Radio Onda Sideral Chat

Every first Thursday of the month, at 11:00 sharp, *Stardust* connects from a town in the Madrid mountains with his portable volume turned up to the max. It's not that he likes the silence of his home —he's a telecommunications engineer and lives surrounded by blinking routers—, but that night he's looking for something his Spotify playlist can't give him: the *click* of someone else listening to the same thing as him. The first time he stumbled upon it by mistake, looking for *Boards of Canada* lyrics that no one in his WhatsApp groups could identify. Now, he's been uploading links to ambient sessions recorded in abandoned planetariums for three years, and there's always someone who responds with a "this sounds like a spaceship taking off" or "what year is the solar storm sample from?". He doesn't ask why they come back. He knows it's for the same reason he keeps coming back: because nowhere else have they told him that *Aphex Twin* sounds better with his eyes closed and the window open.

Conversations here don't start with "what kind of music do you like?". They start with things like: "Does anyone else listen to *The Orb* and think of their ex?" or "I found a *Tangerine Dream* bootleg at a Berlin flea market, is it worth 20 euros?". There are debates that repeat like constellations: whether *chillwave* died in 2012 or just went underground, why *Brian Eno* never gives interviews in Spanish, or if the *synth* in *"Pulse"* by *Pink Floyd* is the loneliest sound in the universe. Sometimes someone shares a link to a set on SoundCloud and the room falls silent for five minutes, as if they were all at a concert with the lights off. Other times, the conversation drifts into absurdity: "If *Daft Punk* were a planet, what would it smell like?" (Most common answer: "like burned plastic and 90s cologne"). The only thing that's not forgiven is playing reggaeton without warning. Although once, in 2019, someone did it on purpose and it ended up being the room's *running gag* for months.

What no other room has is the *Friday ritual*. At 23:00, *Nebulosa* —a nickname that's been around since 2010 and nobody knows who it is— uploads an instrumental theme without saying the title. The first ones to guess it win the right to choose the next one. The tradition was born when someone played *"Spiegel im Spiegel"* by *Arvo Pärt* and someone else responded with a simple "damn, this is the soundtrack to my divorce". Since then, every Friday is an emotional Russian roulette. There's also the *room glossary*: calling any non-ambient electronic song *"space junk"*, referring to *drops* as *"wormholes"*, or the eternal mystery of why *Darkside* always writes in lowercase. And then there's the *room ghost*: a user named *Voyager* who only appears once a year, leaves a link to a *Vangelis* theme, and disappears. Nobody knows if it's a person, a bot, or the spirit of *Carl Sagan* with a hangover.

To join, all you need is a nickname and an IRC client (mIRC, HexChat, or even ChatZona's webchat). There's no registration, no written rules beyond "don't be a jerk", and the server has been up since 2007 without going down for a single day.