CliqHop IDMCliqHop IDM

CliqHop arrived on SomaFM in 2002, alongside Indie Pop Rocks! and Beat Blender in the first real wave of expansion past the original three channels, two years after Rusty Hodge turned a micropower transmitter he had run at Burning Man into a full-time internet station. It has run since on listener donations alone with no advertising anywhere in the schedule, which is the arrangement that lets a channel this specialised hold a permanent slot instead of justifying its listener numbers to anyone.

The music is IDM and its neighbours — glitch, braindance, microsound — composed on laptops rather than played on instruments, with Autechre, Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada, µ-Ziq and Ulrich Schnauss in regular rotation. It is cerebral and deliberately awkward rhythmically, and rewards close listening far more than it suits filling a room with sound.