I’ve been doing a nostalgic re-run of the phenomenal Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas recently, which includes a fun house music radio station, “SF-UR”, hosted by the lonely German ex-pat “Hans Oberlander”. Finding myself wanting to listen to something like SF-UR while working from home I realised that in 2015 it is not exactly difficult to listen to an actual German techno radio station. Minimalradio.de fits the bill nicely, with extended mixes and relatively little speech. MPlayer is pretty easy to install on Mac OSX with Homebrew and on GNU/Linux with standard package management tools; it does have a habit of spraying messages to standard output and error but this is easily solved by redirecting the output so the required command for instant techno is:

mplayer http://6mediaserver.de:8000/ < /dev/null >&0 2>&0 &

To stop play, just killall mplayer or bring it to the foreground with fg and kill with Ctrl-c.
Setting an alias in bashrc is easy:

alias minimalradio='mplayer http://6mediaserver.de:8000/ < /dev/null >&0 2>&0 &'

UPDATE: Last time I tried this, the Minimalradio stream wasn’t working. http://laut.fm/minimalcalling makes an acceptable substitute.