Ambient Flo (2020-2025)
RIP Ambient Flo radio. Thanks to everyone who tuned in and supported.
After five years of continuous broadcasting, I’ve decided to close Ambient Flo Radio. It was a radio station I set up in lockdown as a means of exploring a whole terrain of beatless and largely instrumental music that seemed like a kind of antidote to the uncertainty of the pandemic. At that point, I pivoted fully away from dance music as without the full sensory and communal experience of the dance floor, I felt the music had become somewhat redundant: it made less sense.
I started streaming weekly ambient sets from my garden in the early phase of lockdown. It was spring and the birds were in full voice, their calls unmasked and amplified by the massive reduction in anthropic sounds produced by humans: planes, sirens and traffic.
My basic streaming set up included my iPhone camera and microphone, using Instagram Live. The feed picked up the ambient music but also the sounds of the natural world and the bird calls in particular. Many were trapped inside with little access to nature and listening became a means for them to escape the confines of their four walls.
Many people commented how much they appreciated this combination of ambient music and nature and that formed the idea for the radio - two channels that a listener could blend together to suit their tastes - one with a continuous feed of ambient music, and the other with field recordings from places of natural beauty around the world. The formula seemed to work, and Ambient Flo was born in November 2020, just as the 2nd phase of lockdown began around the world.
This was a manifesto of sorts that I wrote for the website:
We love Deep Listening.
We are fighting against a world of bland, generic ‘chill out’ music. Every month we search through the best new releases which are exquisitely produced to offer a transportive listen. Ambient Flo is curated in a way that an algorithm could never do and a lot of the music doesn’t appear on Spotify.
Your listening experience can be either active or passive ; put on headphones and immerse yourself, or play at a low level to relax, meditate or work. The selection should work discreetly – as per Brian Eno’s original Ambient manifesto – but it should also be of high enough quality that the compositions can be listened to over and over again.
Ambient Flo is heavily influenced by the deep listening movement of the late, great Pauline Oliveros, environmental music from Japan and elsewhere, the 4th world concepts of Jon Hassell, the immense sonic sculptures of Tim Hecker and the spiritual music of Alice Coltrane.
All of these great visionary artists have acted as musical guides during the inception of Ambient Flo.
Curation
I decided to work with curators from around the world of music to help me with the selection. Every month, I worked with one guest who would curate a selection of music that suited the station. Their selection was scheduled according to the time of day, and placed amongst the three other playlists that I handpicked to suit the circadian rhythm of each day: Morning, Daytime and Night.
I loved the opportunity to connect with some of my music heroes and looking back the list of guest curators is one I’m really proud of, to pick a few: Cold Cut, James Holden, KMRU, Lisa Lerkenfelt, Eris Drew, Twitch, Gigi Masin, Grand River, Arushi Jain and many more. What a festival this would be!
Artist-Profit-Share
The other dimension to Ambient Flo was our attempts to build a fairer model for musicians operating in this space. At the time, fair renumeration within music was being questioned as the gig economy had evapourated overnight. Artists and small labels realised they had slept-walked into the new streaming model, where Spotify was dominant, and their ability to get fair compensation from their music being streamed was rigged in favour of the major label artists.
I came up with a model that I called the ‘Artist Profit Share’ - distributing a portion of the profits the station made to the artists who’s music we featured. I had a vision of creating an ecosystem of likeminded independent artists around the globe, supported by the listeners who gained a lot from listening to the music.
We set this up as a Patreon account, where subscribers could support the station with a monthly/annual payment. At it’s peak, we managed to get to around 150 paid supporters but unfortunately, it would have needed around 10 times that many to make the artist profit share begin working.
The brutal reality was that the station never made any profits, the costs of running it were just too high (we also paid the licence fees to the PRS and PPL, spent a lot of money on music, paid for promotion and server costs etc). Like the short-lived by similarly well-intentioned ‘Aslice’, we were just not able to pull the kind of community together to realise this alternative vision for the independent music scene.
This is the End (and the beginning)
And, with lockdown now easing, the station listenership plateaued and then slowly declined. In 2023, I could not justify spending as much time on in so stopped working with the monthly curator and updating the playlists. We had amassed over 5000 songs at that point and they were put into a playlisting system that recycled them every day.
The playlist and playback streaming system was built by the music consultancy business I founded, Open Ear Music. To give some insight, the business was acquired by a competitor in 2023 and they kindly agreed to keep the station going following the sale. To their credit, they hosted it free of charge for the past two years but alas that credit has now run out and they have closed the server down, meaning the Ambient Flo streams have now stopped.
What’s Next… SONIFEROUS
I considered moving the streams to a new streaming set up but instead, I’ve been working on a really exciting mobile app project that I think will be a suitable replacement for Ambient Flo - combining field recordings and generative ambient music from around the world.
It’s called ‘Soniferous’ and you can register for early access here.
More News on this will be coming later this year and as a subscriber to this newsletter, you’ll be the first to hear.
In the meantime, I’ve moved all the Ambient Flo playlists to Spotify. You can have a browse here:
And if you’d like an Ambient Flo ‘zine, simply sign up as a supporter to A State Of Flo and I’ll send you one.
Finally - I want to thank everyone who supported Ambient Flo over the years!
Thank you. Keep on keeping on....🙏