This is a program I got a bit more comfortable with being behind the mic. While I have done a lot of morning show hosting, news reading and live, on-air fundraising, this experience has been different for two reasons. First, I’m not working with a format; I’ve had many chances to diverge within a format, but composing this as I go is altogether different. Second, I have connections with the music herein and want to do well by it.

Opening with Radian, the program started with a tactile tone… percussion and uneasy space framing the stage for what follows. The jagged energy of Boredoms came next, splattering noise that seems very 1990s Japanese experimentalism. I tried to switch it up then with Suk Hong, which I appreciate for its bristling intensity. Thom Holmes flips the script with minimalist, retro-synth abstraction that plays like a dusty educational reel made uncanny. I love Thom’s music and scholarship; if you haven’t bought one of his books on the history of electronic and experimental music, please do.

Two from Cold Spring’s catalog were up, with Violent Onsen Geisha’s chaos into Mayuko Hino’s elegiac facet. Jenny Berger Myhre is a vital turning point, offering fragile, lo-fi intimacy as a human breath amid machine clamor, released on the aptly named Take It Easy Policy. Then, Bull of Heaven plays like a cryptic footnote.

Next show will be the best.

Playlist

Improvisation, Pt. 1
Radian
Mottomo Otomo
Trost Records

サリドマイド・カー
Boredoms
TASTE OF WILD WEST 3
徳間ジャパンコミュニケーションズ

Pedigree I
Suk Hong
Pedigree
OTOROKU

Numbers
Thom Holmes
Intervals
Wave Magnet Ltd.

SCTL85SWE
Intrinsic Action
Intrinsic Action
BloodLust!

Death Mothership Connection
Violent Onsen Geisha
Noise Forest
Cold Spring

Faintainhead - Excerpt
Mayuko Hino
Earthen: A Cold Spring Sampler (New Version)
Cold Spring

Chidoribashi
Jenny Berger Myhre
Here is always somewhere else
Take It Easy Policy

If You Are Unhappy
Bull of Heaven
Slightly Artificial
1510765 Records DK2

The Humidity Mascot
Three Legged Race
Rope Commercial, Vol. 1
Underwater Peoples Records

An Unbearable Lightness Of Being - II - Deus Ex Machina
ZAÄAR
Ovules
WV Sorcerer Productions & Subsound Records

Fuzz Legion Majesty
Our Love Will Destroy The World
Carnivorous Rainbows
Ba Da Bing!