Today’s fea­tured music harks back to the musi­cal expe­ri­ence of tun­ing in to the ear­ly “New Age” radio sta­tions on the West Coast of the USA in their hey­day in the late 1980s: sta­tions like KTWV, “The Wave” in Los Ange­les and KLRS (“Col­ors”) in  San­ta Cruz.

You’ll hear a wealth of music of the peri­od, pri­mar­i­ly but not exclu­sive­ly instru­men­tal, fea­tur­ing both syn­the­sis­ers and nat­ur­al instru­ments. A lit­tle more live­ly than “space music” in most cas­es, the music is by and large tune­ful, melod­ic and relaxing.

These radio sta­tions and their com­pa­tri­ots in oth­er mar­kets grad­u­al­ly shift­ed towards “smooth jazz”, “New Adult Con­tem­po­rary” and beyond, and thus lost some of the atmos­phere that the sta­tions orig­i­nal­ly cre­at­ed. We hope today’s pro­gramme will bring back some mem­o­ries if you were there at the time, and present some har­mo­nious musi­cal vis­tas if the music is new to you.

In addi­tion, tune in at 12 noon or 4pm SLT/Pacific Time for the lat­est episode of our series in which we dis­cov­er things to do and places to see around the Sec­ond Life grid — “Where Have You Been?” —  and catch “The Engines of Our Inge­nu­ity” every four hours from 4am Pacific.

Image: “235/365 …some­where there is a bound­less uni­verse wait­ing to be dis­cov­ered” by rennes_i is licensed under CC BY 2.0. Cre­at­ed by Ukrain­ian artist Iry­na Yeroshko