Everybody hates Twitter. I understand why. There’s so much vitriol and misinformation. I’ve rarely had those experiences on Twitter. My experiences on Twitter have been good for the most part.
Take today’s show.
Last year Emil Zapffe guest deejayed on the show. He opened his mix with a track from Giulio. I shared the show on Twitter, and Giulio thanked Emil for including him in the mix. I invited Giulio to join us on Soundwave, and here we all are today.
Giulio Aldinucci
Giulio describes his mix as “Altri ambienti: a glimpse at Italian minimalism between the 70s and 80s in five pictures.”
Giulio’s mix is lovely. It’s helped get me through the week. Summer decided to get hot in San Diego. I work from my kitchen table and am blasted by the sun all day. If you had a video camera trained on me, you’d see me moving my laptop around my kitchen table to flee the sun’s light coming from my skylight. But there’s no escaping the heat. I’ve been baking in the sun all week long, which leaves me a little stunned, making me more receptive to Giulio’s mix. Some songs lend themselves to the heat, and I lost myself in their shimmering sound waves. Others felt like a cool draught of air.
You’ll want to hear more music from Giulio. His new album Real will be released on Karlrecords on October 14, available on vinyl, cassette, and digital.
All this from a conversation that started on Twitter.
Join us next week when our guest deejay will be Stefan Beck.
Oleg Puzan of Line Spectrum, AKA Dronny Darko (listen to Dronny’s mix here and his Line Spectrum mix here), recommended his partner guest deejay on the show last year, and Sasha’s mix was beautiful and sublime. I invited Sasha back on Soundwave, and she’s delivered another fantastic mix.
Sasha, AKA protoU
While Sasha’s first mix for Soundwave was elemental and cosmic, today’s mix feels cozy and intimate. I’m listening to it as I write today’s show notes, and I wish San Diego would not be so characteristically warm and sunny, and a chilly and overcast day seems more appropriate for Sasha’s mix.
I’ve also been listening to Sasha’s mix while I work at the office. It has been an interesting experience because I launched Soundwave to cope with the stress and isolation of the early days of the pandemic. I’ve been working remotely and listening to Soundwave mixes for nearly two years, and it feels unsettling to listen to the mixes at my office. I’m sure I’ll adjust, but presently it feels out of context.
Where do you listen to Soundwave?
Join us next week when our guest deejay will be José Sobranes.
Jonathan guest deejayed on the show last October. Jonathan’s mix was so moving that I invited him back to Soundwave. Today’s mix is equally remarkable. I had the unique opportunity to listen to it while driving from San Diego to Sacramento to visit my wife this weekend. It’s wildfire season in California (it’s always wildfire season), and Jonathan’s mix provided the soundtrack to my apocalyptic drive. The skies were tinted dirty brown from the ashes from the wildfires, but somehow the sun managed to blast the landscape with glaring light: grass and trees parched from California’s megadrought. Every 20 miles or so, I’d pass an abandoned car to the side of the highway. And yet, Jonathan’s mix somehow lent some beauty to such desolate scenery.
Jonathan has some words about his mix below.
Join us next week when our guest deejay will be anthéne.
See you then!
Jonathan Ammons
I think that my past year has looked like many people’s lives during the middle of one of the largest global pandemics in history. A lot of isolation, a lot of finding ways to busy yourself or occupy your mind. In the past, as someone who worked from home, I had enjoyed drone, ambient, and all of those experimental genres for the way they occupied a space without dominating it. If ambient music was created to generate music that did not evoke strong and tumultuous emotions — as Brian Eno claims— that was exactly what I wanted droning on in the background of my house while I pecked away at a keyboard for work. As a journalist, it provided this stoic, emotionless wallpaper for the background of my daily existence.
Covid changed a lot of that. They daily monotony left me just craving a change of emotion. But I didn’t want words; I didn’t want lyrics that would remind me of how things were when we were able to go places, meet people, kiss strangers at a bar… I wanted the same stability that the drone I’d come to love gave me, but I wanted something a little more expressive.
I also noticed that the more I used any streaming platform, the more the algorithm would eventually whittle things down to the same handful of artists. I wanted new things. I wanted variety in a locked-down life with no chance of spontaneity. So I decided to cut all algorithmic music out of my life. I stopped listening to Spotify or Pandora or any of those generated playlists and dialed back in to the radio.
