WIWS RADIO

WIWS is a full-time, online AM-style radio station built to sound exactly like 1962 — not a parody or a playlist, but a living, breathing recreation of the sound of local radio as it once was. It plays 50s and early 60s music (many sourced directly from my own design archive), filled out with vintage jingles, radio commercial transcription discs, and breaks that reflect the real pacing and tone of the era.

The audio is processed in real time to emulate the tonal signature of high-powered AM radio — complete with playback chains modeled after the stations I grew up hearing. To our knowledge, no one else is doing this quite the way we are: rebuilding the sonic environment from the ground up as part of the storytelling.

The station grew directly out of my work with John Sellards Design. For years, I’ve built visual worlds around mid-century music: record sleeves, box sets, promotional materials, reissue packaging. To do that, I’ve maintained a huge private archive — not just records and labels, but magazines, ephemera, type books, and so on — all used in the daily rhythm of my work.

WIWS became a way to take that archive and extend it into sound. It wasn’t about nostalgia — it was about building a living counterpart to the visual work I’ve spent my life doing. If the design side reanimates the printed and visual language of the era, the station provides the soundtrack.

Right before launching the station, Chrissy and I had uncovered a box of untouched store-stock 45s in her grandmother’s basement, leftover from his 1950s radio and record player repair shop — I can only speculate that for a while he carried records. We were both down with Covid soon after, and in the middle of all that illness fog, Chrissy said: What if we made a radio station? Not a podcast or the usual playlist, but emulating a real station — with jingles, commercials, the whole thing. I was immediately in!

I’ve spent my life designing music packaging, especially conjuring up the look of the 50s and 60s — reissues, jackets, box sets, you name it. I’ve built a huge personal archive of records, sleeves, ads, logos, type samples and so on. That archive is what fuels my design work every day.

WIWS gave me a way to take all of that and let it breathe. It’s not just something to listen to — it’s a living environment for the design world I already work in. I’m constantly pulling audio and visual elements from the same sources: a label scan becomes a redrawn logo, or a record dub becomes a commercial break, etc.

Chrissy and I voice the station ourselves as Ray and Dottie, a fictional husband-and-wife team broadcasting from 1962 Beckley, West Virginia. We keep it contextually accurate as far as we can — no ironic winks or out-there spaceship or tiki culture. Just the sound and feel of music on AM radio, done right. WIWS isn’t a side gig. It’s part of the same work I’ve always done. The difference is, now you can hear it.

Listen here:
The WIWS Website
on Live 365