Porpoise Mouth Radio: wide open

Before Psychedelic Site there was Porpoise Mouth the Internet radio station. Tune in now.

The Last.fm-based project follows this site’s philosophy that psychedelic music need not be from any particular era or genre.

And so along with Jimi Hendrix, Love, Pink Floyd, Traffic and the usual suspects from the 1960s, you’ll find sonic adventures from Ornette Coleman, Bernard Hermann, They Might Be Giants, Thelonius Monk, Nick Drake and Kate Bush.

We’ve also conjured up another “station” on lala.com, a cool newish service. Check out Psychedelic S. on lala for the latest brew.

These online collections are psychedelic crazy quilts. The criterion for inclusion is that the artists’ music provides some of the fuel for our sonic journey. Porpoise Mouth Radio and Psychedelic S. seek to challenge and elevate listeners in ways that over-the-air radio rarely does. (Continued below.)

While some commercial songs exist in the database, quite a few are explorations that would get a DJ fired PDQ. No radio format does Sun Ra. We love him.

The subtitle for the lastfm station is “Music for mushrooms and night people.” That comes from an FM program that played late nights during the late 1960s on WGBS in Miami. The first progressive radio I’d ever heard.

Of course, these are not a real radio stations. They’re big mix tapes, put togther by one guy. You can do it, too. Last.fm and similar services allow music lovers to create DIY stations without copyright concerns, another treat from the cosmos that is the Internet.

The Psychedelic Sight online stations have several hundred songs. Each week, some come and some get the boot. Check out the Porpoise Mouth library and the Psychedelic S. music stash.

These stations are quality-controlled on a Mac with good strong speakers and a trippy screen saver.

Yes, we take requests … and yes, there are no ads.

If you have a similarly exploratory Internet radio project, please leave the URL in the comments below.