Matthew Dunn, the operations manager at Provincetown’s Outermost Community Radio (WOMR), has waist-length dreadlocks and wears galaxy-print shirts. Both amplify his gravitational pull.

In his corner office at 494 Commercial St., he engages a visitor the same way he does his radio audience, offering an immersive auditory experience. He talks in a warm, deep voice punctuated by the staccato cadences of something like Beat poetry — free-flowing and intent on bucking convention.

Dunn has been with WOMR since 2002, when the station lived in a condo on Center Street. He started out as a DJ on the midnight to 3 a.m. graveyard shift. Supporting himself with various side hustles — tending bar, waiting tables, and DJing for weddings — he worked as a volunteer for 10 years before becoming the full-time operations manager in 2012.

Dunn introduces himself as Matt, but most people know him as Matty Dread. The nickname predates his time on the radio; he got it at the University of Vermont where, immersed in the reggae of the late 1980s, he decided to “go dread.”

“I was a young hippie with an Irish afro,” he says. “I was never seriously into Rastafarianism, but my hair represents my commitment to breaking down cultural norms. At this point I think I would still be Matty Dread even if I cut my hair or it all falls out.”

Dunn hosts the blues show Morning Madness on Wednesdays from 5 to 6 a.m. and The Soul Funky Train on Thursdays from 1 to 4 p.m. On any given Thursday, a listener might follow him through a playlist of jazz, hip-hop, rock, reggae, and soul, held together by the fiber of funk that Dunn threads to connect them.

“The vast majority of the time I’m playing music that I suspect most people will never have heard before,” he says. He thinks listeners get more joy that way. “But I do try to provide a few signposts along the way. I’ll throw in Aretha Franklin or something because it helps put everything else in context.”

Dunn was born and raised in Syracuse, N.Y., studied philosophy in college, and moved to Cape Cod in the early aughts with his wife, Beth, who grew up here listening to her father, Jim Mulligan, on his long-running WOMR show, Mulligan Stew. Now, Beth and Matty co-host the station’s Outer Cape News show every Friday afternoon. Matty drives to the studio in Provincetown from their home in Dennis at least once a day, sometimes more, depending on need.

DJing is just one part of Dunn’s job. “My real job is making sure the radio stays on,” he says.
“I ask Matty technical questions often,” says Denya LeVine of Wellfleet, who has been a WOMR DJ since 1985. “He put together a manual that you can look at for almost anything you need to know.”

In addition to making the schedule and providing tech support, Dunn trains and manages the 100 or so DJs who sustain the station’s programming across a wide spectrum of genres. “It’s eclectic: bluegrass, funk, opera, folk,” he says.

“Matty is constantly trying to bring new voices to the station and weave a fabric that reflects the Outer Cape,” says Mike Fee, who lives in Truro and hosts Road Trippin’ — a three-hour journey through classic and contemporary blues, rock, soul, and funk on Thursday mornings. “I started calling him the ambassador — he is truly the ambassador of love.”

That diplomatic spirit helped Eric Auger feel welcome when he joined the station last year as a substitute DJ after moving to Provincetown during the pandemic. He says Dunn’s trust in him helped him feel that he had found a home at WOMR.

Each time he has presented a new idea — from pitching his show The Reminiscence Bump, in which Auger relates memories from his life and plays the songs attached to them, to holiday-themed sets like a Halloween vampire radio hour — Dunn has been all ears. His approach is “Okay, let’s see what you can do,” Auger says.

Dunn’s DJ diplomacy also includes visiting Outer Cape schools to teach kids about radio and making house calls to collect donations from listeners who want to offload their analog music collections of cassettes, CDs, and vinyl.

He assesses the value of these donations and sells them on Discogs, a type of eBay for music collectors. The proceeds of the sales go to WOMR.

Until they are sold, most donations get stored in Dunn’s office. Two floor-to-ceiling bookshelves packed with vinyl climb one wall on either side of a large window above a sun-bleached red carpet. There are cassettes on one desk and CDs on another.

From a different pile, Dunn picks up Woyaya, a 1971 album by the London-based Afro-rock band Osibisa. “I just discovered them,” he says, beaming like a kid with a brand-new toy.

Posters of Earth, Wind & Fire and from the New Orleans radio station WWOZ guard the desk, which is populated with a soundboard, microphone, and four monitors that Dunn constantly works.

Above all of this, there’s also a scrap of paper on the wall, penned by the musician and WOMR board member Barbara Blaisdell, that frames Dunn’s commitment to the station in black and white: “I pledge allegiance to WOMR and to the programming for which it stands: one station, on Cape Cod, transmittable with melody and substance for all.”

Dunn is quick to note that he is just one voice of many. “None of this happens without everybody working together,” he says.

“I want to be able to have WOMR be a safe space for me to do my thing and to create that space for other people to do it, too,” says Dunn. “It started with just hippies and beer and borrowed space. More than 40 years later, we’re still here to provide a platform for members of the community to express themselves.”