Space Station SomaSpace Station Soma

Space Station Soma arrived on SomaFM in 2006, six years after Rusty Hodge turned a Burning Man micropower transmitter into a full-time internet station running out of his Bernal Heights garage. The network takes its name from both the sedative in Huxley's Brave New World and San Francisco's South of Market district, where it now works out of a converted warehouse, and every one of its channels is paid for by listener donations rather than advertising — an arrangement unchanged since 2000.

The channel plays mostly analog-inspired mid- and downtempo electronica from 1990 onward, spacious and slow-moving without ever collapsing into pure ambient. Its standing conceit is that it transmits from geostationary orbit to listeners scattered across the solar system, which is silly and also exactly the right frame for music that rarely announces itself.