Sonic Universe: live radio from San Francisco

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Sonic Universe

For the restless purist.

Jazz rerouted through Oslo, with the effects on.

Sonic Universe opened in 2008, one of six channels SomaFM added that year and the only one of them that went looking for jazz. The station's reputation had been built on downtempo and ambient, and this was the room where that taste got pointed at a different tradition: not the standards repertoire and not the festival circuit, but the end of jazz that had already absorbed electronics, studio processing and a European sense of space, where a trumpet is as likely to be treated as played.

What plays is largely the Nordic axis. Nils Petter Molvaer and Bugge Wesseltoft come from the Jazzland circle, Arve Henriksen supplies the processed trumpet, and ECM chamber records by Bobo Stenson and Eberhard Weber hold the quiet middle. Around them sit Allan Holdsworth's fusion, Kyoto Jazz Massive's club jazz and a Laurent Garnier collaboration.

bySomaFM

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Sonic Universe

For the restless purist.

Jazz rerouted through Oslo, with the effects on.

Sonic Universe opened in 2008, one of six channels SomaFM added that year and the only one of them that went looking for jazz. The station's reputation had been built on downtempo and ambient, and this was the room where that taste got pointed at a different tradition: not the standards repertoire and not the festival circuit, but the end of jazz that had already absorbed electronics, studio processing and a European sense of space, where a trumpet is as likely to be treated as played.

What plays is largely the Nordic axis. Nils Petter Molvaer and Bugge Wesseltoft come from the Jazzland circle, Arve Henriksen supplies the processed trumpet, and ECM chamber records by Bobo Stenson and Eberhard Weber hold the quiet middle. Around them sit Allan Holdsworth's fusion, Kyoto Jazz Massive's club jazz and a Laurent Garnier collaboration.

bySomaFM