Chasing the Monkey: Rebuilding Internet History

The hunt to figure out what Monkey Radio actually played — and to rebuild it from forum playlists, old CDs, and a lot of detective work.

Rebuilding a slice of internet history, one track at a time.

↓ Jump to the Deep Dives

Back in 1999, an internet radio station called Monkey Radio went live — chillout, down-tempo, trip-hop, and smooth jazz, an eclectic mix of artists you’d be unlikely to hear on traditional radio. Thanks to it, I discovered artists like DJ Krush, Kruder & Dorfmeister, and A.P.E. It became the sound of a productive workday.

The challenge

The problem is, it’s hard to say what was actually on Monkey Radio given we lack the raw playlist data. There’s a hand-built playlist document from 2002 that was posted on a forum, and other folks have shared Spotify and YouTube playlists that fill out the picture with more recent content.

Armed with a Plex server, a healthy portion of these tracks on old CDs, and a deep desire to buy the rest and replicate the station for my own entertainment, I started hunting. That turned out to be harder than it sounds: the 2002 playlist is full of errors — swapped artists and track names, misspellings, duplicates — and lists no album names. It also only runs through 2002, so other (less complete) lists have to fill the gaps with newer artists like Hird.

Rebuilding the rotation

So I set out to use a mix of scripts, AI, and old-fashioned web sleuthing to consolidate as many tracks as possible into as few albums as possible — many of them collected on compilations and remix albums. I’m sharing the results in case anyone else has the same impossible dream:

The consolidated album spreadsheet

It lists my best guess at the album, artist, and tracks for each entry, along with the source list it came from. For anything with 3+ tracks I’ve added a place to buy it in lossless (Bandcamp, Qobuz, Juno, or just old CDs). Links rot fast, so YMMV.

A few notes on the data:

  • Many tracks are remixes. I’ve removed a lot of cross-collection duplicates, which may have accidentally culled some original versions. There’s heavy cross-pollination, so most are still present somewhere on the artists’ albums. I kept tracks that were explicitly different versions — but if you’re confident something shouldn’t have been dropped, let me know…
  • Some only exist on old CDs. The internet was young, and many of these artists were obscure enough to fall through the digital-storefront cracks. At least one track only exists on a 12” vinyl, best I can tell.
  • Expect errors. I’ve checked and reviewed by hand and with automation, but any time scripts or LLMs are involved, issues are likely.

Thanks to the folks at the Monkey Radio fan-site on Facebook for collecting the sources I started from. If I missed any big albums or consolidations, let me know — I just wanted to share a bit of internet history.

Deep dives

Longer write-ups on individual aspects of the rebuild. (More to come.)

© 2026 Monkey Radio Archive — an unofficial fan tribute. “Monkey Radio” and “Grooving. Sexy. Beats.” were trademarks of Brennan Underwood, whose original station ran 1999–2014.