n5MD Radio: live radio from San Francisco

Hooold...

Dusting off the needle…

San Francisco, United States

n5MD Radio

Feelings, rendered in circuitry.

Broken beats, soft edges, and no irony at all.

n5MD started in 2000 as a MiniDisc label, literally: the name is shorthand for No Fives, Minidiscs! Mike Cadoo ran it out of Oakland, across the bay from SomaFM, and when Sony stopped pressing pre-recorded MiniDiscs the catalogue moved to CD and later to vinyl. It has passed a hundred albums since, all of them at the emotive end of electronic music, where a broken rhythm is still expected to carry a mood. SomaFM gave the label a channel of its own in 2020, twenty years into the run.

The roster is the programme. Lackluster and Funckarma cover the glitched, braindance end, Proem and Dryft the harder rhythms, and Ocoeur, Stray Theories and Last Days the drift toward strings and ambient. Near The Parenthesis and SubtractiveLAD sit somewhere between the two, and practically everything on air came out on the label itself rather than around it.

bySomaFM

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San Francisco, United States

n5MD Radio

Feelings, rendered in circuitry.

Broken beats, soft edges, and no irony at all.

n5MD started in 2000 as a MiniDisc label, literally: the name is shorthand for No Fives, Minidiscs! Mike Cadoo ran it out of Oakland, across the bay from SomaFM, and when Sony stopped pressing pre-recorded MiniDiscs the catalogue moved to CD and later to vinyl. It has passed a hundred albums since, all of them at the emotive end of electronic music, where a broken rhythm is still expected to carry a mood. SomaFM gave the label a channel of its own in 2020, twenty years into the run.

The roster is the programme. Lackluster and Funckarma cover the glitched, braindance end, Proem and Dryft the harder rhythms, and Ocoeur, Stray Theories and Last Days the drift toward strings and ambient. Near The Parenthesis and SubtractiveLAD sit somewhere between the two, and practically everything on air came out on the label itself rather than around it.

bySomaFM