Reboot radio show - 2010 -1 - 12

A new year, a new radio show. This is my 20th year of doing radio. Just sayin'.

2010 Jan 12

Salzburg Bells Multiple --- Michael Wittmann --- Herrnau Kirche Aufnahmen

This is the traditional start to my radio show, ever since we got back from Austria in 2008. It's a recording of the bells in the Herrnau church tolling noon. They're all at different rhythms of course. Natural meta-metric music. Ha.

Drumming: --- Ictus --- Reich: Drumming

I'm playing the full piece - gotta love college radio. As usual, when I write my commentary, I'm not a musician, so I'm going to use all the wrong words here. Anyway, the "point" of this piece is phasing, and I love listening to it slowly roll into chaos and back out. Totally awesome. This new recording (new? I forget how new, but I think it's 2009) has a different sound to it than previous versions. The drumming sounds more brittle, drumheads much more taut. There's more bounce in the heads, if that makes sense. Hell, I don't even know if they're playing real drums or not, this is just my ears interpreting. Anyway, it's a fabulous piece, and I'm excited to have a new version to play. There are several reviews where you can find out more.

Part 1 hits this point around 10:40 where - man o man o man - things just take OFF. It's fabulous.

The transition to marimbas in Part 2 is smooth, beautiful, and rich. As the voices rise into the piece, it continues to have the crisp precision that is by now normal. Moving to new instruments, though, changes the timbre completely, and the resonance in the marimbas keeps notes sustained that were previously cut off almost as soon as they were played. Rather than being muddy, it's rich and clean. And then, briefly at 6:40, things drop out out of phase, the rhythms take over again, and there's the transition at 7:09 to the new pattern. I'm loving this piece.

Ah, silly me, I ordered them wrong and played Part 4 before Part 3. Grrrar. Part 4 ends with a wild romp, totally great, and part 3 is a chiming glockenspiel dance with another beautiful lilting pattern high up above. This is a truly great recording

Atemtango --- Franziska Baumann --- Vocal Suite

Freaky! Interesting! It gets more and more harsh as time goes on, but always interesting. The overlapping, dubbed vocals are vaguely phase-like, meaning there's some connection to the previous piece.

In A Landscape --- Gamelan Pacifica --- Trance Gong

Excellent gamelan version of John Cage's "In a Landscape," which is weird to contemplate until you listen to it. It works. I like it.

Three Landscapes, Part Ii A Waterfall For Bjørnstjerne Bjørn --- Steve Roden --- Sleppet

Sound art, quiet, good, excellent as always. Steve Roden is not only a great sound artist, but he's a totally friendly guy. I wrote to him a few times a few years ago, and he was not only so kind as to reply, but he sent me music, for free! Holy cow! So, since then, I've bought music of his (including the pieces he sent me, if I could find them - some are out of print), and I try to play him on my show. Really good stuff.

Sleppet - Chris Watson --- Chris Watson --- Sleppet

More from the Sleppet CD, a compilation of sound art, basically. This sounds really good, the water and the noise, the textures coming together. I used to find this stuff so freaking weird, when I began. I would think to myself, listening to the slightly grey-haired DJ who'd been doing this for 20 years, "Why not play, y'know, SONGS, buddy?!" And now, 20 years later, here I am, slightly grey-haired, and playing sound art. I mean, I've done whole shows dedicated to sound art, over the years (ah, the WMUC days of spoken word and noise played at once, several turntables spinning in random, creating insane and accidental, coincidental synergies), and I still love it. This piece is great, as it moves from water to birds, with... oh, never mind. It's impossible to describe, like dancing about architecture.

Trance Gong --- Gamelan Pacifica --- Trance Gong

Another good piece by the Gamelan Pacifica group.

E-bows and Rainbows - Steve Roden --- Steve Roden --- Cosmic Debris Vol. II

Electronic blips and bleeps start this off, and with this piece I end the show. Rich sounds, almost like we're listening in on radio transmissions of some 50s majestic space kingdom drifting further and further out into space - sadness and remorse, loss and hope, all buried in one set of sounds. Seriously, how the hell did he do that in the first minute of an electronic piece?! What a fabulous story line. Incredible.