Maybe roughly two months ago now I learned about a 90s-through-early-00s Japanese satellite radio company called "St.GIGA". I no longer even remember how or from where, exactly. One of those serendipitous internet rabbit hole discoveries.
English Wikipedia article "St.GIGA"
Most of the story is there in the Wikipedia article if you really want to go through it in full detail. St.GIGA created the world's first digital satellite radio station. It was strictly a subscription service. You had to actually buy a dedicated hardware device, a decoder about the shape and size of a DVD player (or a typical modular HiFi AM/FM tuner but I assume a DVD player is a more familiar reference for most people), and have a dish to plug it into, and then also pay a monthly subscription fee. It's astonishing to consider that enough people might have wanted to do this for the whole venture to be commercially viable! I mean, St.GIGA was plagued by financial problems its entire life and ultimately went bankrupt, so one might argue that it *wasn't* commercially viable, but to keep kicking for over ten years is still a kind of achievement, given the competition from conventional FM radio at no monthly cost and cheap pocket-portable receivers. I am vaguely aware that satellite radio is "a thing" in the US, but I understand that there's a unique market there created by the huge country, low population density and strong driving culture, where folks want to drive coast-to-coast and be able to listen to the one station the whole time. Japan is by comparison a tiny country with a huge population density and a much weaker driving culture. The whole idea of satellite radio seems bizarre to me in that setting.
But precisely because St.GIGA had a listener base who were paying monthly fees and who had invested in expensive hardware which could *only* be used to listen to St.GIGA, they were able to operate the station in a way completely unlike any other radio station I've ever heard of. This thing sounds like it was so off-the-wall unconventional I can't believe it was a corporate product and not some kind of pirate station broadcast out of a squat by hippy art school drop-outs. For starters, there was a policy of "No Commercials, No DJs, No News Broadcasts, No Talk". From the perspective of 202x this is kind of hard to get too excited about, because there are plenty of internet radio stations which operate under basically this principle, but in the 90s that would have been pretty crazy stuff. What's weird even by today's standards was the scheduling of the different programs. There was no fixed schedule along the lines of "jazz from 10:00 until 12:00, then ambient from 12:00 until 13:00" or anything like. Instead, transitions between genres happened gradually with overlap, where one genre slowly became less frequent as the next became more, easing you through the transition. The transitions were, get this, synchronised with ocean tide tables, an idea they called "Tide of Sound". I figure the way this must have worked was something like that you hit the peak of one genre at high tide, and then the peak of the next one at the following low tide. High and low tides do not occur at exactly the same time from day to day, there are all sorts of complicated ebbs and flows to the cycles, and I get the impression St.GIGA actually followed this principle, so that even if you only listened during the same fixed window of time each day, over the course of a year you'd actually hear a range of different kinds of music. And I use "kinds of music" kind of loosely, as they also included high quality field recordings from natural environments all over the world, and sometimes even live sound from ocean shores! These nature recordings were often combined with poetry readings, sometimes with poems composed specifically for the show. It was as much ambient *sound* as music, but somehow cohesive.
Despite attracting a dedicated cult following, St.GIGA seemed to struggle with constant financial problems, as I mentioned. They briefly teamed up with Nintendo and broadcast SNES games over the air, a kind of higher-tech replication of the Kansas City Standard data broadcasts for cassette-based home computers in the 80s, but that didn't seem to save them at all, and by 2006 they were gone. Thankfully, the miracle of internet piracy means there are hours of old recordings (of admittedly variable quality) up at archive.org for the folks of today to peruse. I have dipped my toe into these archives casually so far and found some really good stuff (amongst stuff I'm not that into). I think a deeper dive could be well worth while if you're at all into ambient/environmental music. There's some stuff on YouTube, too, but I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of it is just people uploading the the archive.org recordings and slapping some imagery over it.
"St. GIGA - Tide of Sound Archive" at archive.org
While listening to these archives, I learned that St.GIGA had an (infrequently used) catch phrase, or slogan, or whatever, which was "I'm here, I'm glad you're there, we are St.GIGA". I have no words for how great this is as a slogan for a radio station, you have no idea. It's hard to really put into words, but as somebody who has spent more than his fair share of time sitting alone in forests at night with a radio and a long bit of wire slung over a tree branch, twiddling knobs and plucking strange things out of the ether, there is a sort of intimacy to broadcast radio. At some level, by modern standards, it's a very "disconnected" medium. The broadcaster doesn't know whether you, as a specific individual, is listening or not at any given moment, and of course you have no way to let them know, no way to communicate with them in real time at all. It's a strictly one way communication, and it doesn't have the obvious intimacy of a one way communication which is one-to-one, like a letter to a friend. It's one-to-indeterminately-many, necessarily impersonal. And yet there *is* still somehow a sense of human connection there. The whole thing only works if both parties keep doing their part in the expectation that the other will keep doing theirs. There's some similarity with the practice of tossing messages in bottles into the electronic seas of Gopher and Gemini, assuming the existence of a real-or-imagined audience that you have only a tenuous link to. The declaration that "I'm here, I'm glad you're there" completely nails the core human aspect of this relationship.
Does anybody know of any internet radio stations which are doing anything even remotely this interesting in the present day? Most of the ones I know of (which is admittedly not that many) don't even have schedules per se, just separate channels dedicated to specific genres which play just that non-stop. But I just love the idea of, say, a station which is associated with a particular city, where the mix of music is tied to the current time of day and the current weather conditions in that city, so you have sunny playlists and rainy playlists and nighttime playlists, and the selection drifts gradually between them as appropriate. In this day and age, something like that could be very cheaply and very easily set up by hobbyists, completely automated on a Raspberry Pi or something, but I've never heard of anything like it. I'd love to know if something like that exists.
On a quick closing note - if you're interested in weird unconventional radio in general, do check out gemlogger Lettuce's post about Micropower radio from earlier this year!