New wave, post-punk, shoegaze, and no format at all.
Sheri Barclay, a Canadian indie promoter who ended up in New York, started KPISS in 2015 and still runs it, taking the model from WFMU and from the campus stations she grew up on — CJSR in Edmonton, the CBC. For years it went out of a specially rigged RV parked in a Bushwick lot, which is how most of the city first heard about it; the pandemic scattered the DJs to their own kitchens and the roster has been global ever since. It is ad-free, funded entirely by the DJs and the people listening.
Dozens of shows share the week and none of them were handed a brief: Hailey On Intercom does new wave, post-punk and garage, the Katie Collins Show runs synthpop into psych rock, No Humans Allowed sticks to italo, new beat and anything ending in -wave, and Go To Bed winds down into ambient and melodic techno. The DJs call themselves crate diggers and nobody corrects them.
Weird on purpose, always was.
