Happy birthday to ARTxFM in Louisville, Kentucky. The Internet radio station has just finished celebrating its first year of streaming. Now its General Manager Sharon Scott writes to tell us that the non-profit will apply for a Low Power FM license this October. Scott was responding to my essay on “Hybrid Highbrow” radio.
“While the term ‘Hybrid Highbrow’ is new to us, the concept is not,” Scott wrote:
“Just now marking our first anniversary of broadcasting, ARTxFM has a highly diverse schedule that includes every kind of music you can imagine — from classical to jazz to country to hip hop to punk rock. We are also interested in radio-art experimentation and host daily arts news programs that bring in some of the best composers, authors, and performers the great city of Louisville has to offer. The response has been incredible among local and international listeners. It seems folks truly are interested in a station that is rich in diversity.”
ARTxFM cool mission statement here. The station is:
“Committed to providing artists and community members access to the airwaves for creative and experimental use, ARTxFM employs sound, music, and conversation to explore the hidden properties of audio broadcasting. Sculpting with frequency that is delivered in watts, ARTxFM amplifies contemporary art ideas and broadcasts international creative dialog.
Our definition of artist is broad. It includes musicians, performers, writers, athletes, painters, photographers, sculptors, dancers, filmmakers, philosophers, scientists, and more — the trained and untrained, the local and the superstar. ARTxFM functions with the belief that the greatest forms of art, like the greatest forms of democracy, flourish within the free and unfettered exchange of ideas.”
Louisville is, of course, a hugely important city in American arts and letters. Among its many virtues, it is home to the Louisville Orchestra, whose recordings introduced me to a universe of 20th-century composition. It is where I learned about composers like Henk Badings and Alan Hovaness and Walter Piston.
Judging by my search of Louisville via REC’s LPFM signal finder, there is a signal availability in a contour that covers Central, Algonquin, Emerson, and Audubon Parks. There are also some second adjacent maybes. ARTxFM’s relative newness may deprive it of a competitive point in the Federal Communications Commission’s Low Power FM application. But my guess is that some of its participants can show the FCC that they’re had an established community presence in Louisville since, well, since a long, long time ago.
I hope ARTxFM get’s their signal. Good luck to them. Don’t forget that the application window opens on October 15.
