For the first three hours of his morning show, Ken Freedman roamed through the music world's frontier, segueing from ''Cafe Thorax'' by Zut Un Feu Rouge, an experimental pop band from Sweden, to Liberace's version of ''Tico Tico'' to ''Rondevouz'' by Real Fish, a group whose signature sound is a chorus of women yelping in Japanese.

At noon he brought the show closer to home, to the future of his radio station, WFMU. In his ''Hour of Chaos'' update, the 31-year-old station manager discussed WFMU's struggle with the Federal Communications Commission and three other noncommercial stations that want to reduce its broadcast range, saying it interferes with their signals.

''The other stations are trying to say this is a technical issue,'' said Mr. Freedman, who is one of the station's three paid employees. ''It's a human issue. To lower FMU's power the way the others are proposing would take away something that people have supported and come to rely on.''

Crowded together on the low end of the FM-radio band, WFMU and the other stations are engaged in a bitter fight over broadcast range and listener base. The dispute has generated attention beyond what might be expected from a spat among small FM outlets because it threatens the highly regarded WFMU, 91.1 FM, which The Village Voice has called New York's best radio station.