Porpoise Mouth Radio: wide open

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

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, Thelonious Monk, Nick Drake and Kate Bush.

The online collection is a psychedelic crazy quilt. The criterion for inclusion remains that the artists’ music provides some of the fuel for our sonic journey. Porpoise Mouth Radio seeks 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 collection has several hundred songs. Each week, some come and some get the boot. Check out the Porpoise Mouth library. You’ll need a lastFM account (free).

The station is 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.