LD11: Live and Direct Listens IV - Ruth MacKenzie - Kalevala

Today's episode of Live and Direct Listens features a musical interpretation of a Finnish epic poem. It's 33.6MB and 1:02:03 long. Ruth MacKenzie's album "Kalevala: Dream of the Salmon Maiden" is a mixture of Finnish and English folk song punctuated by a high pitched call named "kulning", which is actually a Finnish animal call. MacKenzie has said that in Kalevala she realized that beauty and ugliness are not too different and also that there is very little separating the earth, the animals and the human voice.

The original written work that the album is based upon is called the Kalevala, it was published in 1849 and is a collection of oral tradition which may come from as far back as pre-recorded history and include fragments as recent as the Iron Age. Part creation myth, part folk song and poetry, it has a national Finnish holiday dedicated to it (February 28th) and has influenced numerous artists, of whom Ruth MacKenzie is one.

There's an overview of the Kalevala here on wikipedia, along with the source text (in english) here on wikisource. You can buy it from Ruth on her site and also find it on iTunes.

I hope you enjoy today's show. It's a little bit different from things you normally hear on the radio, and I wanted to share it with you in the hope that it would touch something within you and awaken part of you. Thanks for listening, and please tell me what you think.

LD9: Live and Direct Listens III - NetPD CD 1 (Dub Area) - Massively Multiplayer Online Music

Click, download, listen! Live and Direct number 9 (Live and Direct Listens ep #3) has arrived. It's 48.9MB, and 56:10 long. In it, I featured an album composed in real time on the Internet by a group of musicians collaborating with some software called NetPD. NetPD in turn relies on PD, which is a graphical programming language particularly suited to music synthesis and composition, but also extensible to video and other forms of data, hence the name "Pure Data".

The album is "dub" in style, featuring samples and loops that wind here and there at the whim of the collective controlling them. I played most of it, sans the last bit, which I had to cut for time constraints whilst on-air. If you wish to listen to it, you can find the whole thing here as an mp3. It's 72.1MB and 1:18:44 long, and the bit that I cut starts at 1:08:03 and goes till the end.

If you're interested in playing around with PD, you should check out the main site listed above as well as other sites on the PD webring. PD comes in Mac, Windows, and Linux flavors, so chances are it's compatible with your hardware. There's also a book, which gives some of the philosophy and context of PD's development as well; you can download the whole thing in pdf format here. Wrap your mind around the idea, install PD, download some other people's patches (PD programs are called patches), and then give it a whirl. It's free, you're bored, go create something!

As always, feel free to let me know what you think. In the future (given a large enough listenership) I'd love to do an experiment in live radio where you, the listener get to influence the music going live on the air. Whether this is via a web browser which interfaces with PD behind the scenes, or some such similar arrangement, I think it'd be fun.

LD5: Live and Direct Listens II - ESCM - BT

Behold, Live and Direct #5. This, the second episode of Live and Direct Listens, and the 5th episode of Live and Direct, is upon us. This too-long-for-the-air, uncompromising, special podcast version runs for one hour, ten minutes, and seventeen seconds, and will set you back 64.4 megabytes of disk space.

Today's featured Listen is ESCM by BT (also known as Brian Transeau). This album was released in 1997 following his debut album Ima. The US version (featured in this podcast) included the track "Lullaby for Gaia" (5:26); in the UK, the track included instead was "The Road to Lostwithiel" (8:38), which I have not heard but will attempt to dig up.

I didn't have time to play tracks 5 and 6 ("Memories In A Sea Of Forgetfulness" and "Solar Plexus") on air, but I've inserted them in the proper place in the podcast, thanks to Audacity, a podcaster's best friend.

BT rose to fame in the late Nineties and helped define the sub-genre of Electronica called Trance (specifically "Dream Trance"). His albums, however, often avoid categorization and jump genres happily. He has created and employed several production effects, notably the "Stutter Edit" and "Break Tweaker", which are both slated to be released by BT's software venture this year. Speaking of software, BT codes much of the software used to produce his music himself, by hand. Check out some of the interesting trivia and hard-core geekiness behind his latest effort, This Binary Universe. On a more domestic note, "BT has said that the album has a lullaby-like quality, inspired by his newborn daughter, Kaia, who sat on his lap throughout most of the song writing process." [from this Wikipedia article]

As one of my listeners noted, sadly, BT's studio was recently burglarized again (the first time was in 2001), and hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment stolen. This includes the data for his current show. On his site, Transeau discusses his intent to create a non-profit dedicated to helping musicians recover stolen gear and also to providing equipment to aspiring musicians who would not otherwise be able to afford it.

If you have ideas for future Listens, please email me. Good night, and enjoy.

LD4: Live and Direct Listens - Chill Out - The KLF

Live and Direct episode 4 is available for you to download and enjoy. It's 44.4MB in size, and 48 minutes and 24 seconds long. Live and Direct Listens is a new series on my show where I'll play cohesive albums in their entirety, as they were meant to be heard. This week's album is Chill Out, by the KLF.

I prefer to listen to this album at night, because of the atmosphere and mood it evokes. It brings to mind a road trip through the Deep South, which was the artists' intent:

I've never been to those places. I don't know what those places are like, but in my head, I can imagine those sounds coming from those places, just looking at the map.

Chill Out is one of my favorite ambient albums of all time, by one of my favorite artists of all time. Let me know what you think of it, and if you have any suggestions for future albums to feature on Live and Direct, drop me a line.