“Radio North Sea International! The sound of Europe! The voice of the world!”

Immediately this is going too far, the actual sound of Europe probably being more like a Romanian lady reading from the European Constitution or a Spanish boy singing The Final Countdown. But Radio North Sea International really believes in what it says; it’s a relic of an old battle, a cloned reincarnation of the libertarian, swashbuckling pirate stations of the 1970s, when the pleasing choruses of pop music were to the British as Twitter is to latter day Iran. The original RNI operated out of a psychedelically painted ship and like many such outfits flirted with genuine piracy, or rather was flirted with: an attempted hijacking repelled in 1970, a bomb hurled onboard a year later from a passing vessel in search – according to arrest warrants – of “money and adventure”.

Now it is just another pop radio station, or perhaps the true median of every pop radio station in existence – the voice of the world! It doesn’t have any human content; there are no DJs, there’s no news. The name, the playlists – they bring to mind a freighter somewhere, abandoned all of a sudden, Mary Celeste-style, with no time to turn off the mains, the broadcasting equipment, or Terry Wogan’s permashuffling ipod.

Or it’s run by simple robots, and will continue to broadcast long after we’re all dead from swine flu, its output worshipped as a sound-deity by an ascendant race of cockroach men who pick it up through their quivering, spindly antennae.

But really, what am I doing? Why have I written so much? Who is listening to this? Who cares? “Just for you!” says another, far more believable, jingle of theirs.

Been listening to this last night and this morning: both times I have been transported west to American railroads and prairies, rather than north east to great forests and model societies.

The sound is vintage bluegrass, country, blues, a touch of yodelling and the comforting crackle of very old vinyl. From time to time there are spoken interludes but they are, sadly, not accessible to me. In any case, it’s a rather lovely backdrop for working at home. Oh, hang on – they’ve pootled into a spot of trad jazz: my mind’s eye is picking up small town bandstands and look, Tom and Jerry are rollicking past. I like it very much indeed!

There are a lot of stations with ‘Stockholm’ in the title under the Swedish/College category. I’ve had a quick listen to many of them – Stockholm 2, Stockholm Community 95.3 etc – and they seem to be identical. The website says Stockholm Närradio is “an association of some 25 non-profit organisations in the Stockholm area, that broadcast their own radio programs on three low power radio transmitters” so therein lies the answer, undoubtedly.

Actually, the tone has just now completely changed to driving indie rock: a Bloc Party remix, a modern version of Roxette. Check the website for schedules – it seems that Närradio hosts various ‘stations’. Radio Rörstrand was the station described in this post, the indie rock is coming from Radio Rocket and – for all scholars of Swedish town planning – they also run live broadcasts of Stockholm city council meetings

It’s about making sense of over 10,000 stations, broadcasting 24 hours a day.

But mostly, it’s about a leap of imagination: the one you get when you tune into a station that is broadcasting hundreds or thousands of miles away – and for a time you hum the same song as a butcher in Memphis, a taxi driver in Jerusalem or a lawyer in Jakarta.

We can’t visit every country in the world, but we can hear what their Drivetime DJs have to say.