Hooold...
Dusting off the needle…
Hooold...
Dusting off the needle…
Foundational Jamaican riddim, slow and immovable.
Heavyweight Reggae joined SomaFM in 2020, alongside Vaporwaves and n5MD Radio, twenty years after Rusty Hodge turned a micropower transmitter he had run at Burning Man into a full-time internet station in February 2000. It remains the only reggae channel the network runs. SomaFM has taken listener donations and carried no advertising throughout, which is what lets a channel stay this far inside one tradition instead of broadening out. Nothing here is a crossover cut.
The rotation is foundational Jamaican music played without rush — Alton Ellis and The Heptones for rocksteady, Johnny Clarke and Yabby You for roots, Lee Perry and The Upsetters for dub, U-Roy and Lone Ranger toasting over the top of it, and Linton Kwesi Johnson's dub poetry. It favours the original recordings over everything that came after.
Bass heavy enough to lean on.
