How this station works

We wanted a radio station of our own. Not a playlist and not a show — a thing that is playing whether or not anyone is listening, with music we actually like, on the assumption that if we like it somebody else will.

Separately, we wanted this domain. It had a past: radiomutation.com was the home of a garage punk network that ran from 2005 and went quiet in 2019. The registration lapsed, we took it, and we set about putting back what could be put back.

The two wants met in the middle, and this is what came out.

Why the music is made for the station

We like this music and we cannot write it. That is the honest version, and everything else follows from it.

Playing other people’s records around the clock is a different project, and most of that project is paperwork: licences, reporting, money, and permission from people who are often no longer easy to reach. We did not want to spend the station’s life on that, and we did not want a station that plays ten records because ten is what we could clear.

So the music here was made for the station. What we aimed at is the garage revival of the two thousands — fuzz, organ, primitive drums, songs that end before they outstay themselves. Not because it is fashionable, but because that is when we started listening properly, and it is still the sound we reach for. The station is the record collection we would have had.

It went on air with twenty-four compositions. It has been growing since.

Where the bands come from

Every track gets a band of its own. A library where one act plays everything is a playlist with a name on it, not a station, and a station is what we were after.

The names are invented, and so is everything behind them. There are no gigs, no pressings, no line-ups and no history. We say so on the listen page and the DJ says so on air, because somebody who likes a track and goes looking for the band should not have to work it out for themselves.

This is also why the archive is kept strictly apart. That side of the site documents real shows, made by real people, on dates that can be checked — and nothing on this stream belongs to it. The two kinds of work sit on the same domain and never mix. What we write about is real as well: records made by people, covered by an editor, which is what sending us music is for.

The two voices

There are two of them, and they are the classic pair.

DJ Mutation is the engineer who ended up with the microphone because there was nobody else in the building. He is precise where a presenter would be vague — the bitrate, the hour to the minute, how many volts the transmitter is drawing, which valve is failing — and vague about the music, which is the joke he never acknowledges. He can tell you exactly what a fuzz pedal does to a signal and cannot reliably remember which band he has just played.

Vera can. She does not work here. She turns up, stays a while and leaves without saying goodbye, and nobody has ever explained how she gets in. She knows who played on what and why a guitar sounds the way it does, she likes this music plainly and without embarrassment, and she has heard his story about the basement before.

We picked those two voices because they worked next to each other — different enough to sound like a room, close enough to sound like a conversation. A single voice explaining things is a broadcast. Two people disagreeing is a station.

Neither of them pretends to be a person, and that turns out to be the most comfortable place for them to stand. The jokes they make about what they are land better than any disclaimer we could write.

What has gone wrong

Plenty, and the failures are more interesting than the successes.

For a while the station told the time incorrectly with total confidence. The DJ announced the hour, but the break had been chosen long before it went to air — so “two in the morning” reached listeners at twenty to three. Measured over a day and a half, not one hour announcement landed inside the window where it was still true. It was not a setting that fixed it, but changing the moment the station decides what to say: now it chooses five seconds before the words are heard, against the clock on the wall.

One night the DJ disappeared for seven hours. A rebuild of his material stopped halfway through, the station played straight music, and the only trace was a single line in a log. Music with no voice sounds exactly like a station that meant to do that, which is why nobody noticed. It now says so, loudly, the moment it happens.

And the basement still hums. The DJ has never been down there to find out why, has no intention of going, and says so about once an evening.

Listening to it

The stream runs around the clock at 128 kbps, and it opens in anything that takes an address — a browser, VLC, a phone, a player pinned to a desktop since 2011. The listen page has the addresses and a player.

It is a small station. It is also on the air right now, which is the part we still find unreasonable.