Radio Malaria: total relax number one world folk music internet estación

2026-09-26

Caveat emptor: this post bas been drafted by automatically transcribing my ramblings as i walk in the woods or drive to buy food, if you fojd a mistake or incongruence blame it on me and give yourself a pat on the back, you’re smart!

A couple of weeks ago I got a notification about an upcoming domain payment. Turns out the renewal date for radiomalaria.com had come around, which means it’s the anniversary of the web radio I set up a year ago — and it’s been running the whole time, 24/7/365 nonstop. The 13th of September was its first birthday. I was pleasantly surprised to notice, since I had completely failed to notice for an entire year.

The radio is focused on what tends to get called “world music”, some americanocentric term for “anything made outside the west”; I don’t really like that term so let’s say: radio malaria plays traditional music from different parts of the world, from different eras. You’ll find folklore from different parts of the planet, religious music, regional chants, ultralocal ethnocentric sounds that documentarists and field recorders took time to record, edit and share with the world. Content is so old all the playlists are composed of public domain music, let me know if you find discrepancies!

I took the birthday opportunity to do some touch-ups and fix a few things that had been bothering me:

• A new playlist. The old one hadn’t been changed in a whole year.
• A completely new player looks good, plays great
• Current listener count is now showing correctly.
• Fixed streaming playlists
• A “leave a message” button.

A new playlist

The old playlist hadn’t been changed for a whole year and as i listened to the radio I began getting bored with it.

For now I have integrated the old playlist with a bunch of new music, but for this year I would like to begin experimenting with some acousic adventures:

• themes during the day, instead of the random poutpurri say there will be one hour dedicated to tibetan music, two in the afternoon with gamelan only, etc., it would work like real programmes on real radios for real hueman beans - live mixing and light DJ’ing from my phone: I sometimes deep dive niche folk subgrenres and I would like to introduce the anthropological background with some details that could make the listening session more interesting, let’s see what the future brings!

New player

I changed the website so that it works better, but the core of the interface edits was dedicated to the audio player. It now correctly shows current playing track, and should finally perform beautifully on all devices; this means that finally I can leave the radio playing on my phone with the screen on to have it running while I’m cooking or fixing my bike.

Current listener count

Website now tracks the current amount of listeners connected to the website, along with the peak listener count. We’re currently sitting at four consecutive concurrent listeners, it’s not much but it’s a radio bigger than yours (prove me wrong? More radios more fun)

Streaming playlists

M3U and XSPF links have been fixed, you can add the stream to your preferred client (I like VLC) and listen to the radio from your computard.

Leave a message

If you go to radiomalaria.com and hit the leave-a-message button — you’ll see it below the logo, on the right — you get an audio file upload. On mobile you can record straight from your phone. Pick a title if you want, hit submit, and it uploads.

If you get the green success message, your message is in the queue and will be played at random during the day.

I’m not going to censor the messages. I don’t have the time, the willpower, or the ethics for that; I’m trusting random visitors to be kind enough not to leave peak-grossing messages and make a nuisance of themselves. Let’s see. If random listeners make a mess, I’ll find a way to fix the problem

Give it a listen

Go to radiomalaria.com, hit play, listen and if you enjoy maybe leave a message in your local language ok? Ciao