Track -- Artist -- Album -- Composer if not artist (or not known)
- Salzburg Bells Multiple — Michael Wittmann — Herrnau Kirche Aufnahmen
- Red Bird (part 1) — Trevor Wishart — Red Bird/Anticredos
Man, this is some weird music, but actually kind of fun to listen to. The found sounds, the weird sampling, the overlapping of oddness. I wonder what drove the people to do this - then again, I'm enjoying it. - The Harp of New Albion: IV. Cadence on the Wind — Terry Riley — The Harp of New Albion
12.21 Just intonation, where the intervals of note to note make sense, but the intervals of note against note sound dissonant. This is a calm piece. - Postcards From Italy — Beirut — Gulag Orkestar
Oh, let's go ahead and put in some vaguely gypsy sounding music with a ukelele or something, along with actual English language lyrics (songs? with lyrics? on this show? impossible!). But it's a bit of joyous music in the otherwise weird stream that I'm pumping out. - Badminton Girl — Fennesz — Endless Summer [Bonus Tracks]
12.32h This isn't as bubbly happy as last week's track. It still has that incredibly heavily processed guitar sound to it, like you can't quite hear what some lovely new age guitar is doing because it's been sludged down and made opaque. Sound opaqueness is a fascinating thing, and I do love my thick textures. - Love Will Tear Us Apart — Susanna and the Magical Orchestra — Melody Mountain — (Joy Division cover)
This is a sad version as different from the original as the Swans version is trippy happy. Ah, well. I do love the song, and it's nice to throw things for a loop when you get a chance. - Death of the Spider + Epitaph — Group 180 — II. — Béla Faragó
This is a nice piece of postclassical music, downloaded from the ubuweb archives, and it's freaking great to listen to. It's got all the minimalist elements that you can think of, repetition, phasing, additive parts, but is obviously not the 60s minimalism anymore. It sounds kind of like Music for 18 Musicians, and yet does an entirely different job along the way. Totally worth it to play this for the first time. Hey, how often does college radio get an oboe? - The Sinking Of The Titanic — Gavin Bryars, Alter Ego, Philip Jeck — The Sinking of the Titanic — Gavin Bryars
13.01h This returns to the opaque buried sound from Fennesz, but is being played to commemorate Dec. 7, Pearl Harbor Day. Yeah, sinking and all that. The sound starts with thick turntable static and some rumbling down beneath. I know that eventually the sounds of the bass (Bryars playing) and other noises will come in, and eventually we get the sampled interview of the woman who survived the wreck, and so on. This is entirely different from the Point Music release (was it on Point?) from a few years back, all beautiful, with the hymn Autumn rising up out of the iceberg crash and slowly descending into the thick sludge of water-based noise. This version starts out with sludge and barely ever rises out of it. There's no iceberg crash, there's no story being told in direct terms. It's being told in noise and scrapes and dark moods, throughout. - Derveshum Carnivalis — Terry Riley — Atlantis Nath
This really doesn't fit at all to the 17 minutes of Titanic that I just played, but it's kind of an off-kilter carnival atmosphere. It makes me think of Tom Waits and the Black Rider, a bit, but not as murderous. Hey, bells. Ha. I feel good about the orchestration. Oh, and the opening chord wasn't too different from Autumn. Yeah, I'll go with that as to why I did the mix the way I did. - The Sea Organ of Zadar, Croatia — City of Zadar
13.22h THIS was what I was supposed to play after the Titanic. Whoops. But how can you not love a randomly generated organ making honking noises and creating floating weird little patterns, based on waves pushing against air bladders which create the different sounds along the coast of Zadar? - I — Terry Riley — Poppy Nogood And The Phantom Band “All Night Flight” Vol. 1
In keeping with the swirling organ noises, this one goes vaguely Arabic (must be the instrumentation that makes me think of this, at first blush), and I love the slow development - nothing happening but so much going on, thick textures and patterns which keep doing the same thing (except not), more and more instruments being layered. It's almost noise, it's almost dervish trance music, it's almost a weird saxophone driven jazz piece, and it's none of those, either. Oh, right! And then you get to the weird mixing, where it sounds like the sound board is making errors, until you realize that's only in a few instruments, and later on it even takes on a rhythm. - Coming Up (again) — A Beautiful Machine — Solar Winds, White Noise, Antigravity
13.33h A shoegazer track to put on after the Terry Riley drones, why not? I never really listened to these guys as much as Slowdive they remind me of Lush and Ride at times, but they're worth listening to more, and a great example of when the postclassical style and one or another indie college radio style overlap. This was a totally seamless transition in musical style, where this song even sounds nearly boring in comparison (what, using only guitar and bass for sound? and only the drums to lay down a nearly boring and blatant rhythm?). - Nikko Wolverine - Of One Forbids — Chas Smith — Nikko Wolverine
Though it's played on pedal steel (you know, that country music instrument), it sounds just fine in a segment of a show dedicated to sustains and noise. Long overtones drone on, melodies get played out in places where you don't think any music is being played (I swear, there's some game where my ears hear the feedback and make up sounds that aren't actually composed), and it refers back to the moody darkness of the Sinking of the Titanic. Matter of fact, the two go hand in hand very nicely. - Tread on the Trail — The ARTE Quartett — Terry Riley: Assassin Reverie — Terry Riley
Starts off with a drone, and then suddenly a jazzy little saxophone jumps out. It's repeated in another line, and we're off. Yup, a sax quartet doing Terry Riley, with all that means in terms of minimalism, jazz, chamber orchestra, swirling sounds, overlapping parts doing identical things at different times, and more. Plus, it's in a brighter key, so it takes the dark drones from before and turns them into something happier. Gets kind of chaotic after a while, but that's fine, too. - Mankaiyarkkaraci — Temple De Chidambaram — Inde Du Sud — Periya Melam
Last song of the set, takes the tone and texture of the saxes and turns them into Indian (eastern, not american) music.
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