Tides of Sound: The Story of St.GIGA

At the crest of Japan's economic bubble, in the spring of 1991, a radio station unlike any other began broadcasting from satellite into homes across the country. St.GIGA carried no news, no commercials, no DJs. Instead, it offered an unbroken flow of music, field recordings from around the world, commissioned poetry, and the quiet announcement of tides. Its programming was not built around schedules or programme titles, it was built around the sea.

Conceived by creative director Hiroshi Yokoi, St.GIGA, was guided by a single, radical idea: that sound could be synchronised with the natural rhythms of the earth. The station followed a tide table rather than a broadcast clock. As the tide rose, the music intensified; classical works, symphonies, techno, anything that embodied what Yokoi called "the beauty of the blue planet seen from space." As the tide retreated, the music softened into ambient and environmental sound. On full moon nights, natural sound increased. On new moon nights, it quietened. The station's ident, repeated in dozens of languages by voices of all ages from around the world, said simply: I'm here. I'm glad you're there. We are St.GIGA.

Tides of Sound is both a documentary about St.GIGA and an attempt to recreate the experience of listening to it. Drawing on original interviews with people who made the station; programmer Yoko Yokouchi, composer Yoshio Ojima, sound archivist Yoshihiro Kawasaki, in-house poet Michico Ryo and producer Akira Ishii, alongside new research by Spencer Doran, the American musician and scholar who has done so much to bring St.GIGA to international attention, the programme weaves together testimony, archive recordings, field recordings made by the station's own audio teams, poetry written for St.GIGA's launch by Michico Ryo, and readings from the station's founding book, Yume no choryu, Current of Dreams, written by Yokoi himself in 1991.

What emerges is a portrait of a genuinely utopian broadcasting experiment and of the particular moment in history that made it possible and necessary. Tokyo in 1991 was a city at the end of its bubble, still glittering on the surface but with an undercurrent of anxiety, a sense that the era was about to change. Into that atmosphere, St.GIGA offered something almost impossibly gentle: time to listen. Not information, not entertainment in any conventional sense, but the flow of time itself, translated into sound.

The station's philosophical roots reached far. Yokoi drew on the concept of kankyo ongaku, environmental music, that had taken shape in Japan in the previous decade, and on the tradition of ambient music then being developed internationally, including the work of Brian Eno, which featured heavily in the station's programming. But St.GIGA's deepest inspiration was something more cosmic. Yokoi gifted each member of staff, on their first day, a copy of The Home Planet, a book of photographs taken from space, compiled by Kevin Kelly in 1988, in which astronauts described the experience of looking back at Earth. He accompanied it with a handwritten note: Please play the Gaia Symphony beautifully. The studios were named Moon and Water. The monitor in every room showed an image of the Earth floating in space.

St.GIGA broadcast live, 24 hours a day, for several years before financial pressures forced a gradual move to recorded programming. Nintendo briefly became an investor, recognising the technical potential of the satellite infrastructure. But the station could not be sustained, and it eventually closed. What it left behind was harder to quantify: a community of listeners who described the experience as therapeutic, even transformative.

This is a production from Munck Studios produced by Ben Fawkes. With thanks to Mari Kimura and Toyohiro Suzuki for their local Japanese support and many thanks to St.GIGA staff members Akira Ishii, Yoshihiro Kawasaki, Yoshio Ojima, Michico Ryo and Yoko Yokouchi for being interviewed and sharing their stories. Many thanks to Spencer Doran for his interview, reading and all his expertise in St.GIGA and for composing the music (with additional music credit to Satsuki Shibano for piano and Yoshio Ojima for processing). Thank you to Chris Wood for sound design, editing and mixing and mastering, Hinako Omori for editing and voice over work, and to the voice over artists Sadao Ueda, Dai Tabuchi, Meg Kubota, Yojiro Ichikawa and Mari Kimura. Audio clips of astronaut Edgar Mitchell used with permission by the Institute of Noetic Sciences.