On air now
Press POWER. The code for the bar that is playing appears here.
How the station decides
No model picks anything here. Every four bars a small program writes the next phrase as Strudel code, and Strudel plays it with real drum-machine and piano samples. The rules:
- Arc. Sections follow a weighted chain: intro → groove → lift → build → drop → breakdown. Each section runs 8 to 32 bars, a build always resolves into a drop, and energy tilts the choice of what comes next. Even a breakdown keeps a pad, a held bass, a sparse melody and light percussion.
- Harmony. The mood picks a mode (dark: aeolian or phrygian; deep: dorian; bright: ionian, mixolydian or lydian). Chords are the mode's own triads, chained with functional-harmony weights (V goes home, vi moves to IV or ii). A phrase leading into a drop ends on a dominant. Progressions repeat for a few phrases before changing.
- Voicing. Each chord takes the inversion that moves the fewest semitones from the last one.
- Bass. Style and energy pick a rhythm; the notes are the chord's root, fifth, octave, and a step toward the next root at the end of the bar.
- Melody. A two-bar motif per phrase, answered and varied; on-beat notes snap to chord tones, off-beat notes walk the scale.
- Drums. Layers enter with energy: kick, then backbeat, then hats on the offbeat. Straight eighths arrive at energy 3 and sixteenths only at the peak. The last bar before a bigger section gets a roll or a tom fill. More cowbell is on request.
- Sleep. The Sleep station has no drums and never builds or drops: slow pads, a sine drone, sparse piano and soft rain at 60 BPM. It starts a 45-minute timer that calms the energy in the last stretch, fades out over the final minutes, and switches off.