Across time and across borders, music has always carried resistance.

Spirituals sung in secret.
Folk songs on picket lines.
Punk basements.
Pirate radio.
Reggaetón in the streets of Panama and Puerto Rico.

Song is how we remember each other.
How we gather.
How we say no.
And sometimes how we imagine a better yes.

There’s something literal about it, too.

Resonance.

Bodies vibrating together.
Breathing together.
Finding each other in the dark through sound.

That’s what this show is built on.

This week on In Frequency, we followed those threads — the songs that protest, provoke, unsettle, or simply remind us we’re not alone.

🔥 First sparks — naming the system

Ani DiFranco — “To the Teeth”
A clear-eyed reckoning with gun culture and accountability.

The Clash — “Guns on the Roof”
From Chris here in Moscow. Punk as alarm bell.

Gil Scott-Heron — “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”
Still prophetic. Still biting. Still true.

Jayli Wolf — “Child of the Government”
Personal history as protest. Survival as resistance.

These are the songs that don’t whisper.
They point.

🌍 Protest lineage — borders blur

Every culture has protest music.
Work songs. Rebel ballads. Street chants. Dancehall. Hip-hop.

Rhythm itself becomes resistance.

Gogol Bordello — “Immigraniada”
Joyful, chaotic, borderless rebellion.

The Honey Drippers — “Impeach the President”
From Steve in Nova Scotia. A groove that became a thousand samples.

Radiohead — “Idioteque”
Climate dread. Tech anxiety. Dance floor panic.

Bad Religion — “I Want to Conquer the World”
From Justin in Moscow.
A sharp critique of armchair revolutionaries — the comfort of certainty without action.
It sounds triumphant… until you realize you might be the one being called out.

That tension is the point.

🎧 Resonance — why music works at all

One of my favorite things about music is that connection isn’t just metaphorical.

It’s physical.

We literally vibrate together.
Same tempo. Same air. Same pulse.

Sometimes that’s all resistance needs:

a room,
a frequency,
someone singing first.

Chief Adjuah — “Bark Out Thunder Roar Out Lightning”
From Simon in Spokane.
Ceremony. Thunder. Invocation.

📻 A small personal loop

This community radio station, KRFP.org, holds a long memory for me.

More than twenty years ago, I was first interviewed here — talking about an arts protest and a community gathering after 9/11. Musicians, poets, professors, neighbors trying to imagine dialogue instead of retaliation.

Independent radio gave us that space.

So being back now — sharing music with you, especially for a theme like this — feels like coming full circle.

Community radio is its own kind of protest.
Local. Human. Unfiltered.

⚡ Riot, folk, refusal

Pussy Riot — “Oh! Bondage Up Yours!”
Flogging Molly — “Revolution”
Sinéad O’Connor — “Black Boys on Mopeds”
Tanya Tagaq — “Colonizer”

Different decades. Same fire.

🧨 Saying it plainly

Killer Mike — “Reagan”
Eddie Vedder — “Masters of War”
Pussy Riot — “Police State”
Bright Eyes — “When the President Talks to God”
Kirby — “Black Leaves”

No metaphor needed. Just truth.

✊ Closing circle

Against Me! — “Baby, I’m an Anarchist”
Bon Iver — “Naeem”
Public Enemy — “Fight the Power”
Michael Franti & Spearhead — “Hey World”

Because protest isn’t only rage.

It’s also hope.
Care.
Community.
The stubborn belief that we can do better.

Join the archive

This show only exists because you send songs.

If there’s a track that carried you through something — grief, anger, change, hope — I want to hear it.

Send:
• the song
• what it means
• your name + location

Instagram: @tarakhowe

We’re building this reliquary together.

🎧 Playlist again here: Spotify

Until next week —
stay curious, stay resonant, take care of each other.

Go in sound.

Before I ever touched a turntable,
before streaming,
before playlists,

there were my grandparents’ living rooms.

A guitar and a deep bass voice.
Great aunties harmonizing from the kitchen.
A giant record cabinet full of 70s and 80s hits.
Cassette tapes labeled in colored marker.
Sundays parked beside the boom box recording favorites off the radio.

