Are you ready to experience the coolest thing ever? Go to radio.garden and you’ll be able to move around an interactive globe and very quickly pick up any radio station in the world. All you have to do is hover the target finder over any of the thousands of tiny green dots representing real stations and then you’re off to the races, free to explore the diverse collection of sounds that the world has to offer. It’s basically a fun, musical version of Google Earth.
But it’s not the only musical map out there. There’s also a musical time machine known as Radiooooo that lets you travel the globe and back in time as well.
The New Yorker sums it up best:
“In 2012, Benjamin Moreau, an artist and d.j., was test-driving his car-collector father’s most recent acquisition, a white 1966 Renault Caravelle, in the French Riviera. “As we drove along this road, lost in time, my fingers came across the splendid old radio on the exquisite wooden dashboard,” he recalled. When Moreau switched it on, the speakers belched “a wave of awful commercial music,” he said, “instantly bursting the time bubble we were so happily swimming in.” The moment led to an idea: what if you could organize music, not based on genre or complex algorithms but instead as a part of time and space? What if, instead of scrolling through artists and songs arranged alphabetically, you could explore them historically and geographically?
He brought the concept to his friend Raphaël Hamburger, a music producer and soundtrack supervisor who had amassed a vast collection of music from all over the world. You pick a country on a world map, select a decade in the twentieth century or the aughts (or listen to contemporary music via a “Now” option), and enjoy a curated playlist of crowdsourced songs from that time and place.
They called their idea and company Radiooooo—the five o’s represent the five continental landmasses, all of which you can hear music from, though Antarctica’s stations contain mostly whale songs. (So as to avoid confusion, they bought all the domains from radiooo.com to radioooooooooooooooooooo.com.) In 2013, they secured funding and were able to launch the site. By this time they had partnered with Anne-Claire Troubat, an attorney specializing in international business, who left her job at an investment firm to become C.E.O. To get their time machine started, Moreau and Hamburger needed a community of contributors. They took advantage of one of the Internet’s great human resources, the obsessively specialized music nerd, to endow the collection.
Radiooooo employs curators who spend hours every day combing through hundreds of submissions from almost thirty thousand contributors, from all over the world (Troubat refers to them as ‘treasure hunters’). The curators make sure the audio files are high quality, and judge whether or not the song fits the Radiooooo aesthetic, which can be difficult to define. For Moreau, the decisions about which music to include are instinctive, and ‘the music is only selected based on how we feel when we start listening to a track. The ability of a song to touch us instantaneously, in a completely subjective way. I would almost say in a naive way . . . We are not trying to apply ethno-musical criteria. We are keeping what we believe are true musical treasures.’ Troubat told me that the strength of the editorial line leaves lots of good music, about ninety per cent of submissions, out of the collection.
The result is that Radiooooo listeners, of whom there are now over a hundred and seventy thousand, have access to music from inveterate collectors of Mandopop, Afrobeat, Italo disco, Yé-yé, and many other genres. Attention to detail is apparent in the collection, but elsewhere, too. On loading Radiooooo’s site, you are presented with a map of the world that was hand-drawn by Moreau and his partner Noemi Ferst, an illustrator and Radiooooo’s artistic director, using a quill pen and ink. Even the user experience is pleasantly calculated: click on a country, select a decade, as well as a mood: slow, fast, or weird, for “those eager to take the trip a little further.” Afterward, you can enjoy song after song, as though you were listening to the best radio station in eighties Berlin, sixties Bangkok, or seventies Beirut. In Taxi Mode you can cobble together your own “musical road trip” by combining any number of countries and decades, for example Colombia, Ethiopia, and Sweden in the fifties, sixties and seventies. This feature allows you to experiment with space-time combinations—like a time-travelling d.j. in pursuit of the universe’s vibe.”
I’m not very musically inclined but even I can appreciate a good vibe when I hear it. Especially when part of a treasure hunt. Especially when time travel is involved.
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