Secret AgentSecret Agent

Secret Agent was the third channel SomaFM ever launched, in 2000, arriving right behind Drone Zone and Groove Salad. Rusty Hodge had run a micropower transmitter at Burning Man the year before and turned it into a full-time internet station that February, working out of a basement garage in Bernal Heights. The concept has not moved an inch in the twenty-five years since: the sound of 1960s espionage, held at a permanent and unhurried mid-century angle the whole way through.

In practice the rotation leans modern rather than archival — Gotan Project, Dimitri From Paris, Alex Cortiz, Visit Venus and Carmen Rizzo working the nu-jazz and downtempo end, with Alan Parker library cuts underneath them. It is contemporary music built to sound like a title sequence rather than the original spy soundtracks it spends its time evoking.