Music wasn’t background.

It was the room itself.

The Lakota phrase All My Relatives speaks to kinship not just with humans, but with the more-than-human world — the sense that we belong to everything and everything belongs to us.

For this episode of In Frequency on KRFP, I took that idea literally.

I asked my family — near and extended, across the Palouse, Vancouver, Edmonton, Salt Lake, New Zealand, San Francisco — to send me:

a song
and what it means to them.

What came back is a sonic family tree.

A stemma.
A braid.
A little archive of love.

🎧 Full playlist here: All My Relatives

🌱 Where it began — the grandparents

Loverboy — “Turn Me Loose”
for my Grandma Loretta

Marty Robbins — “Cool Water”
for Grandpa Tom and Grandma Della

These songs feel like kitchens and coffee.
Like card games and open windows.
Like the first place music lived for me — not as culture, but as family.

✉️ Letters to old friends

Neil Young — “One of These Days”
from my Auntie Tami (Vancouver)

A song about wanting to write letters to the friends you’ve loved across a lifetime.

Brudi Brothers — “Me More Cowboy Than You”
from River — my oldest, sometimes on air with me as Brother Bass

Dusty, playful, a little wink of Americana.

Yes — “I’ve Seen All Good People”
from my dad

Letting us know that people are what make our worlds go round.

🔥 Getting hyped for the day

Deltron 3030 — “Mastermind”
Alicia’s pump-up anthem. Sci-fi rap opera energy.

Laura Branigan — “Gloria”
For dancing with my mom in our tiny living room.

Taylor Swift — “Fearless”
From my niece Adelaide — pure invincibility.

Dennis Brown — “Things in Life”
Morning light. Dark kitchens. From Virginia.
A reminder that the next small step is enough.

🚗 Memory roads

Khalid — “Location”
A high-school summer in song.
3am road trips. Sunrise energy. From my son Ronan.

Allman Brown & Liz Lawrence — “Sons and Daughters”
Wedding music. Foundations. Ten years of partnership. My sister-in-law Maddie.

Noah Kahan — “The View Between Villages”
Driving and reconciling with the past. My niece Chloe.

Matchbox Twenty — “Bent”
Pure nostalgia. Immediate time travel. My brother Chris.

🌊 Fluid, grief, and love

All Saints — “Pure Shores”
Feels like water. Formless. Free. Cousin Liam.

Soft Cell — “Tainted Love”
For my Auntie Judy, recently passed — knowing she’s still right here.

Bon Jovi — “It’s My Life”
Auntie Chris — Choosing yourself. Finally.

Des’ree — “You Gotta Be”
Quiet armor. Thank you, Margaret.

😂 Chaos, because… family

of Montreal — “The Party’s Crashing Us”
My brother Sean says it perfectly captures how our family plans anything: beautiful chaos.

Jack Johnson — “The News”
from my youngest, Noah. Who but Jack Johnson says “diabetic” in a song?

Coldplay — “Sparks”
Farn’s mission and hours of my boys learning it together on guitar.
Serenades drifting through the house.

🌄 Sending you out

And finally — songs that marked each of my boys stepping into themselves. Standing up. Finding their voices.

Because maybe that’s what all of this is.

Music as inheritance.
As courage.
As proof we belong to one another.

This is In Frequency — All My Relatives.

I’m Sister Sonic.

Send me your lesser-known sounds, your relics, your stories.
Let’s keep braiding this tapestry.

🎧 Playlist again here:

All My Relatives

Go in sound.

There were the songs you only heard once.
On late radio.
At a friend’s house.
On a scratched CD pulled from a milk crate.

And if you missed them — you missed them.

In Frequency is my attempt to return to that feeling.

Each week on KRFP, I wander the station’s reliquary — old CDs, records, sleeves with no cases, names I half-remember — and follow instinct. Alongside your requests and the stories you send with them.

Not hits.
Not nostalgia bait.
But the songs that changed you.
The ones that live a little deeper in the body.

The full broadcast stays up for two weeks, then disappears.

