Drone ZoneDrone Zone

Drone Zone was the first channel SomaFM ever put on air, in 2000, ahead of Groove Salad and Secret Agent. Rusty Hodge had been experimenting with online radio since 1995 and ran a micropower transmitter at Burning Man in 1999 before launching the station full-time from his basement garage in Bernal Heights that February. Everything the network later became was built outward from this one channel, and it has never carried a single second of advertising in the years since.

The music is continuous ambient and drone — slow-moving, textural, frequently without a beat at all, and sequenced to run for hours at a stretch rather than in discrete sets. It was built for deep focus, for sleep, and for the kind of listening that asks nothing back at all, which is why it has outlasted very nearly every other station that launched around it.