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. The station keeps two tunes, each a two-bar motif: a hook and a contrasting line. The hook plays in grooves and drops and comes back plain every other phrase; in between it is ornamented, restated a third higher, or answered by the other line. Lifts carry the contrasting line and breakdowns strip the hook to its main notes. Tunes move mostly by step and turn back after a leap. Each bar of the tune is shifted along the scale to wherever its notes on the beat land on chord tones, and a phrase ends on a held chord tone. After a while the contrasting line becomes the new hook.
- 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.