decades of curation demonstrate mastery equivalent to the most recognized experimental radio globally, yet receive no compensation because the practice produces no object that markets can sell. This isn’t oversight; it’s structural. The system depends on devotion while denying legibility.
Every week she keeps the frequency alive, she performs quiet resistance to disposability culture: refusal to monetize, to optimize, to stop. That durability is political. It is infrastructure maintenance in the guise of a radio broadcast.
When the algorithms collapse under their own metrics and the branded platforms fade, the signal will still hum in the community bandwidth, carried by the people who never stopped showing up. That’s where the real adventurousness lives—not in novelty, but in persistence.
Keeping the frequency alive.
Keeping the record.
Denying the erasure.