Sunshine Live - Nature One carries the name of one of Europe's biggest electronic music festivals for a reason. It is the dance-focused stream from Sunshine Live, the Mannheim-based German network that has covered the Nature One festival since the event's very first edition three decades ago, and the station's programming reflects the same high-energy dance and trance sound that fills the festival grounds every summer.
From a Frankfurt airport to a Cold War missile base
Nature One did not start where it happens now. Founder Nik Schär launched the event in 1995 as an open-air rave at Frankfurt-Hahn Airport, drawing around 13,000 people in its first year, according to its Wikipedia history. In 1996 the festival moved to its permanent home, the decommissioned Pydna missile base near Kastellaun in the Hunsrück region, a former US military installation with over 100,000 square metres of usable ground, not counting the more than one square kilometre needed for camping. What began as a single stage with 38 DJs has grown into an event spanning more than 20 themed floors and hundreds of acts, drawing attendance north of 50,000 in recent years.
A radio station that showed up from year one
Sunshine Live's connection to the festival is not a recent marketing tie-in. The station states it "was part of this story from the beginning," and its coverage has included live broadcasts from the festival grounds under segments like "BPM, Beats per Morning," artist interviews, and DJ sets streamed directly from its own stage at the event, according to Sunshine Live's own festival page. That relationship traces back to the station's roots as a dance-focused offshoot of Radio Sunshine, which itself launched in October 1994 in the Rhein-Neckar-Odenwald region before Sunshine Live spun off as its own 24-hour dance format in November 1999, according to the station's German Wikipedia entry.
Three decades of the same sound, still going
Nature One has grown considerably since its first Frankfurt-Hahn edition, and so has the radio partner that has followed it there every year. Sunshine Live - Nature One functions as the year-round extension of that partnership, a stream that carries the same trance, house, and techno programming that defines the festival itself, for listeners who want the sound of the Hunsrück missile base without waiting for summer.