Hooold...
Dusting off the needle…
Hooold...
Dusting off the needle…
Bossa nova, cinematic jazz, and shadowy spy grooves.
Secret Agent was the third channel SomaFM ever launched, in 2000, arriving right behind Drone Zone and Groove Salad. Rusty Hodge had run a micropower transmitter at Burning Man the year before and turned it into a full-time internet station that February, working out of a basement garage in Bernal Heights. The concept has not moved an inch in the twenty-five years since: the sound of 1960s espionage, held at a permanent and unhurried mid-century angle the whole way through.
In practice the rotation leans modern rather than archival — Gotan Project, Dimitri From Paris, Alex Cortiz, Visit Venus and Carmen Rizzo working the nu-jazz and downtempo end, with Alan Parker library cuts underneath them. It is contemporary music built to sound like a title sequence rather than the original spy soundtracks it spends its time evoking.
1960s cool with a Cold War edge.