After that, this page becomes the archive.

Below are a few stops from tonight’s wander.

🎧 Full playlist here: In Frequency 1.28.2026

1. “Do You Feel Good”

The Last Poets — “Do You Feel Good”

This isn’t background music.

It’s a pulse check.

A breath of fresh air in a musical landscape built for distraction — songs designed to be catchy, vague, disposable.

Instead:
drums, truth, directness.

Traditional African rhythms.
Spoken word that doesn’t flinch.
Lyrics that name the political and social weather we’re actually living in.

Long before hip-hop had a name, they were already there — poets with percussion, shaping what would become an entire culture.

Avant-garde without trying to be.

Still urgent.
Still alive.

This one feels less like a song and more like someone grabbing your shoulders and asking:

Are you awake?

—Justice Green

2. “Alcestis on the Poetry Circuit”

Vanessa Daou — “Alcestis on the Poetry Circuit”
from Zipless

This one arrived as a story first.

A new friend told me:

On his first trip to New York, he met the last princess of the Kingdom of Benin.
They wandered the Met together looking at African art.
Later, in her apartment, she put this record on.

And suddenly the city felt slower.
More intimate.
Like the walls were listening.

Spoken-word.
Electronic jazz-pop.
Erotic poetry adapted from Erica Jong.

It’s sensual without spectacle.
Private. Close. Almost whispered.

Music for late night kitchens.
For cigarettes on fire escapes.
For remembering your own body.

Somehow it feels like being invited into someone’s apartment you’ll never visit —
and still being welcomed.

We get to travel there anyway.

— Zeth DuBois

✉️ Add your frequency

Send me:
• a song
• what it means to you
• where you’re listening from
• what name (or no name) you want shared

Instagram: @tarakhowe

I’m Sister Sonic.
Holding space for rhythm and ritual with you.

See you next Thursday night.

🎙️ In Frequency is a weekly live radio show where we gather the songs that don’t usually get airtime.

The obscure tracks drawn from the reliquary.
The quiet obsessions.
The songs only you seem to know by heart.

Music that lived in your bedroom.
Your car at night.
Your headphones walking home.

All genres welcome.

Listen Live

Thursdays, 8–10 PM PST
Live on 90.3 FM Moscow/Pullman
Streaming worldwide at KRFP.org

Full shows remain available in the KRFP archives for two weeks.

This Substack is the companion space —
a place to hold the signal after it airs.

Here you’ll find:

• short audio snippets
• set lists + playlists
• notes and stories
• themes + calls for submissions
• fragments, ideas, and sound

Think of it as the notebook beside the turntable.

How to Participate

If there’s a song you carry, I’d love to receive it.

Send:
• song + artist
• a few words about what it holds for you
• where you’re listening from
• the name you’d like shared on air (or anonymous)

Message me here on Substack or on Instagram @tarakhowe.

Recurring Segments & Themes

✊ Signal Fires

Songs of protest, resistance, and collective voice.

🙈 Secret Headphones

Tracks you absolutely love but might be shy to admit.

🤖 Ghost in the Machine

AI-assisted searches, odd algorithmic finds, and digital serendipity.

👁️ Strange Signals

The weirdest music videos and audiovisual artifacts we can dig up.

🎲 Static Shuffle

Pure chance. Totally random pulls from the crate.

🧒 Raised By Radio

Songs that shaped you — even if they probably shouldn’t have.

🌊 Too Much / Perfect

Songs that overwhelm, ache, swell, or break you open — and that’s why they matter.

🌙 Confession Crate

Late-night, quieter offerings for tender or intimate shows.

🎶 Almost Lost, Eventually Immortal

Songs that nearly didn’t make the album — but somehow became hits.

🛼 Derby Floor

Fast, fierce, body-forward jams for skating, sweat, and grit.

🔮 Gypsy Heart

Nomadic, road-trip, border-crossing songs with dust on their boots. Or gypsy punk rock. You choose.

📻 DJ Reliquary

Personal favorites from DJs, KRFP and beyond.

🗣️ Misheard Gospel

Lyrics you sang wrong for years — and maybe still prefer that way.

