College radio history is near and dear to me; so I am thrilled to learn about the WNUR Underground Archive Project. Launched initially as a student project by WNUR (see my 2008 station tour) participant Brock Stuessi, the website features a glimpse into the Northwestern University radio station’s rock music collection. Featuring scans of album […]
I am listening to South Dakota Public Broadcasting interview Joseph Horowitz, author of Classical Music in America: A History of its Rise and Fall. Judging from the author’s tone, the book decidedly focuses on the decline aspect of the story. “What we take for granted today,” Horowitz tells his radio interviewer David Gier, “that the market […]
Julius Eastman was a brilliant black/gay composer whose lamentably short life is explored on WBUR’s Here and Now. His music was beautiful, but its presentation was not for the faint of heart. I hear Bach’s C-minor Passacaglia in Eastman’s controversially titled work, “Evil Nigger.” You listen and decide for yourself. According to interviewed historian Tiona […]
I have started something called the “Hybrid Highbrow Network.” It is at this point mostly only a figment of my imagination, a matrix of people who don’t know they’re in the matrix but who mix classical, jazz, showtunes, world music and whatever into whatever comes out the other end, radio-wise. Undaunted by the fictional nature […]
The fourth installment of my Hybrid Highbrow podcast gets at a musical phenomenon that I have wanted to explore for a while: the affinity that the jazz world has for the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók. In pursuit of this nexus, I’m serving up some wonderful tracks by Richie Beirach, Tabula Rasa, Oliver Haynes, the Peter […]
I enjoy one of the best driving commutes of anyone I know. I drive from San Francisco, California down the Highway One to the University of California at Santa Cruz, where I teach. Usually I drive down the coast on Mondays, and back up on Thursdays. This week I downloaded King-FM’s application onto my iPhone […]
While looking for info on a BBC session recording of the 1980s new wave / post-rock band Talk Talk I stumbled upon a version of the band’s Radio 1 broadcast on a site called Past Daily. Digging into its archives I discovered a treasure-trove of audio archives, from a 1991 CBS Radio world news roundup […]
Catch Alice’s Restaurant on the 2023 radio dial. See our latest listening guide. It’s the most wonderful time of the year, the wind up to the holiday season, which means that the annual ritual of tuning in to hear “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” on the radio is just around the corner. As I’ve been chronicling year […]
Coming out from a long Radio Survivor posting hiatus (apologies) and rummaging around for some good classical sounds, I have chanced on Sangeet – Classical Music from the Indian sub-continent, over at wonderful WPRB in Princeton, New Jersey. This morning (Saturday, November 18) the show gave its listeners a generous hit of the incomparable Ustad […]
I just listened to the latest episode of The Quietus Hour featuring an interview with Matt Johnson, the principal behind the English post-punk band The The. Although Johnson largely put the band on hiatus—save some film soundtrack work—since its last formal release in 2000, I learned from the interview that on UK election day in […]
