I'm here, I'm glad you're there (they were St.GIGA)
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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.
Most of the story is there in the Wikipedia article[1] 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[2] 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.
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[3] from earlier this year!
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St.GIGA
[2]
https://archive.org/details/stgigaarchive
[3] gemini://gemini.ctrl-c.club/~lettuce/micropower-radio.gmi
