Radiooooo

Radio but with the last letter written five times. This is the name of a website that serves as an online radio station with content curated by its membership. The interface very quickly tells you what it offers. There is a world map and a sliding scale of decades from over a century of recording. Using this you can hone in onto any offered time and place and then listen to the music of various artists. I tend to focus on the 60s-to-80s but let the world be my musical plaything. At other times however I just let the website do its things so that older and newer tracks are played too.

Here I will laud just a handful of the tracks I have discovered at Radiooooo. In this process I have found that the past is rich with new content. Much like history, there is always something more to find. But I will start with one newish track it played to me.

Disco Man (2021) by Remi Wolf is surprisingly joyous. The tense gloom I have noticed in many pandemic-era tracks is refreshingly absent here. The singer eschews such a pose in this song and you get a sense of gay abandon in celebrating the fun of the now. But sometimes I do enjoy the depiction of other emotional states.

I never knew of Labi Siffre and with songs like Cannock Chase (1972) we are given melancholy with a hint of hope thrown in. It is both heartfelt and beautiful. He seems a rare and overlooked singer-songwriter from a time in which others like him were dominating the charts.

I did know of Eartha Kitt and with tracks like Whatever Lola Wants (1962) we get a seductive yet quirky delivery that is all her own. She was much more than just Catwoman or the wise elder from Erik The Viking.

But now I move away from the Anglosphere. And yet English creeps into songs all over the world. Nice Mover (1979) by Gina X Performance says nothing of much consequence in English but this only accentuates its status as a quintessentially German New Wave track.

Zindagi Meri Dance Dance (1987) by Alisha Chinai & Vijay Benedict is in Hindi but every now and then the Bollywood singers say cute things like how they want to sing and dance on either Mars or Venus in very crisp English. This is lots of fun.

Songs that are mostly in another language but then present a short English phrase can have varying effects for the Anglophone listener. In French Graffiti (1975) Jane Birkin sings breathily in French but towards the end suddenly says "I want to be fucked by you" in English and it really gets your attention.

Eventually I escape English entirely but sticking with French for a moment - Lindberg (1968) by Robert Charlebois & Louise Forestier from Canada - what is this song? I cannot tell but it is compelling.

Ma Beham Nemiresim (1973) by Googoosh from Iran is likewise compelling. She seems to be singing of something important and tragic if only to the singer of the song. It feels exotic and timeless.

Rozy (2013) by Dakh Daughters from Ukraine presents the wild chants and beats of an alternative circus raging for a better world of both free nations and free individuals.

La Zarzamora (1974) by La Grecas from Spain seems to update Romani music with a pysychedelic groove but I cannot say much more as a lot of these tracks are obscure even in an era of instant information access.

Radiooooo also offers something the charts rarely have - instrumentals - and I find some of the best come from Brazil. Summertime (1971) by Rosina da Valenca and Bebe (1972) by Eumir Deodato really are an aural balm.

I lack eloquence in much of this post because music is something that resonates in a way that is difficult for the individual to reduce to words. I also feel this post is a bit short but that is because it takes time to actively pay attention to the data of tracks passing by on Radioooo. Its purpose is for listening and stopping to note names and dates interferes with that. Maybe I will add short paragraphs here from time-to-time.

One more thing Radiooooo lets you do is modify what is played with controls dubbed 'fast' and 'slow' and 'weird'. And yet I find that it is never too frantic and rarely ever mundane. What one gets in summation is a somewhat surreal yet centering musical experience of a past that has never entirely gone but is just around the corner. It is like a space-time cabaret and a wonderful way to explore a whole world and century of music. I use it regularly as a supplement to my own collection.