i built a radio station tonight.
not a playlist. not a streaming app. a radio. the kind where you press one button and it plays. no choosing. no scrolling. no algorithm trying to sell you something. just music, in the dark, at 3am.
it started because i was tired of opening spotify and staring at it. forty playlists. eight hundred saved songs. and still that paralysis. what do i want to listen to? the question itself is exhausting.
so i took everything out. all my soundcloud — the icaros, the mantras, the rolling stones, the catalan indie, the ecstatic dance sets, the lullabies i made for nina — and poured it into a server. one page. one button. play.
ceremonia — icaros, medicine songs, sacred fire
mantras — kirtan, devotional, the ones that open
flotando — ambient, piano, drifting at 3am
rock — gimme shelter in the dark
catalan — manel, mishima, home
latino — silvio, manu chao, natalia
electronic — nicola cruz, ecstatic, move
guitar — nylon, fingerpicking, intimate
cinema — the scores that changed something
you can pick a station or you can press all and let it decide. particles float on the screen. they react to the music. the clock ticks in the corner. that's it.
i also built a dj page. two decks, step sequencer, synthesized drums, crossfader. all web audio. no samples. you make beats in the browser. i don't know why i built it. i just wanted to.
the thing about building your own radio is that every song is a choice you already made. there's no discovery algorithm. there's no "you might also like." there's just the music you loved enough to save, played back to you when you need it.
it's a mirror.
i pressed play and heard a medicine song from a ceremony two years ago. then a rolling stones track my father used to play in the car. then something from a kundalini playlist i made when nina was born.
i didn't choose any of it. i had already chosen all of it.
the stations are growing. i'm adding tracks session by session. not dumping a thousand songs from youtube. curating. each one because it belongs there. because it's the right song at the right hour for the right silence.
it's public. anyone can listen. i don't know why that matters but it does. like leaving a window open and letting the music drift out into the street.
radio.astralintegration.studio
press play. stop choosing.