I have to give a giant shoutout to Noods Radio out of Bristol, England, because they have been a major lifesaver. A station dedicated to the wild and weird sounds of Bristol. You never know what you’ll find, but the rich spread of creativity has introduced me to a slew of new artists. Props to BBC6’s great ambient show, as well.
Northern England’s A Beautiful Burning World make’s gorgeous sounds using very simple gear and tape loops. They even have a subscription system for $15 a year, and you can get their entire discography for cheaper than that! Much of this mix comes from artists discovered through the radio or combing around Bandcamp.
Seamstress makes delightful chill-out beats. Scanner gorgeously blends drone and ambient with deep arrangements that are so subtle, but meaningful. And I don’t know why it took me till now to notice Garth Stevenson’s incredible compositions. We really are in a golden age for the reinvention of modern classical music. Just look no further than Tristan Perich’s fantastic work.
I also have to give a shoutout to Kimathi Moore. Kima is an incredibly talented sound artist here in Asheville. His style’s shift between ambient, drone, and Edgard Varèse-like tone poems. I got the chance to work with him on a music video he shot for my latest album, and got to see just what a meticulous worker he is.No wonder his sounds are so precise and pristine.
Of course, I had to include some Harold Budd. I included a selection off of his album the Serpent (In Quicksilver) because I remember hearing an interview with him in which he claimed that it was his favorite record that he’d made. A major loss for the ambient music world, losing one of the original masters to this damned virus.
And lastly, the original tracks are two previously unreleased compositions. I started messing around with more tape loops in my studio this winter, and really decided to dive into it, which is how “The Same River” originated. The closing track is actually from a much larger piece I have coming out in the Fall. “A Certain Kind of Light” is a 40-minute piece in five movements. It was an experiment to see just how far I could go using only a single chord. The incredibly talented Olivia Springer performed all of the string parts for that piece. I’ve included the final movement of that piece to close out this mix as its debut.
Endless thanks to Joseph for having me back for another Soundwave mix. It’s been a pleasure to follow along and hear what everyone is listening to these days!
Hello, I’m Joseph Aleo and welcome to the Weekly Mix!
What is the Weekly Mix? It’s a show that features seven tracks from the last week that I’ve posted to Facebook and Twitter for my #songoftheday series. The songs are old and new, but with an emphasis on the new and are from many different genres. What unites all the tracks you’ll hear on today’s show and every show going forward is that they are fantastic and deserved to be heard.
The mixes often won’t be seamless and smooth because that’s not what I’m going for on this show. Again, I’m just delivering a week’s worth of the songs of the day in one place. That pains me as a deejay because as a deejay I’m all about the segue, but so be it.
The Weekly Mix will also include an introduction from the featured band or musician whenever possible. For example, on today’s show, you’ll hear from Preacher vs Choir and HypeMan Sage.
I only have a couple introductions on today’s episode because the Weekly Mix doesn’t have an audience yet, so if you like what you hear, please feel free to introduce your friends to the Weekly Mix. The more people who listen, the more talent I can get to participate on future shows.
Another reason should you listen to the Weekly Mix is because I’ve been a deejay and podcast producer for nearly 30 years. I have great taste in music and I want to share that music with you. Some of the music you’ll hear might not be your cup of tea but I think you’ll recognize that it’s good stuff. The music that is your cup of tea I hope will become your new favorite song. In fact, if you hear a song on today’s show that you like, I encourage you to go out and buy it to help support the artist.
The album art for each Weekly Mix features an illustration by the wonderful Geneva B. My girlfriend discovered Geneva on Instagram and I quickly became a fan. When I decided to launch the Weekly Mix I immediately contacted her for permission to use one of her illustrations for the show. You can find her on Instagram or find her online at her website . I hope to talk with Geneva on the Weekly Mix in the near future.
On today’s show we’re going to listen to a mix I put together with my friends two years ago. That’s a long time, I know, but there’s a reason for that and to explain myself I have to tell you a little bit about myself.
First off, I’ve been deejaying and producing shows for more than half my life. I’ve been on the air for hundreds of hours and I’ve spent hundreds of more hours producing shows. People often ask me where I find the time to work on so many shows. The answer was simple: I wasn’t married and I didn’t have kids.
