Psst, wanna try something new?

If you’re bored with your current diet of music and would like to try something different, may I perhaps suggest some Swedish home-made sausage?

Swedish state-operated radio has been getting into the Internet space in a pretty big way, and has, amongst other things, created a stream of only Swedish music. Some of it is great, some is middling, and there are a few tracks that are … well … not quite so good, if you catch my drift. Still, it’s all in all a pretty cool thing, and a good antidote to US radio boredom.

Most of the tracks are in some kind of English, some pretty broken and some very American-sounding, and a few are in Swedish. But since you’re no doubt the kind of hipster that loves a challenge, you’ll have a good time hearing the Swedish, deriving the Germanic and Latin roots, and figuring out what it is they’re saying. Actually, the game is most fun if you’ve studied Icelandic, the root of all Scandinavian languages, but you, dear reader, are no doubt smart enough to figure it out anyway. Or you could simply not care about the lyrics and just listen to the music. Your choice, Cha-Cha.

You have two way to listen, one of which will involve your trusty web browser and give you a live playlist update, and one which will give you the stream but without the playlist. Your call. To listen to the stream in your Real Player, click here. To get the playlist and also to get a choice between Real Audio and Windows Media Player, go to www.sr.se, then click on “webbradio” in the blue bar. This will launch a popup window, which presets to using Windows Media Player and station P1, which is sort of like NPR on really bad Quaaludes. If you don’t have Windows Media Player, click on “Byt ljudformat” and select Real Player. (No, there is no mp3 stream, because that would be a good use of Swedish taxpayer money, and that can’t be tolerated, so your only choices are WMP and Real.) Either way, at this point click on “P3 Svea” and current Swedish pop will flood your speakers.

At this point you’ll be all cool and Euro, and if you’re really talented you can phonetically memorize phrases from the songs and impress girls in bars. Don’t say I’m not here for you, ok?