Beat BlenderBeat Blender

Beat Blender arrived on SomaFM in 2002, alongside CliqHop and Indie Pop Rocks! in the first expansion past the original three channels, two years after Rusty Hodge moved the station from a micropower transmitter he had run at Burning Man to a full-time internet operation in February 2000. It has run on listener donations and carried no advertising at all across the twenty-three years since, and still broadcasts from the San Francisco base the network started in. The format has never been touched.

The blend is midtempo and upbeat electronica held at a steady pace — Zero 7, Hooverphonic, Baby Mammoth, Bullitnuts and King Kooba, with Solar Fields ambient and Roots Manuva dub cut through it, and deep house from Gorge and Rasmus Faber. SomaFM's own line is that it will keep you awake without stressing you out, which is exactly the register.