After a year of hiatus and diligent efforts to revive it as a Student Interest Group, Howler Radio’s studio has officially closed its doors for the last time.

This might be the first time many readers will hear of the Howler Radio. If they wander around the upstairs of the Arts Center for long enough, students might still hear its whispers. Old posters advertising shows like Research Paper Radio or calling for new DJs still dot the corridors of some buildings. There is an unsupervised crate of vinyl records knocking around somewhere too.

But what was Howler Radio? Who was it for?

Howler Radio was for everyone. It was an internet radio project open to all members of the NYU Abu Dhabi community. Born as Jackal Radio in the summer of 2015, Howler Radio formed from a cadre of students from the class of 2016. The Associate Professor of English and former NYUAD Vice Provost Bryan Waterman was talked to about its early days. An earlier article about his own juggernaut show Research Paper Radio can be found here.

About the birth of Jackal Radio, Bryan had this to say: “That group of students from the class of 2016 who were, kind of in my mind, the architects of the unofficial campus culture, you know. Projects that existed outside the world of SIGs and funding and major programs… They had a lot of projects that they ran that were just sort of art and art projects that were kind of underground. Movie clubs, cooking clubs, and bicycle races, and they really thought it would be fun to run a radio stream. As far as I recall, [they] asked me and Jonny Farrow to sit in on some early discussions about what that would look like. It kicked off what they called Jackal Radio with an independent Marhaba event, a sort of Q&A about campus culture and life on campus that they advertised to incoming first-years and returning students. And the idea was just to have a panel of people talking, you know, openly and honestly about issues on campus, and I participated in that. It was really fun. I would say maybe, I do not know, half a dozen to maybe more, maybe a dozen people had ideas for shows. And so we just signed up for time slots and people started showing up and doing their thing.”

By fall 2016, Jackal Radio had changed its name to Howler Radio. An article about the rebranding can be found here. It had been brought under the wings of Professors Scott Fitzgerald and Jonny Farrow into the Interactive Media program. With this, Howler staked out a new home, transforming the corner of an IM classroom into a live studio space. Bryan described some of the challenges this posed.

“So, there was a much bigger lab at first that was shared with student projects, and the radio stream had a little corner of that lab. So sometimes you would be playing your show, and there would be other students in the space working on projects, trying to be kind of quiet in the background while you’re over in the corner doing your show.”

As Howler Radio evolved, the station developed a collaborative and archival ethos, including the penning of a manifesto by station managers. Bryan explained that early attempts to archive live broadcasts were not always successful. “It was maybe a semester/a semester and a half before they figured out how to archive the shows. You know, how to start recording them and keeping track of them… Once we started archiving them, it was really a matter of luck that you got a really good recording. Some, you know, getting used to the soundboards and figuring out what levels you should be broadcasting and recording. That was all, you know, just the kind of DIY and learning as we went. There are a couple of early shows I wish I had better recordings of.”

Howler Radio show formats from 2016 onwards became increasingly playful in their approach to broadcasting. What had started as a niche experimental project had begun to accrue more of a listenership, which varied between shows and DJs. Some students tried broadcasting in other languages, sometimes developing an international audience. Bryan described one show in particular. “For a lot of us, we just assumed that this was a small enterprise but, you know, for example, when Sebastián Rojas Cabal had a show that was called El Pregón, and it was Spanish only. His mic breaks were in Spanish, the music was in Spanish. He was profiling music from different parts of the Spanish-speaking world, and he had a big audience. And in Abu Dhabi, I would sometimes meet Colombians… and they’re like, oh yeah do you know the kid who runs the radio show from NYU?”

“For me, you know, I was aware, once we had features like a comments board, or maybe even people were on Twitter or Instagram or something, while I was playing… I had students from study aways or who were alumni who were listening every week. Or almost every week. And so just having that group of people was also really special to me… I would have people in China and Oxford and Canada and New York and Seattle. It was kind of fun to sit there and realize that it was this little group of students that had scattered. It was around the world.”

“Talking about numbers and audience though, I don’t think my show ever had more than two dozen people listening at once… but it didn’t really matter… Working in radio, you’re always talking to an imaginary audience, and I sometimes was talking to the tape. I was sometimes talking to the future. Sometimes talking to my kids you know, saying like, someday, I hope you find a hard drive with all these shows and you’re able to listen to me play music in Abu Dhabi sometime in the past.”

Near the end of our conversation, I mentioned to Bryan that I had been listening to archived recordings of British radio shows from the 1970s. In particular, I was drawn to the work of the DJ John Peel, who broadcast his own shows with an eclectic array of genres from punk, reggae, new wave, and jazz often late at night on BBC Radio. I had found comments on a YouTube video of one recording that talked about how it felt that John Peel, when he broadcast, was not talking to the world or talking to Britain. He was talking to you, in your bedroom late at night.

Bryan replied, “That’s an autobiographic experience for me. That’s me. That was me. John Peel played on the Navajo Nation Radio Station in the middle of the night where I grew up in Arizona, and I listened to that show on an FM signal at midnight. That’s how I even found out about some music that I loved in the eighties.”

A selection of archived Howler Radio shows can be found at https://www.mixcloud.com/Howler_Radio/.

Listen to recorded sessions of Bryan Waterman’s Research Paper Radio at https://www.mixcloud.com/researchpaperradio/.

You can explore the remains of Howler Radio’s old website at http://radio.nyuad.im/ .