NEW YORK, NY.- “Do you think about your organs, Timmy?” asked Moriah Evans, an experimental choreographer. “How often do you commit yourself to trying to sense the bodies within your body?”

She was live on air, speaking to artist and teacher Timothy Simonds on Montez Press Radio, an online station based in Manhattan’s Chinatown. Simonds hosts a show called “Miss Othmar’s Meeting with Teachers,” a reference to Charlie Brown’s teacher, who is only ever heard as a disembodied voice. Every month, he asks people with wildly varying expertise to educate him on something new.

That winter afternoon, Evans was instructing him in the art of dancing with his internal organs.

They stood facing each other on opposite ends of the station’s sparse recording studio. “I want you to try to draw with your esophagus,” she said, asking him to picture his esophagus as a tool separate from the rest of the body. The point was to “use the organ to move the container of your throat.”

Evans began to emit a series of unearthly noises: She retched, growled and unleashed a long, high-pitched shriek. “Shock your body into the vitality that’s already there!” she told Simonds.

The host joined in, gurgling quietly. Evans urged him on: “Come on Timmy, a few gags!”

It’s not exactly NPR. Montez Press Radio has carved out an oddball niche in New York City’s creative ecosystem from its perch above a skate shop on Canal Street, across from the popular bar Clandestino. The station has thrived with a defiantly low-stakes approach and penetrating reach into the underground dimensions of the city’s art, literature, nightlife and music scenes.

It’s an appealing alternative for artists frustrated with social media’s race-to-the-bottom incentives and the dwindling number of traditional publishers.

“The media landscape has fractured,” said Whitney Mallett, who runs the small indie magazine The Whitney Review. What Montez does, she said, “is offer a container for a lot of the splinters.”

‘Aren’t We Supposed to Do Podcasts Now?’

In the summer of 2018, Anna Clark, a founding member of Montez Press, the publishing house based in London, Hamburg, Germany, and New York, was looking to stage a project with her colleagues, Stacy Skolnik and Thomas Laprade, in an art gallery on Canal Street. The gallerist had left town for the summer and offered them the space. They envisioned a temporary radio station that would broadcast online and within only a few blocks around the art gallery, using a pirate radio antenna.

“Tom was interested in community access TV, and I was interested in community spaces that would bring together various disciplines,” said Skolnik, 34.

They reached out to friends to see who might be interested in hosting. Nobody involved had any radio experience, but plenty of people wanted to give it a shot.

Their first show aired in August 2018, and they broadcast live from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. At first, they considered the station “a durational work of art that lasted for 30 days,” said. Clark, 39. But after a few raucous parties in their studio — the first of many — and an informal initiation into the city’s indie art and publishing scene, they sensed the project had legs. After its initial run, Montez Press Radio was invited to appear at the New York Art Book Fair; the three founders transformed a rented recreational vehicle into an impromptu recording booth, parked it outside of MoMA PS1 and broadcast for the three days of the fair.

That fall, the gallerist left New York for good, and Skolnik, Laprade and Clark took over his space. In January 2019, Montez Press Radio became a permanent venture. Initially backed by the press, the station became a separate nonprofit entity, subsisting on grants and fundraising. (There’s no more pirate antenna — now the station is online only.)

Some were bemused: “Even in 2019, you had a sense of like, Why is there a radio station?” recalled Nate Freeman, a culture reporter at Vanity Fair who had a Montez show at the time with critic Dean Kissick. “Aren’t we supposed to do podcasts now?”

Although podcasts had become something of a trademark product for New York’s downtown, many of the station’s contributors immediately saw the appeal of live radio.

“There’s a lot of joy in it that feels really communal,” said Dena Yago, a writer and visual artist who co-founded the high-concept trend forecasting agency K-Hole. She hosted “New York Conversation,” what she called a “Brian Lehrer-style call-in show.” She invited experts on to discuss garbage, rats and traffic-control systems.

Making a radio show, she said, was a welcome counterpoint to “everyone with their sad bedroom brands on Instagram, siloed off, maybe not having a great time.”

