Umpako RadioUmpako Radio

Umpako is a Ukrainian netlabel for experimental music and IDM first and a radio station second, and the station exists to keep the catalogue audible. The releases are numbered rather than marketed, more than a hundred and forty of them, and every one is given away under a Creative Commons licence, which is how a roster of seventy-odd artists came to share a single archive. The stream simply plays that archive through, without hosts and without a schedule, at any hour of the day.

The register runs from quiet to abrasive and back. Drum and bass trades places with murkier, slower electronics, one artist scores an imaginary film, and another sends folk-tinged pieces down from the Carpathians. Around them sit glitch, breakcore, noise, trip-hop and long ambient stretches — the full range a netlabel accumulates over twenty years.