Support Your Favourite Radio Stations
	2025 March 27
	Current Mood:	morning breakfast vibes at a real kitchen, can you believe it??
	Now Playing:	Wilson Tanner - Blush

I can't be alone in a room or an apartment in general for a long time without having some voices in the background to keep me company.

For quite a long time already I've been using YouTube videos to fill that quiet void: long video essays in my recommended feed on topics that I don't really want to learn about at the moment, but that seem to be interesting nonetheless. This has been completely paralysing me though, because, with most of those videos, I couldn't just listen to them and do something else — I needed to actually watch them. Otherwise, I felt like I wasn't receiving any information at all.

Turning on music that I had available to me also didn't always help, because sometimes I felt that I was still in that quiet void — the only difference was that now there was music playing in that void.

I also sometimes watched video game streamers for the same purpose, but, while feeling like I was in the same space with them, again, I needed to constantly check the stream to understand what they were talking about, and that distracted me from my current activity.

What has really fixed this silly psychological problem for me was going back to listening to my favourite online radio stations — something that was saving me during long office work hours in front of a computer some years ago. It's LIVE, it's IRL, it's real people talking and playing music of their choice! And, since not every song they play is my favourite song ever, I don't have to always keep concentrated on it. For example, I can write this post and also not feel the "scary loneliness" of the space that I'm in right now.

Turning the radio on after waking up has also been helping me getting quicker into the ready-for-the-day mood without me having to pay much attention to it.

Basically, music radio shows combine several important to me aspects:

• I am listening to music
• I am discovering new music
• The shows are providing The Presence that I need
• It's all happening completely in the back of my mind, while I can do whatever I want (unless there's a really good song playing that I instantly have to find the name of)

In some of her vlog videos Evelyn From The Internets tells the viewers to support their local DJs, and, while being a radio DJ of sorts myself, I've only recently started thinking about this occupation in a more serious way. Yes, of course, I completely support the importance of radio DJs as music curators — one of my favourite ways to discover new music — but now I also can't ignore this weird social aspect of their work — providing the aforementioned Presence for empty spaces.

To end this post, here are some cool internet radio stations that I like:

• NTS
• N10.AS
• The Lot Radio
• NOODS
• datafruits.fm