Groove SaladGroove Salad

Groove Salad was the second channel SomaFM ever launched, arriving in 2000 directly behind Drone Zone, when Rusty Hodge turned the micropower transmitter he had run at Burning Man into a full-time internet station. Hodge had been tinkering with online radio since 1995, and the channel first went out from his basement garage in Bernal Heights. It has been commercial-free and listener-funded from the beginning, and has since become the most-listened channel on a network that now carries more than twenty of them.

The sound is downtempo and chillout electronica — Kruder & Dorfmeister, Fila Brazillia, Nightmares On Wax, Groove Armada — leaning hard on the Pork Recordings and Cafe del Mar end of the catalogue. It moves at a deliberate pace without ever tipping over into ambient, and that restraint is what has kept it running in office headphones for the better part of two decades.