When I began working on today’s show that was still true. But two years ago I met the love of my life. And the love of my life also has three kids. I was having too much fun and was too busy to spend time on anything that didn’t revolve around them. But the itch to deejay never goes away and now that things have settled down a bit in my life it’s time to get back into it. Kicking off 2017 seems the best way to do it.
So let me tell you about today’s show.
I got my start at WMFO, a college/community radio station in Boston. WMFO broadcasts under a freeform format so it wouldn’t sound incongrous to hear disco, jazz, opera and hip hop on one of my shows.
From time to time I would throw a deejay party at the station. They were a lot of fun and very intense because it was a test of our abilities as a deejay. While one deejay was spinning a song you had the length of that track to choose the next song and cue it up on the turntable or CD player. And not just any song, it had to be a song that would segue nicely out the track that was being played at the moment. The results were unpredictable but those shows always sounded fantastic, and that’s what I’m hoping to capture on today’s show.
I’ve invited my friends to particpate on today’s mix by having them select a song to play based solely on the track that preceeded their song. They had no idea of what was played any further than that. They could stay within the same genre or veer off into an entirely different direction as long as their selection made sense, if only just to them. I also asked each of my friends to record an introduction for the songs they chose.
On today’s show you’ll hear “Acid” by Stu Mitchell, which was chosen by Steve Howard, who I’ve know almost as long as I’ve been deejaying. We met at WMFO and Steve currently spins at Asheville FM.
We’ll also hear “Kolyskova” by DakhaBrakha. “Kolyskova” was selected by Darek Mazzone, who is also a WMFO alumn and currently hosts the wildly popular Wo’ Pop show on KEXP in Seattle.
From Kidkanevil we’ll hear the track “Butterfly / Satellite,” which was selected by Macedonia, who hosts the Both Sides of the Surface podcast. You can also find him spinning on Bondfire Radio out of New York City. In fact, as I write this I’m listening to his 50th broadcast on Bondfire!
Alan Ranta chose Tipper’s “Homage Sliders” for today’s show. Alan writes for the likes of Exclaim!, CBC Music and PopMatters so it was a no-brainer to include him on today’s show.
Ned Raggett selected Grouper’s “Living Room.” I connected with Ned through Steve Howard. Ned writes for Pitchfork, The Quietus, and many other fine publications. Go Google him!
Blank Realm’s “Cleaning Up My Mess” was chosen by Sean Hocking, who runs Metal Postcard Records. I met Sean when I featured his label on my show, solipsistic NATION, and I’ve been meaning to get him involved in one of my hairbrained schemes ever since, so I’m happy he joins us on today’s mix.
Anji Bee picked the Stwo Remix of JMSN’s “The One.” Anji Bee has been producing podcasts for just as long as I have and I urge you to listen to her show, The Chillcast.
Mikel OD is another podcaster who I’ve known for ages and he selected “Pressure” by My Brightest Diamond. I was a big fan of Mikel’s Most People are DJs podcast but these days he’s up to no good with his latest project, Digital Racket.
Another guest I had on solipsistic NATION was Strictly Kev (AKA DJ Food). I’ve been a fan of his music for a long time and I was thrilled when he added Heliocentrics & Melvin Van Peebles’ “The Cavern” to today’s mix.
Deejay Om picked “And I Love You” by The Darling Dears for his contribution to the Friends mix. I met Deejay Om through solipsistic NATION and had the pleasure of meeting him in person a few years agon in San Francisco. He’s a classy guy with exquisite taste in music.
My buddy Craig Ruiz chose Dr. John’s “Getaway.” Craig and I bonded over our love for Amon Tobin’s music and we’ve been friends ever since.
Mahiane d’Ultimate is yet another person I met through solipsistic NATION when I featured her label, Ultimae Records, on my show. Mahiane is one of the sweetest people I know so I was honored when she graced today’s mix with Apparat’s “Arcadia.”
Sativa Mariposa is the love of my life so she had to be on today’s show. Her taste in music is fantastic and it’s one of the very many things I love about her. And I also love that she selected James Browns’ “Please, Please, Please” for the mix your about to hear.
