Bluemars

Some time around 2007, I came across an Internet radio station[1] named Bluemars which was hosted and DJed by the pseudonymous lone. With its tagline promising "Music for the Space Traveller", Bluemars had hosted free, 24/7 streams of uninterrupted ambient music since 2000[2]: no advertising, no station IDs. This was a rare[3] proposition at the time.

There were three separate audio feeds. The first was a titular Bluemars station, featuring downtempo music. The second was Cryosleep ("Zero Beat Guaranteed"), featuring slow and droning tracks. These two feeds had many overlaps. The last was Voices From Within ("Words from Beyond"), featuring mostly chants.

Growing very fond of Bluemars and Cryosleep over the following years, I'd be tuning in many times a week. Its musical selections played in the background as I read and programmed, or even sometimes as I went to sleep once I learned that my PSP Fat could play Shoutcast stations[4]. The Bluemars streams were such a common motif in my life that anytime they went offline—not an uncommon event—it would leave me feeling slightly bitter or hollow.

In 2013, though, the streams went down for good. Without any prior announcement (as far as I know), all of the stations were taken down. At first, I figured it was a usual crash or maintenance and thus thought nothing of it. A few days passed as my stream connections continued to fail. Trying to find a solution, I unexpectedly came across a memorial image in place of the usual website. For a moment, I stared at my screen with my mouth agape. "Signal lost".

Not all was lost. Two years prior, I had come across an already years-old torrent on The Pirate Bay for a rip of Bluemars. The collection's quality was far from perfect as it was directly cut from the streams, but it was very convenient to have each track available on demand. After the shutdown, I was very glad to have these mangled MP3s as they could be my very own Bluemars-in-a-box. I eventually started purchasing the tracks and albums I most enjoyed from that collection, then eventually started exploring related works. The stations and this torrent thus served as a major seed for my current library.

A brave soul has since set up a faithful clone or unofficial continuation of Bluemars: Echoes of Bluemars. It appears to have come up less than a year after the shutdown, but as I only found out about it after I'd built up my own collection, I only occasionally tune in for the sake of nostalgia. I've also since learned about SomaFM, which has a few similar streams: Drone Zone, Deep Space One and Space Station Soma.

I'm writing about this little dead Internet radio station because it once meant a lot to me and because it has defined a tangible portion of my musical taste. If you (think you'd) like ambient or slow electronic music, you should check out Echoes of Bluemars or the aforementioned SomaFM. I'll end this article with the description and file listing for the aforementioned torrent in case anyone is curious. Many of the tracks from Bluemars have poor search engine results, so perhaps this can be a beacon for someone out there in the vast, empty space of the Internet.

This is a survivor of Cryosleep, Space Cadet Zetanor, signing off.

Notes

  1. ^[a] A SHOUTcast server initially, though for all I know it could have been Icecast in the latter years.
  2. ^[a] As "lone" seems to have somewhat tried to keep his Space identity separate from his Earth identity, I'll exclusively use the pseudonym. The only information I could find online specifically about the "lone" persona is an interview: archive.org, local transcript.
  3. ^[a] In the aughts, the RIAA and similar assemblies of cocksuckers were running vast terror campaigns, spooking many projects into shutting down. This choked some life out of the nascent online radio scene, which was otherwise gaining traction as bandwidth became cheaper. In the end, many of the stations left standing went "legit" by running ads or by prompting for donations to pay off SoundExchange-type protection rackets.
  4. ^[a] Prior to running homebrew, I used the surprisingly excellent pspradio.co.uk (official YouTube demo).

Links