56 kbit/s

A radio show about how technology changed the way music is made, moved and found. 56 kbit/s is the most a dial-up modem could carry, and the name is the whole argument: the internet arrived as a broadcast medium, and music has been rearranging itself around that ever since.

I host it as DJ x86 — nineteen transmissions between April 2025 and January 2026, mostly on WRIR 97.3FM in Richmond, every other Thursday at eleven. The genre it lives in is vaporwave and its neighbours: musique concrète, plunderphonics, found sound, sound collage, textures. Episodes open on a dial-up handshake, run under "Dreaming" by Unknown Caller and "Astral Baths" by FM Skyline, and wander from there through the history of internet music.

The show does interviews as well as sets. Shormey, Whitewoods and Vapor VA each sat down for a transmission, and each conversation was written up afterwards on the lazy sundays blog. Alongside the regular episodes there were one-offs: a Christmas special, a set for Dystopian Oasis: Virtual Mall 2025, and the Sanctuary '26 launch party.

Every transmission is archived on hearthis.at, with the playlists on Spinitron and several of the sets also on YouTube. The show's home, dj-x86.straw.page, is a desktop collage rather than a page — windows for about.txt, a music player, an ask box, setlists and the episode archive, with the transmission count in the status bar.

There's a program document, in the form a college radio station wants it: DJ name, program name, genre tags, production music, and the argument for the show in a single paragraph.

56 kbit/s is on hiatus and I'm not promising a return date, so the archive is the work for now.