Tides of Sound

Fantastic 30 mins from Radio 3"At the crest of Japan's economic bubble, in the spring of 1991, a radio station unlike any other began broadcasting from satellite into homes across the country. St.GIGA carried no news, no commercials, no DJs. Instead, it offered an unbroken flow of music, field recordings from around the world, commissioned poetry, and the quiet announcement of tides. Its programming was not built around schedules or programme titles, it was built around the sea.Conceived by creative director Hiroshi Yokoi, St.GIGA, was guided by a single, radical idea: that sound could be synchronised with the natural rhythms of the earth. The station followed a tide table rather than a broadcast clock. As the tide rose, the music intensified; classical works, symphonies, techno, anything that embodied what Yokoi called "the beauty of the blue planet seen from space." As the tide retreated, the music softened into ambient and environmental sound. On full moon nights, natural sound…