WGXC Turns 15: How Catskill’s Freeform Radio Station Made Not Knowing the Point

Most bumper stickers flatten the world into something smug or scolding. WGXC’s new one does the opposite. “Keep honking, I have no idea what I’m listening to on WGXC,” it reads—both a joke and a mission statement. Fifteen years in, the freeform community radio station has become a place where not knowing is part of the pleasure, where tuning in means surrendering to surprise rather than submitting to an algorithm.

That spirit is being celebrated in real time this week, as WGXC (90.7FM) marks its 15th anniversary with a loose, radio-shaped crawl through Catskill. Festivities begin on the evening of Thursday, February 26 at Left Bank Ciders with a live broadcast of “The Thursday Afternoon Show” and DJ sets, followed by a “Breaking the Algorithm IRL” broadcast and “Local Waves” conversation at the Avalon Lounge featuring Wave Farm founder and executive director emeritus Galen Joseph Hunter. Later stops include cake and a live broadcast at WGXC’s Main Street studio and nightcaps nearby—less a formal gala than a reminder that this station has always lived in public, porous to the street and the community around it.

WGXC is the broadcast arm—and, in many ways, the most public-facing expression—of Wave Farm, the Catskill-based arts organization founded to support work in the field of transmission art: practices concerned with sending, receiving, relaying, and interfering with signals of all kinds. Since going on air in 2011, WGXC has grown into a distinctly Hudson Valley phenomenon: fiercely local, unapologetically strange, and deeply human in an era increasingly defined by frictionless audio.

For Meredith Kooi, who became Wave Farm’s codirector in January 2025 alongside Bianca Biberaj as Hunter stepped into the role of executive director emeritus, the station’s evolution mirrors her own long relationship with the organization. Kooi first connected with Wave Farm through a radio show, then as an artist-in-residence, watching as the organization’s scope expanded—new residencies, a growing Art Park, and an ever-widening understanding of what transmission art could look and sound like. WGXC, she says, remains a “living, breathing manifestation” of that mission.

That life is audible in the way the station operates. WGXC doesn’t divide its days into tidy, predictable programming blocks. Instead, it works around the lives of its volunteer programmers—some broadcasting weekly, others monthly—resulting in a schedule that feels less like a grid than a tide chart. The station currently broadcasts 118 original shows, along with a number of syndicated programs, reflecting a significant growth in local participation over the past few years. Recent restructuring, Kooi notes, has expanded staff capacity and made it easier for volunteers to do what they do best: bring themselves to the mic.

What distinguishes community radio, Kooi argues, is presence. “Things are hand chosen by a person in a place,” she says. On WGXC, listeners come to know the programmers behind the shows as people breathing into microphones, reacting in real time. Live radio preserves the physicality of speech: the pauses, the inhalations, the moments that podcasts often smooth away. When a show is broadcasting from WGXC’s storefront studio on Catskill’s Main Street, passersby can literally see the voices they’re hearing, seated behind the glass.

“Wave Farm’s mission is to support work in the transmission art field,” Kooi says. “It’s everything that has to do with sending and receiving transmissions. And that can look and sound like many different things. WGXC is a living, breathing manifestation of Wave Farm’s mission.”

That intimacy carries across wildly different kinds of programming. On one afternoon, listeners might hear a community talk show focused squarely on the concerns of the region—interviews with local business owners, activists, and civic leaders. Programs like the “Tuesday Afternoon Show with Randall Martin” or the “Hudson-Mohawk Magazine” function as a kind of civic infrastructure, stepping into gaps left by the steady erosion of local journalism.

Turn the dial a few hours later and the soundscape may dissolve into something far less familiar. Experimental and esoteric programs such as “Noise in the Megacity,” “Bells Bugs, Whispers, and Plinks,” or “Unknown Sounds”—hosted by Elena Botts, who interviews sound artists from around the world—push radio toward the outer edges of what it can be. “The Blue Amberol Hour” digs even deeper into the past, drawing on archival cylinder recordings made before vinyl records existed, reminding listeners that “new” and “old” are slippery concepts in the world of sound.

Between those poles, the station thrives on collision. Local music-focused shows like “Local Waves,” hosted by Mike Amari of Chosen Family, sit alongside remote broadcasts, rave-history deep dives such as “This Is Our House,” all-vinyl programs like “The Magic Stranger,” and genre-defying mashups that resist easy description. One moment you’re overhearing a conversation rooted firmly in Catskill or Hudson; the next, you’re immersed in experimental radio art that could have originated anywhere on the globe.

This sequencing is deliberate. WGXC’s schedule, Kooi says, is where the global meets the local through adjacency. The station’s philosophy is grounded in play and access: the belief that radio should remain a tool for creativity, open to anyone willing to learn its possibilities. Listening becomes an act of curiosity rather than consumption, an invitation to drop into a conversation already in progress. “WGXC provides the listener with the possibilities of radio,” she says.

That ethos depends on volunteers, many of whom have been with the station since its earliest days. Kooi describes programmers who keep meticulous notebooks, who bring decades of accumulated knowledge and obsession into the studio and share it freely with anyone tuned in. “There’s a wealth of knowledge and interest in the programmers and they’re sharing it with the community,” she says. “These folks are providing the region’s listeners with something really special.” Their dedication, she says, is what gives WGXC its depth—not as a product, but as a practice.

Fifteen years on, WGXC doesn’t offer certainty or cohesion in the conventional sense. What it offers instead is trust: trust in its programmers, trust in its listeners, and trust that radio—messy, embodied, gloriously unpredictable—still has something to teach us. Hence the bumper sticker. Keep honking. Nobody here is pretending to know exactly what’s coming next.