A shelf in the record shop
The Deep
Ambient, drone, outer space. Music to disappear into.
14 stations
Every station here plays in 432 Hz instead of the usual 440 if you want it to — the page shifts the pitch down by 31.77 cents. We promise you no effect. We give you a dial.
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SomaFM · San Francisco, US · mp3 · 256 kbit/s
The best-known drone channel from listener-funded SomaFM in San Francisco, on air for over twenty years. Ambient without a beat, without structure, without end — meant as a sound space, not a music program.
instrumental at night no ads
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SomaFM · San Francisco, US · aac · 128 kbit/s
Ambient and space sounds, deeper and colder than Drone Zone, with occasional radio chatter from spaceflight archives. The channel to leave running when the apartment starts feeling too small.
instrumental at night no ads
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SomaFM Groove Salad
FLACSomaFM · San Francisco, US · flac · 1084 kbit/s
The house's best-known channel, the same steady hand for over twenty years — and lossless as of recently: FLAC around 1000 kbit/s instead of 128 MP3. If you want to know what the difference does, here's the comparison against your own memory.
instrumental no ads lossless
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ETX.FM · Portland, US · mp3 · 192 kbit/s
A small American station for what it calls Electronic Listening Music — ambient, modern classical, and everything in between. No hosting, no advertising, no genre fence.
instrumental no ads
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CAMP · Paris, FR · opus · 128 kbit/s
A French collective broadcasts ambient and experimental music in the Opus format, which sounds noticeably better than MP3 at low bitrates. The selection is calm but never arbitrary — something is always happening.
no ads community
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Substrate Radio · Seattle, US · mp3 · 128 kbit/s
Dark ambient and industrial drone from Seattle, considerably more inhospitable than the SomaFM channels. Not a relaxation program, but music that makes a room oppressive — if that's what you're after, there's little better.
instrumental at night
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Drug Radio · Sankt Petersburg, RU · mp3 · 128 kbit/s
A Russian ambient channel with a leaning toward psychedelic and space-related sounds. The selection follows a different tradition than the American one — more Berlin School, less Californian relaxation.
instrumental at night
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New Age Radio Greece · Athen, GR · flac
A Greek station broadcasting new age and meditative music lossless in FLAC — a rarity in this genre. Especially on quiet, overtone-rich pieces, it makes an audible difference.
lossless instrumental
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Ambi Nature Radio · Zürich, CH · mp3 · 320 kbit/s
A Swiss station mixing ambient with real nature recordings — rain, forest, water, recorded in specific places. Resolved high enough at 320 kbit/s that the quiet details survive.
instrumental at night no ads
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Spokoynoe Radio · Moskau, RU · mp3 · 320 kbit/s
Calm radio, as the name says in Russian: instrumental music with no announcements, no advertising, at 320 kbit/s. A quiet corner of the catalog that gets by without the usual relaxation clichés and whale song.
instrumental no ads
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Café del Mar · Ibiza, ES · aac · 192 kbit/s
The calm channel from the bar in Sant Antoni, whose sunset compilations invented the chillout genre starting in 1994. Unlike the thousand imitators, this station has the original records and the sense behind them.
instrumental
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Nature Radio · Mailand, IT · mp3 · 128 kbit/s
Very slow, very quiet soundscapes, expressly meant for falling asleep and without any dramatic arc. The most useful channel in the catalog for late evening.
instrumental at night no ads
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SomaFM · San Francisco, US · mp3 · 128 kbit/s
Ambient with spaceflight radio traffic mixed in — Apollo, Space Shuttle, mission control. The voices are real, pulled from NASA archives, giving the music a gravity that pure space ambient never reaches.
no ads instrumental at night
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SomaFM · San Francisco, US · mp3 · 256 kbit/s
Dark ambient and horror-film sounds, expressly meant to be spooky and originally built for Halloween. The most unsettling channel in the catalog — which is sometimes exactly right.
no ads instrumental at night