Embracing the DIY Spirit

Skolnik and Laprade who handle Montez’s day-to-day booking, are not too precious about polish, and they embrace spontaneity. Over the years, Montez has aired Tanzanian dance music; a round table of artists and writers reading offbeat erotica; songs off a broken iPod that skips forward at random; and “astrology through the lens of Yu-Gi-Oh!”

“They make me believe people in New York are interesting and have wild interests,” said Kaitlin Phillips, a publicist and onetime host of the Montez show “Insider Baseball.” (She does not do publicity for the radio station.) “The internet era can make you forget that people know things you don’t. I’m always like, ‘Where do they find these people?’”

One night, during an ambient music show at the station, Laprade, 33, heard a racket from the sidewalk outside. It was a young guy wearing “K-Swiss sneakers, JNCOs, doing this ’N Sync thing with an amp on the corner,” he remembered. “I was about to tell him to shut up. But I was like, ‘Whoa, wait, what are you doing? This sounds really cool.’”

Laprade asked him up to the studio and invited him to perform on air, which is how he met Mat Kastella, an outsider pop musician. Inspired by his itinerant style of touring, Laprade and Skolnik threw a concert where Kastella and a crew of backup dancers performed on a stage inside the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

So while Montez may be something of an anachronism, for the city’s young artists and writers, it arrived at exactly the right time. Community radio, once a vibrant ecosystem in Manhattan, had been struggling to stay afloat for years. Know Wave, a station with ties to the art world, stopped regularly broadcasting in 2018; East Village Radio closed in 2014 (although it is expected to return next month). These stations, which streamed online, carried the torch from the halcyon days of the late 1970s and early ’80s, when community radio was how New Yorkers learned about what was going on in the city’s underground cultural scenes.

Donald Miller, who hosted an experimental music show on the Columbia University station WKCR from 1978 to 1982, described the experience in an email as “two tons of fun and great hangs.” The station is the reason he ended up in the pioneering free jazz trio Borbetomagus: The two young saxophonists who would become his bandmates reached out to him after they heard, and were enthralled by, the records Miller played on the air.

That era’s creative ferment inspires today’s downtown denizens. “What Montez is doing reminds me of what I read about the Mudd Club or Danceteria,” said Adrian Rew, an East Village record store owner with a Montez show, “where punks and avant-garde artists and curators were all rubbing shoulders.”

Alternative Voices

Many say that the station, which sprung up as art world haunts like Spain, China Chalet and Forlini’s were closing, offers them a glimpse of an alternative reality free from market pressures. (This perception has held even as Montez’s studio sits at the current epicenter for hype-based real estate marketing, epitomized by Nine Orchard, the luxury hotel that opened down the block a couple years ago.)

Without having to worry about billionaire owners or other corporate interests, Montez’s hosts and guests say they feel free to be as edgy or esoteric as they like.

“The art world is just tremendously asymmetrical, where there’s enormous amounts of power at the top,” said Joshua Citarella, an artist and media theorist whose Montez segment “Memes as Politics” later became a podcast. “There seems to be a lot of stuff happening that doesn’t necessarily capture the hearts and minds and imagination of young people.”

Citarella said that the imbalance has meant that legacy institutions are, in his view, out of step with the creative class and their politics. He pointed to the recent turmoil at Artforum over an open letter opposing the war in the Gaza Strip and resignations at several prominent museums as evidence.

Since the war began, Skolnik and Laprade have rebroadcast transmissions from the Palestinian radio station Radio Alhara, aired lectures by Edward Said and dedicated a four-hour segment to field recordings of the Palestinian sunbird’s calls.

Laprade says he wants the radio station to be a community — a place where people can talk about political issues from any angle, complain about a bad art show and have a few free beers. Maybe they’d hop on the air, too. Maybe not. They keep an open-door policy.

Freeman, the Vanity Fair writer, said he was grateful to have been one of the people welcomed into the fold.

“For a semi-burned-out early 30s professional writer’s life, it was like the greatest thing that could ever happen,” he said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.