We’re going to wrap up today’s show with Jhené Aiko’s “Eternal Sunshine.”
See you next week when I launch my Weekly Mix series.
Today on Pop Culture Intelligentsia we’ll talk with producer, engineer and mixer, Mark Pistel about protest music. Is it relevant? Does it change anything? Mark was a founding member of the band Consolidated, who had radical activist leanings. We’ll also talk with Eric Drass, who is an artist who paints, creates digital installation, and generative experiments that live on the net. In particular, we’re going to talk about his latest foray, The Glitch News Network, a bot that scrapes various online news sources for images of the latest stories and glitches and mashes them into a 2 second video. In our third and last segment we’ll discuss Storium, an online storytelling game. Storium is based around creative writing. As you play, the game helps you figure out what to write next and how to keep your story interesting. We’ll be joined by Storium’s CEO and co-founder, Stephen Hood.
Consolidated‘s Friendly Fa$cism LP Friendly Fa$cism is the second full-length album by industrial/hip hop artists Consolidated which was released in 1991. The name comes from the title of a 1980 book by political scientist Bertram Gross, Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America, which laid out the form of “creeping fascism” that Gross feared might come to pass in the United States.
Michael Franti Michael Franti is an American rapper, musician, poet, spoken word artist and singer-songwriter.
Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy was an American industrial hip-hop band, active during the early 1990s.
The Beatnigs The Beatnigs was a San Francisco band, which combined hard-core punk, industrial and hip hop influences, described as “a kind of avant-garde industrial jazz poets collective”.
Spearhead In 1994, Franti formed a new band called Spearhead with a few studio musicians, including mainstay Carl Young, and announced the dissolution of Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy.
Donald Trump Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is an American businessman, politician, television personality, and candidate for the Republican nomination for President of the United States in the 2016 election.
Vegetarianism
Holly Herndon Holly Herndon is an American composer, musician, and sound artist based in San Francisco, California.
Honey Soundsystem San Francisco’s coveted queer dj collective and production group.
Dark Entries Dark Entries takes great care in preserving sound quality and respecting the aesthetics of its artists.
Bézier Robert started DJing in 2003 and joined SF’s DJ collective Honey Soundsystem in 2007. He produces music under the moniker Bézier.
Rykarda Parasol Rykarda Parasol is a composer, lyricist, vocalist, musician, and performer.
Blipvert A blipvert is a very brief television advertisement, that lasts just one or several seconds.
tl;drbot This bot takes works of literature and algorithmically summarizes them, a chapter at a time, to 1% of their original length.
bffbot If you follow her, she’ll follow you back and send you a cheery greeting. She’ll favourite your tweets (she especially likes your ‘plain text’ tweets, rather than recycled links or retweets). Every now and then she’ll reply.
Machinima news
trippingbot MARTA (Meta. Aphoric. Recurrent. Tripping. Algopoet) starts taking drugs at 6pm each day, and then reports on its mental state intermittently over the next 6 hours. As the evening progresses, the bot takes more drugs and becomes more intoxicated, which is reflected in the (in)choherence of the reports it delivers. This reaches a peak at midnight, when the reports cease until it begins again at 6pm the next day.
Conspiracybot
Robin Rimbaud A.K.A. Scanner Robin Rimbaud is an electronic musician who works under the name Scanner due to his use of cell phone and police scanners in live performance.
Private Sector Multimedia band that Eric Drass is involved in.
Matthew Plummer-Fernandez Matthew Plummer-Fernandez is a Colombian-British artist based in London known for playfully and critically exploring socio-cultural entanglements with technology, through 3D printed sculpture, autonomous bots, software, and his ongoing research blog Algopop.
sekuMoi Mecy Ongoing exploration of derivatives of a 3D scan of Mickey Mouse, titled sekuMoi Mecy (a simple computer generated anagram). Each derivative demonstrates the progression of scanning and remixing processes Matthew Plummer-Fernandez is developing. The choice of character also raises issues of potential clashes with big copyright holders that could potentially choose to lobby for legislation against 3D scanning.
Julian Oliver‘s cell phone jamming battle tank With the flick of a switch No Network implements a blanket ban of mobile telephony in its presence. All access to the cellular (mobile) network within a 6-15m diameter aura around the object is jammed, including calls, SMS and data connectivity.
