The Kyoto Connection RadioThe Kyoto Connection Radio

The station is the radio arm of The Kyoto Connection, the project Argentine musician Facundo Arena started in Buenos Aires in 2005 out of an attachment to a Japanese city he had never set foot in. Two decades of albums followed, most of them given away under Creative Commons, along with a live band, and eventually the trips to Japan the music had spent years imagining, including tours across the country in 2025 and 2026 and a live set recorded on the banks of Kyoto's Kamo River.

What goes out is a hand-picked run through Japanese ambient, environmental and new age records, weighted heavily toward the instrumental: film and anime scores, soft synth instrumentals, the koto-and-tape experiments of the 1970s. Listeners send in half-remembered fragments of songs and get the artist and the album back, which is how the rotation keeps growing, request by request.