I mentioned on this show that I have been doing radio shows for fifteen years. People who know me will know I am someone who oscillates into periods of real difficulty with confidence, who sometimes is completely stricken with fear before doing a broadcast. I know the years I have been doing this there have also seen appalling and sad things happen all over the world, and there have been significant political events close to me. However, whatever I have been experiencing, or seen going on in the world I have always felt I understood what music – and by extension music-radio is for. The only things ever in question were did I feel I was up to the task in hand, and was it relevant or useful to apply this format of communication to address my thoughts on a situation in the world. As I prepared for this show, I felt an unfamiliar uncertainty about the purpose of this all.
I had had to miss my previous show because I was sick in bed with the symptoms I had been reading about for weeks prior – a fever, an accompanying high temperature, and a new persistent cough. I still don’t know if what I was sick with was Covid-19, but if I was I am happy and thankful to say I recovered. I read the news; I ventured into what I found was a different world – a world where people noticed each other with a new piercing perception. I read the news and I wondered what music, and what purpose radio shows being reverential about music were for could play in the face of what seemed like seismic events.
There were times though, that music helped. There were times when I knew exactly what to listen to. Music helped, not to make anything better but just to place how I was feeling slightly outside of myself for a while and to be able to look at things with some form of perspective. I read the news. I wondered about people who’s paths I had crossed over the years that lived in the places I was reading about were getting on. I realised that music and radio didn’t need to be for, or to solve anything, as Snakepiss who I reached out to for an audio-postcard for this show puts it – “we can be smaller than we thought we needed to be – or were told we should be”.
So this show is simply a collection of sounds that have helped me understand my new surroundings, played in the spirit of communication, connection and smallness. I hope they make sense in the world they find you – or at least that you enjoy them in it.
Numb Mob – Sammy’s Point
Mike Slott – Falling Through
Jacaszek – November Early
Valiska – Suspension
Photay – Peace in the Era of Telecommunication
Jóhann Jóhannsson – They Being Dead Yet Speaketh
Claire M Singer – Fairge
The Cinematic Orchestra feat. Fontella Bass – Evolution
Mark Pritchard – Under The Sun
Burial – Stolen Dog
Anenon – Two For C
Eluvium – Fugue State
Arca – Urchin
Matthew Bourne – Extinction
Richard Robert – When I’m Gone
Justin Wright – Modular Winter
Hania Rani – F Major
Scratcha DVA – Sumbodydefinatlydied
Soul Drummers – Shango Prayer
Jay Electronica – Eternal Sunshine (The Pledge) – 4
Strict Face – Into Stone