Wire Radio

Wire Radio is one stream at one address, running all day and all night. There is no app and no account. You open it, something is already playing, and whatever is playing is what everyone else is hearing at that moment. That last part is the whole point: it is radio, not a queue built for you.

How it is programmed

Daytime, 07:00 to 19:00 UTC, is the archive in rotation: every Wire Mix, the live sessions, interview audio, and the odd forty-minute record played end to end because somebody on the desk insisted. Evenings belong to guests. Tuesdays and Thursdays we hand over two hours to someone who has never had a radio show, which is most people.

Overnight, 01:00 to 06:00, we stop performing. Field recordings, long ambient pieces, tape loops left running, and the silences that give the stream its reputation. There is a nine-minute gap in the schedule at 03:12 every night where nothing plays at all. We get email about it most weeks. We are keeping it.

How to take part

For a guest show, send two hours, a rough running order and one paragraph explaining why. We want an actual mix, with hands on it, not a playlist. Overnight material is easier: ten minutes or more, unmastered is fine, tell us where you recorded it. Every contributor is credited on the now-playing page and paid a flat fee per show.

It costs nothing and it always will. The stream runs at 192 kbps AAC with a 96 kbps fallback for bad signal, one sponsor bumper an hour, no pre-roll, no talking over the intro. It plays out from a machine the size of a shoebox in a cupboard at Northlight Studios, and when it drops out for a few minutes it is usually because somebody in the room needed the socket.