The FIP Edition

Colin here. I wrote a deep dive a while back about international streaming radio and its charms. There's something about being able to tap into the ambiance of a place from home—something pleasant and slightly dissociative. As I wrote, “there’s something magical about listening to a Tokyo breakfast show on a rainy Sunday night in New York, or imagining you are in a taxi from the airport in a new city, drinking in an unfamiliar news radio station in French.”

I’ve been doing more radio surfing lately but keep finding myself coming back to the delightfully eclectic French radio station FIP.

It’s a French radio network founded in 1971. I was initially introduced to it by Harper Reed, a friend of WITI, and I have a hard time putting my finger on what is so appealing, but I think it has to do with the ways I’ve been listening to music on streaming services and algorithms. I’ve also been listening to too many podcasts and am deliberately trying to reconnect with music in an intentional way. And FIP manages to connect the dots with a human touch, in a way that is intuitive and thoughtful. It is a radio station for expansive palates, and that’s precisely the point.

Why is this interesting?

FIP is decidedly analog. It feels eclectic yet coherent, as if you’re listening to mixtapes from an older brother or sister with insanely good taste. I take a lot of delight in just surrendering to where they go and the moves they make. On any given day, a lot of sonic ground is covered in a way that is not pretentious but genuine.

The Ear sums it up nicely:

“You will be hard-pressed to find a station that matches it for sheer range of musical styles. There is some talk with hourly news bulletins but not so much as to interrupt your listening pleasure, even if you do speak French. FIP’s appeal is that it plays unusual but not too obscure music and manages to find artists that you might not hear elsewhere, and these are not necessarily French. In fact, they only appear to play the mandated amount of French music, which is probably one track in ten at the most. They pick from different eras and genres and tend to put, say, half a dozen tracks of a similar style together before moving onto something new. The sound quality is higher than average thanks to both the 196 kbps bit rate and the use of AAC compression.”

We have a feast of things to listen to and things to put into our ears. But there’s something warm, comforting, familiar, and also intellectually stimulating about the approach of FIP that I’ll keep returning to, like the draw of a crackling fire. (CJN)

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Thanks for reading,

Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN)

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