Radio Series

An Alternative History of Alternative Rock

Featuring Sonic Youth, The Pixies, The Breeders, Hole, L7, Nirvana, Blur, Oasis, Elastica, No Doubt, Beck, Radiohead, The Smashing Pumpkins and Pavement.

Modern Art, Rock and Roll, and Other Stuff Your Parents Warned You About

Featuring Beck, The Breeders, The Sex Pistols, Bloc Party, Fluxus, The Situationist International, Gnarls Barkley, Salvador Dali, Luigi Russolo, Grandmaster Flash, John Cage, The Velvet Underground, David Bowie, Marcel Duchamp and Ben Folds

The End of Civilisation as We Know It

Featuring The Smashing Pumpkins, Weezer, Depeche Mode, Nick Cave, John Keats, Robert Burton, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Kanye West, Friedrich Nietzsche, MGMT and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Hey! Nietzsche!

Featuring The Gossip, Kings of Leon, Ben Harper, Queen, Meat Loaf, Richard Wagner, AC/DC, Arthur Schopenhauer, Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, William Blake, Dizzee Rascal and My Chemical Romance.

Acceptable in the 80s

Featuring Ladyhawke, Peaches, Cut Copy, Mylo, Calvin Harris, Run DMC, Madonna, Marcel Proust, Giorgio Moroder, David Lee Roth, Theodor Adorno, Karl Marx and Michael J. Fox.

Actually My Name's Marina

"What the audience demands of the artist - really demands, in its unconscious desire - and what the artist thinks it ought to be given... [is] the same thing: the sentiment of being. The sentiment of being is the sentiment of being strong... such energy as contrives that the centre shall hold, that the circumference of the self keep unbroken, that the person be an integer, impenetrable, perdurable, and autonomous in being if inot in action."

Once upon a time

"Music was now an object that could be owned by the individual and used at his own convenience... Now the Symphony of a Thousand could play to an audience of one. Now a man could hear nocturnes at breakfast, vespers at noon, and the Easter Oratorio on Channukah. He could do his morning crossword to 'One O'Clock Jump', and make love right through the St Matthew Passion. Anything was possible; nothing was sacred; freedom was absolute. It was the freedom, once the cathedral of culture had been wrecked, to take home the bits you liked and arrange them as you please. Once again, a mechanical invention had met capitalism's need to recreate all of life in its image. The cathedral of culture was now a supermarket."

Evan Eisenberg, 1987

Tomorrow's Harvest

"What if I tell you now that I have often longed even for plays I have seen performed - frequently the very ones which bored me most - or for books I have read in the past and did not like at all? If that is not madness, there's no such thing."

nostalgia

Hold to the Difficult

"And you must not let yourself be misled, in your solitude, by the fact that there is something in you that wants to escape from it. This very wish will, if you use it quietly and pre-eminently and like a tool, help to spread your solitude over wide country. People have (with the help of convention) found the solution of everything in ease, and the easiest side of ease; but it is clear that we must hold to the difficult; everything living holds to it, everything in nature grows and defends itself according to its own character and is an individual in its own right, strives to be so at any cost and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must hold to the difficult is a certainty that will not leave us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; the fact that a thing is difficult must be one more reason for our doing it."

Rainer Maria Rilke, 1904

rainer maria rilke | kate bush

Always music in the air

'Acousmatic, the Larousse dictionary tells us, is the 'name given to the disciples of Pythagoras who for five years, listened to his teachings while he was hidden behind a curtain, without seeing him, while observing a strict silence.' Hidden from their eyes, only the voice of their master reached the disciples.... In ancient times, the apparatus was a curtain; today, it is the radio and methods of reproduction, along with the entire set of electro-acoustic transformations, that place us, modern listeners to an invisible voice, under similar conditions.'

Pierre Schaeffer, 'Acousmatics', 1966

Music Sounds Better

'Imagine a traveller from a hundred years ago arrives at our doorstep and asks us why the music of the 20th century operates so frequently on the basis of cyclic repetition. Not just the rap and dance genres of popular culture, but also minimalism - perhaps the single most viable strand of the Western art music tradition... why does so much of our music work this way? What kind of needs do these patterns satisfy?'

Susan McClary, 1999