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graves of bad people
Between Dogs and Wolves is no more. But don’t fear! We have moved to a bigger and better site: check us out here. We are now Night Listeners. Its much, much catchier and does loads more stuff. Please follow us there.
Dennis Brown
This week we are two contributors to BDAW down with the dreaded parmageddon that is swine-flu. I’ve personally got man-flu, but I can sense through the glands that things could turn nasty. My imminent demise however did have a silver lining in that it led me to be around on a Wednesday night to check out one of my favourite radio shows—the 50 50 Soundsystem on Resonance FM.
I have very few appointments to listen in my life, but if I’m in, this show is always on. I know little about 50 50 other that the music that they play is so spiritual it makes the two hours of broadcast involuntarily propel me into a communion with my maker. Dusty roots 45’s sit next to a cappella chants, sirens and moans to make a collage of sounds that when I close my eyes feels like my idea of a perfect church. This is mystery and wonder timed to perfection.
50 50 don’t podcast or archive their shows, but I’ve got a feeling that I might start doing it myself right here (…if you are already on it let me know!) This is, besides the joy that is Jonny Trunk, the best show on Resonance and one of the best listens anywhere on the dial. Milo Lapis, Jah Beef and crew are the most humble, understated of DJ’s, but their selections and craft are top drawer.
Cheeky bootlegs coming soon, but if—like me—you are owned by Google, you can sync the Resonance running order to Google calenders here to remind yourself when to stay home and tune in.
The Breezeblock was a radio show on BBC Radio 1 a few years ago, a mix show for freaks late at night hungry for electronic music. The show featured a bunch of different DJs and producers from Matmos to Bjork, but Jace Clayton AKA DJ Rupture always occupied a very special place in the show’s pantheon of pornographically good knob-twiddlers. A firm favourite of John Peel, he was The Breezeblock’s daddy.
What Rupture has always done exceptionally well is play stupid music for clever people, and mix it up with clever sounds for those who want it stupid. Sure, a lot of it is electronic with beeps and bass, but he manages to keep a live, analogue, human feel to proceedings that is all his own.
DJ Rupture’s radio show, Mudd Up is available on WFMU and on iTunes as a podcast. If one week’s isn’t enough you can go to his show page where every single show is archived complete with guest information and playlists. Fellow BDAW’s blogger Matt put me on to the show and I can safely say it is the most surprising and rewarding music podcast I currently subscribe to.
Mudd Up! is made with a lot of love. Guests frequently pop up from all continents and disciplines (musicians, poets and more) and the show is full of genuine exclusives. Jace describes his musical sweep as ‘Cumbia. Dubstep. Gangsta synthetics. Sound-art. Maghrebi’, but in reality this is a DJ without respect for fashion, with a thorough disdain of musical genre, audience demographics or conventional broadcasting norms.
Rupture creates sound collages of mystery and drama that consistantly challenge every synapse in my brain. Subscribe immediately.
Big Up Radio on your iPhone
In the first of a series of posts with radio from the iPhone it seems righteous to kick off with something incredibly Ronseal—that does what it says on the tin. When you are lying in bed at night there are some moments when only uninterrupted reggae will do. On some occasions this leads to my default evening FM station Conscious FM or—on a Wednesday night at 11pm in the UK—the absolutely incredible 50-50 Soundsystem show on Resonance FM (post coming soon). However an alternative for the technology fetishists amongst us is to download the free Big Up Radio app for the iPhone.
Big Up is, according to its page, a loose collection of reggae enthusiasts in the California area that started broadcasting together in 2000. Their website looks like its been put together in a long, democratic committee meeting (just toooo much to read / listen to / click on for anyone with a job) but their iPhone app is the bomb.
It may only be a music jukebox service, but sometimes simple is great. Boot it up, spin the wheel to the station you want to listen to and plug it into your speakers. Cue a non-stop reggae music mix. I know that for the musically literate Last FM can do something similar (you do have to know what artist’s station you want to start with), but Big Up proves that there is life in the no-presenters idea. The skill with all of these things is picking the right music, and Big Up do this very well—check the ‘Lovers Rock’ or ‘Steady Rockin’ Roots’ channels for the sweetest prelude to sleep.