⚡ Women Who Shred

Rockers, punks, noisemakers, and electric women who refuse to be quiet.

In Frequency is less about perfection
and more about presence.

A place to share what moved you.
A place to listen together.
A place to remember that someone else out there loves that same strange, beautiful song.

Come tune in.
Come add your signal.

There are knowings that braid themselves together in the mind before you understand why.

For me, it was Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Coleman Hawkins—two men with no reason to be connected except for the slip of a syllable. Coleridge, the Romantic philosopher-poet born the same day I was, and Hawkins, the jazz titan whose recording of “Body and Soul” flips my uterus every time. I would hear one name and think of the other. A strange pairing, until it wasn’t.

Because the undertone is:
both men understood that meaning happens in the tension between what is felt and what is spoken.

Coleridge built an entire philosophy on this premise.
Hawkins plays it into being.

And I think this is why both of them live inside me.

I. Imagination, meet Improvisation

Coleridge believed that imagination was not an escape from reality but the way reality appears to us. The mind shapes, interprets, collaborates. It’s not passive; it’s generative. Meaning is not handed down. We participate in making it.

Hawkins approached music the same way.

His 1939 “Body and Soul” is almost all improvisation. The melody barely appears. He doesn’t play the song as written; he plays the architecture underneath it. The ache in the chord changes. The longing that lives between the notes. The thing the composer felt but couldn’t score.

Listening to Hawkins is like listening to Coleridge think.

Perhaps both men trusted the invisible more than the visible; believed the soul knows before the mind can explain.

II. The ache as intelligence

What moves me about Hawkins—what always has—is that his tone carries an ache that is neither performed nor sentimental. It’s lived. It’s an ache that understands itself.

In trauma language you could call it:
stored knowing turned into coherence.

Coleridge would say:
imagination re-unifying what has been broken.

My body says:
please.

The first time I heard Hawkins’s solo, I sat in a History of Jazz class, while every neuron unraveled in the sound, and my inside was on the outside while I yet struggled to sit upright and remain composed.

This is the ache I write from.

Hawkins doesn’t solve the ache—he plays it.
And that, in itself, is healing.

III. Polarity as a way of knowing

Coleridge said that opposites are not contradictions but engines—
polarity is how growth happens.

Hawkins’s “Body and Soul” is pure polarity:

• restraint and release

• longing and mastery

• structure and freedom

• body and soul

He moves through the tension without collapsing it.
He lets the dissonance be alive.
He trusts that beauty is born in the stretch.

This is exactly how my nervous system works when I’m honest with myself: desire and fear, hunger and boundaries, intensity and stillness. Polarity isn’t dysfunction—it’s the place where truth rises.

When Hawkins bends a note, when Coleridge holds two opposites in one thought, I feel my own internal engine spark. I remember that insight arrives in the in-between, in the held tension, not in the escape from it.

IV. Why these men feel like kin

Sometimes you don’t recognize your lineage until you see it in someone else.

Coleridge wrote as if imagination were the root system of the earth.

Hawkins played as if breath could carry a soul across a room.

Both speak to the part of me that was never content with surface explanations.

Both remind me that the truth of a life is rarely in the narrative—
it’s in the tone, the undertone, the shadow, the improvisation.

Coleridge offers the philosophy.
Hawkins offers the embodiment.
Together, they create a bridge.

A way of knowing.
A way of creating.
A way of living from the inside out.

V. Body and Soul as a practice

Every time that recording comes on, I feel the same thing.

Recognition.

And the way my own writing happens—through blood memory, dream, rupture, intuition, and the quiet, persistent hunger for truth.

It reminds me that the goal is not to be unbroken.
The goal is to be whole.
And wholeness is improvisation over the fractures we’ve inherited.

VI. A last note

Coleridge and Coleman.
Born a world apart, but somehow touching at a point deeper than biography.

One wrote the philosophy of the inner world.
The other breathed it into sound.

And somewhere in the middle—
in the ache, in the tension, in the quiet intelligence of the body—
is the place I write from.

That bridge is my home.

Body and Soul - YouTube