KMRD-LP 96.9 FMKMRD-LP 96.9 FM

When the FCC cracked open a low-power filing window in 2013, a local non-profit in Madrid — a former coal-mining town on the Turquoise Trail south of Santa Fe — put in for a licence and was granted one in February 2014. KMRD made its first broadcast at noon on 16 June 2015 and added a web stream later that winter. The following year volunteers started restoring the old wood shop left over from the mining days, and by the summer of 2017 the station was broadcasting out of it.

Over seventy volunteer DJs hold the schedule down, and nobody hands any of them a playlist. An evening runs Bush Tetras into The Waitresses, Kimya Dawson and Courtney Barnett; The Gospel of Death takes a two-hour slot of its own; overnight the station falls back to an automation mix built entirely from New Mexico artists who mailed their tracks in.