"The thing I admire most about the Chinese is that they are hanging on in there with the chopsticks."—Jerry Seinfeld; .977 The Comedy
Much like many of you, in the morning all of my radios are tuned to different stations. The kitchen flops between Radio 4, Radio 1 and 1Xtra (what else do you listen to on a DAB over breakfast?); the bathroom, waterproof and FM/AM, does the pirates (dancehall being the audio equivalent of Nivea Sport for Men – waking you up with a start) and upstairs the most recent addition to the family, an Intempo digital number, goes all over the place.
Over the last couple of months though, as I throw on my clothes in the morning I have checking out .977 The Comedy that also goes by the name of Comedy 104. Whether by design or accident, this station has the privilege of being the first of the 86 stations in the ‘Comedy’ genre on my radio, and as such was the first one to be given a go. Since then I have pretty much skimmed through all of the comedy stations (including several that sound like they are recorded at the wrong end of the night in an Austrian bierkeller) and .977 is still probably the most reliable of the jukebox comedy options.
I like my comedy straight up, not-messed-about-with, but I do appreciate that comedy radio provokes a very large range of reactions (my other half can’t stand comedy jukebox radio). What .977 does is give you 3 minute chunks of the world’s best stand-ups (and Jasper Carrot) telling a few jokes. Then it cuts immediately to another stand-up and the cycle continues until the end of time. Contributions are 90% American (thank the Lord) and on any given morning you might hear, as I did today, the likes of Bill Hicks, Richard Pryor and the overlord of comedy – Jerry Seinfeld.
Sometimes the contributions err a bit towards the US’s equivalent of Jethro or Freddie Starr (‘aren’t men and women different?’, ‘anyone else here like beer?’ etc) but you are generally only 5 minutes away from someone with a brain. There is no censorship or mediation whatsoever which can make for pretty uncomfortable listening when segueing from Radio 4 in the kitchen.
A station like this can only have a short listening lifespan: as I am quickly discovering people who listen to a lot of stand-up soon become jaded, hearing the familiar patterns again and again. Also, I have no idea how they are getting the rights to this stuff (I’m not sure how E4 radio with its comedy remit would have existed with international comedy talent 24/7 on the same dial) but for the time being I will still be surfing this station and others like it to get my morning fix of slander and willy jokes.
Check out .977 here.
The original cheetah enjoying his retirement
This American Life is one of the most celebrated speech radio shows to be found on any network anywhere. If you are a subscriber you will know that there is something about the perfectly paced stories, the use of first person narration (emphatically feeling like storytime for grown-ups) and the excellent use of music (often from America’s best alternative bands) that feels right. Unlike other radio documentaries found elsewhere the stories never feel too dense, and the conversational tone set by presenter Ira Glass means that his world feels warmly familiar.
A couple of weeks ago was #350. The theme was human resources exploring the uneasy interactions between humans and their institutions. This show is separated into three different acts telling different stories: the prologue has Ira talking to a human resources specialist about how to fire people; act one examines ‘The Rubber Room’, where US teachers go when they are suspended; act two looks at the conspiracy behind American real estate (TAL often appeals to the Trot inside us all), but the real magic comes in act 3.
The final act sees reporter reporter Charles Siebert talk to Ira about retirement homes for chimps. Apparently there are thousands of retired entertainment and medical industry monkeys in sipping cocktails and playing crazy golf all over the States. I was very pleased to hear that those previously engaged in the medical industry love endless reruns of E.R. and House on the telly. That factling, and much more chimp retirement trivia, means that I will be dining out on this item for WEEKS.
Listen to this episode here or, if you haven’t done so already subscribe here.
DJ Scratcha: The Grimey Breakfast on Rinse FM
This is still work in progress, but Scratcha makes me laugh A LOT. Scratcha does ‘The Grimey Breakfast’ on the absolutely incredible Rinse FM. A lot has been written about Rinse all over the web—it is the home of so many of the best black music heads in the UK at the moment including Roll Deep, Skream / Zinc and Benga, Boy Better Know and Plastician—but not enough people have been shouting about the weekday 8-11 slot.