Culture jamming Culture jamming (sometimes guerrilla communication) is a tactic used by many anti-consumerist social movements to disrupt or subvert media culture and its mainstream cultural institutions, including corporate advertising. It attempts to “expose the methods of domination” of a mass society to foster progressive change.
Democracy Now! Democracy Now! is a daily progressive, nonprofit, independently syndicated news hour that airs on more than 1,250 radio, television, satellite and cable TV networks around the globe.
Role-playing game (RPG) A role-playing game (RPG and sometimes roleplaying game is a game in which players assume the roles of characters in a fictional setting. Players take responsibility for acting out these roles within a narrative, either through literal acting or through a process of structured decision-making or character development. Actions taken within many games succeed or fail according to a formal system of rules and guidelines.
J.C. Hutchins J.C. Hutchins is the pseudonym for American podcast novelist and journalist Chris Hutchins. Hutchins is best known for his 7th Son series.
Play-by-post role-playing game A play-by-post role-playing game game (or sim) is an online text-based role-playing game in which players interact with each other and a predefined environment via text.
Dungeons & Dragons Dungeons & Dragons (abbreviated as D&D or DnD) is a fantasy tabletop role-playing game (RPG) originally designed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, and first published in 1974 by Tactical Studies Rules, Inc. (TSR).
Champions Champions is a role-playing game published by Hero Games designed to simulate and function in a four-color superhero comic book world.
On today’s show we chat with Lisa Ronson about her new album, Emperors of Medieval Japan. Brent talks about his affection for the 90s revival sound and Vaporwave. TLR talks about creating a Choose Your Own Adventure audio drama.
Vaporwave, a musical micro-genre characterized by a nostalgic fascination with retro (typically that of the 1980s, 1990s, and early-mid 2000s) cultural aesthetic, video games, technology and advertising, and often involves the fusion of modern popular music with lounge, smooth jazz and elevator music
On this week’s Pop Culture Intelligentsia we shoot the shit about Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly release and what makes and album great. Venetian Snares’ Traditional Synthesizer Music LP baffles us with its brilliance. Lisa Ronson’s Emperors of Medieval Japan album predictably has us giggling about bukkake. Kitten’s “Fall On Me” single has a gushing with joy. Finally, OK Go’s “Upside Down & Inside Out” one-shot gravity defying video has us scratching our heads in wonder.
Today’s show focuses on acid jazz and nu-jazz. Acid jazz combines elements of soul music, funk, disco and modal harmonies while nu-jazz lend jazz textures and sometimes jazz instrumentation, funk, electronic dance music, and free improvisation.
As a former punk I originally hated electronic music like acid jazz. I was into hardcore and the only music that mattered to me was the kind that was raw, abrassive and in your face. If it wan’t punk, hip hop or indutrial I couldn’t be bothered with it. Acid jazz was just to dainty of a thing for me to care about.
But that was soon to change.
At the time I was a DJ at WMFO and each weekend I would have live bands perform on my show. As you might imagine, they were all punk, industrial or hip hop acts. My engineer was a guy named Harry and prior and after a band’s set he would blast the speakers of his studio with all sorts electronic music I had never heard before. And it grooved!
I think the big turning point for me was one night after my radio show I headed over to a nightclub I worked at. The DJ was spinning acid jazz and house. It was very sexy watching people dance to the music, always slighty off beat but always riding the rhythm. Kind of like a jazz solo. For the first time I really started digging the music. The tab of acid I had just taken might have helped.
Let me give you a little background on solipsistic NATION if you’re new to the show.
solipsistic NATION began as a show on a pirate radio station a year or so ago. Electronic music is so diverse that I didn’t want to limit myself to one particular genre. The concept of the show was that I wanted to explore all genres of electronic music, whether it was drum and bass, trip hop, techno, ambient, etc.
I stopped doing solipsistic NATION as a radio program because I simply could dedicate the time I needed to produce what I considered a high quality show. Things have settled down since then and I’ve relaunched solipsistic NATION as a weekly podcast.
On today’s edition of solipsistic NATION we’ll focus on electronic music that feautres synchopated and offbeat rhythms. We’ll start the show with an interview with Ben Torrence, founder of Woodson Lateral Records.
