Illinois Street LoungeIllinois Street Lounge

Illinois Street Lounge arrived on SomaFM in 2006, six years after Rusty Hodge turned a micropower transmitter he had run at Burning Man into a full-time internet station in February 2000. Space Station Soma and Doomed joined the same year. It runs on listener donations with no advertising anywhere on the network, which is what lets a channel devoted to a format the record industry abandoned sixty years ago hold a permanent slot without ever having to justify the audience to anyone.

The rotation is vintage lounge and exotica with the genre's architects present — Les Baxter, Martin Denny, Arthur Lyman — alongside Perez Prado mambo, Walter Wanderley bossa, Morricone and Mancini themes and obscure British library cuts from Alan Hawkshaw. It is bachelor-pad music played completely straight, without the wink that the revival usually adds.