Some things work, and some things go on way too long, but when it’s right it’s very right. Often in a very wrong way. Recent features include a summer special where listeners split up with their girlfriends / boyfriends on air (because you don’t want to have a girlfriend in the summer right?), and this morning was a phone in about the perils of ‘going down’ for both girls and boys. Eat that Terry.
The music is amazing (kinda like a really upfront 1Xtra breakfast minus lame R’n'b plus some killer underground hits), and—without getting all grown up on it—it’s really good to hear a show that hasn’t been neutered in the age of compliance and censorship where young people can talk how they talk.
As he says ‘it’s breakfast—start your day with a nice white pearly smile’. Wow.
Check Rinse on their website, or listen to the podcasts here (Scratcha comes round pretty regularly).
grouper
A short post for you today. I love most things American and independent musically… once upon a time the place to hear anything from Matmos to Mice Parade was on BBC Radio 3’s Mixing It, or (in the case of electronics) Mary Anne Hobbs’ Breezeblock, and of course in the excellent Wire radio shows (surely the subject of a forthcoming post).
Now I have discovered that the ultimate independent record shop trolley dash of a radio show comes from WNYU out of New York (the station that also broadcasts ‘Beats In Space‘).
They bill it as ‘three and a half hours a day of pure, unadulterated, adventurous New Sounds’, and it works absolutely perfectly at the time zone adjusted UK time of 9pm-12.30am. The hosts Kayla and Jonathan and unobtrusive but totally on it, and the music they serve up is completely compelling.
Now that we have Spotify for all the major label stuff out there, the only releases that remain hard to track down are the independent stuff. The Afternoon Show makes this work reachable for those of us who can’t get our geek on at Rough Trade on a daily basis.
The picture above is for an artist called Grouper that they introduced me too this week. It’s swoonfully badass, as were five or six other records from the same show.
Sunday’s get me in a radio funk. As a child I loathed the kitchen radio’s blend of big bands and crooners coming from Radio 2 (the musical equivalent of Sunday roast sprouts for a twelve year old), and, although I like Elaine Page (she sounds like she’d be fun after a couple of bottles of wine) there is only so many show tunes I can handle before I go into toxic shock. Unless it’s Jesus Christ Superstar, in which case, bring it on.
In the absence of any genuine alternatives I have cast my Sunday lunch net a little wider. At present I’m listening to Sonzera Pura while I get the grub ready. At the all new seasonally adjusted time of 1-3pm GMT this show comes out of East Village Radio in New York first thing in the morning.
Sonzera Pura are a duo that rep ‘the best of brazil in NY’. The show takes in all styles of Brazilian music… samba and bossa but also psych, electronics and new stuff. Not too much chat, but obviously a lot of love goes into it… full tracklistings always, plus this week had 3 different guests including a chap called DJ Jeremy who played a lot of tropicalia—that most absurd and wonderful music made by people wearing capes playing the happiest sounds imaginable whilst on drugs that no one takes any more.
Check the show live on East Village Radio between 1 and 3 on a Sunday, or listen to the station from this page below.
I recently picked up the unputdownable Moondust (as recommended by Richard & Judy no less), a light read that puts the space race into the context of the American Era through interviews with the remaining 9 Apollo astronauts. It nudged me to return to the much more brain twisting ‘Welcome To Mars’, a series for Resonance FM presented and written in 2006 by one of the most singularly interesting minds around- Ken Hollings.
I came across Mr Hollings through a mate that is in the band Biting Tongues with him. He told me Ken had presented this documentary (or informal lecture) without any script, which—when you listen—beggars belief. This unbelievable series is riffed live.
Welcome to Mars is a work of genius from a brain of Mekon dimensions. Its ambition is to look at the ‘fantasy of science in the American half century.’ It does this through Hollings’ polemic and a wonderful theremin-laced electronic soundtrack from a chap called Simon James.
Recently I looked at the BBC’s ‘Science Fiction Britannia’ season and couldn’t help feeling that Hollings’ contribution would have been exactly what was missing. Over Welcome To Mars’ twelve parts of 20-35 minutes it remains completely compelling (if somewhat heavy going.)
As Hollings says—’my work turns the universe inside out’.
Download all 12 episodes from iTunes here, or have a preview of Episode 1 (‘1947: Rebuilding Lemuria’) below.
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