Digitalis: live radio from San Francisco

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Dusting off the needle…

San Francisco, United States

Digitalis

Soothing, with a glitch in it.

Indie songs dissolving into hiss, hum and reverb.

Digitalis opened in 2008, part of a six-channel expansion that also gave SomaFM Lush, Sonic Universe and Underground 80s, and its brief was the narrowest of that batch: self-produced music, indie rock and electronics made by people working alone rather than in a studio with a budget behind it. The station had been running out of San Francisco for eight years by then and had the library to sort it, treating a bedroom recording and a label release as equally worth playing and leaving the seams in.

The rotation leans on the Morr Music axis — Styrofoam, Go Find, Arovane — then pulls in chillwave from Washed Out and Teen Daze, dream pop from Chromatics and The Japanese House, and ambient pieces by Marconi Union and All India Radio. Guitars stay audible underneath most of it, just softened, delayed, or chopped into something quieter than they started.

bySomaFM

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San Francisco, United States

Digitalis

Soothing, with a glitch in it.

Indie songs dissolving into hiss, hum and reverb.

Digitalis opened in 2008, part of a six-channel expansion that also gave SomaFM Lush, Sonic Universe and Underground 80s, and its brief was the narrowest of that batch: self-produced music, indie rock and electronics made by people working alone rather than in a studio with a budget behind it. The station had been running out of San Francisco for eight years by then and had the library to sort it, treating a bedroom recording and a label release as equally worth playing and leaving the seams in.

The rotation leans on the Morr Music axis — Styrofoam, Go Find, Arovane — then pulls in chillwave from Washed Out and Teen Daze, dream pop from Chromatics and The Japanese House, and ambient pieces by Marconi Union and All India Radio. Guitars stay audible underneath most of it, just softened, delayed, or chopped into something quieter than they started.

bySomaFM