Chicago Public Radio goes 24/7 with its new :Vocalo, and it’s sounding pert-fuqn-kewl; streaming it now: good conversational DJs, good groovin’ music– what a concept for a radio station. Sez they: “Vocalo is a gathering place, on-air, on the web, and in the community. It’s also a new broadcast format that celebrates the cultures and communities of the Chicago region.” Feel the :V.
From This Just In via Funny or Die, “Bullies Vs. Sissies:”
The LA Weekly article, “Night of the Living Dead,” is an unflattering portrait of Pacifica station KPFK, “where North Korea meets North Hollywood,” and its outgoing GM. For those who enjoy heavy doses of bile and vitriol with your journalism:
During her more than five-year tenure, Georgia has plunged the listener-run station into a dark hole, alienated its staff, pared down its already marginal audience, allowed its signal to decay, and filled the airtime with loonies, ranters and fringies… Not that any of the above made much difference, as Georgia’s bosses – those who run the local station’s board as well as the Pacifica network’s national board – are even loopier and less competent than she is. They’re a crew of slogan-chanting zombies, nary a one with any professional understanding of radio.
An hour from BBC Radio 4 Archive Hour: Saving the Sounds of History. “The BBC Sound Archive, one of the most important collections in the world, began almost by accident one day in the 1930s when Marie Slocombe, a temporary secretary, was told to clear out some old records. The first batch included recordings by George Bernard Shaw and Winston Churchill. Slocombe held on to them and spent the rest of her career developing the collection, from the great and the good to the experiences of ordinary people.”
Slocombe: “First, a pilot on the wing of a burning plane in mid-air…” Next week’s BBC Archive Hour is The Sound of America: The Story of NPR.
via Rich Halten.
This week’s HV cast: A Labor Day Dialectic: A more realistic approach to spiritual awareness: how yoga might help relieve stress at the office, or not. Produced by Rebecca Flowers. A story by Rebecca Flowers, “Office Yoga” (2:16 mp3):
The Knight Citizen News Network has just published Journalism 2.0: How to Survive and Thrive, A digital literacy guide for the information age. Available as a free pdf or $10 dead-tree vers. The book fears not the feature; the chapters flow from “Digital Audio and Podcasting” and “How to Report News for the Web” to “FTP, MB, RSS, oh My!” (did you know a YottaByte is 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 bytes, page 17) and even “How to Blog.”
via PRX Jake.
WYNC celebrates John Cage for 24 Hours and 33 Minutes on his 95th birthday with The Playful and Playable Cage: A WNYC Festival. Airs September 5th at 00:00 (midnight) until 00:33 September 6th. They’ve published an hour-by-hour schedule of the broadcast and A John Cage Web Reliquary with Videos | Interviews | Writings | Quotes | Timeline | Visual Art | Links.
JC on JC from WNYC (4:57):
Other HV Cage posts.
Just got reminded of this nice article Adam Burke wrote about our little HV operation: High Country News, “Radio: Spice for the ears,” October 2, 2006.
Producers Kara Oehler and Ann Heppermann interview and inventively sound-portray Steve Quinn of NYC’s American Museum of Natural History interview w/ producers). From the Stories from the Heart of the Land series, in the episode The Nature of the Imagination, “A Window in Time” (4:12 mp3):
A couple recent StoryCorps intervus—
Antoinette Franklin (R) and her niece, Iriel Franklin, talk about relocating to Houston after Hurricane Katrina (2:40):
Peg Steinberg and her son, Dan, talk about Peg’s battle with cancer (2:07):
Goggles, GoogleMaps flash Flight Sim (beta)– tres kewl.
via some velvet blog.
Below. a few photos of Ron Mueck pieces, an Australian hyperrealist sculptor, sez Wikipedia. Sez Snopes, “Ron Mueck is a London-based photo-realist artist. Born in Melbourne , Australia , to parents who were toy makers… His work is lifelike but not life size.”
Two Women (2005)
In Bed (2005)
Boy (2000)
Mueck working on “In Bed”
More photos of Mueck scupltures: WA Post | Crazy Russian | James Cohan Gallery
From Current TV, a four-part vid by TAL’s Ira Glass on Storytelling.
On the basics…
On finding great stories…
On great taste…
On two common pitfalls…
via Gregg McVicar- Undercurrents.
Exquisite field recordist (and ex-Cabaret Voltaire band member) Chris Watson has new site up with news, bio, and downloads.
Form Touch Sampler 3, Chris Watson, “Out of Our Sight” (2:59 mp3):
“Motionless anticipation, along the dry sandy banks of the Zambesi a Mozambique nightjar is sucking in all the remaining light.”
This week’s HV cast: The last half of A Hot & Dry Summer Special, hosted by Ben Adair of APM Weekend America: The Quiet American (Aaron Ximm) sound-captures the forbidding warning signs rattling in a harsh wind and “Desert Sun” outside the nuclear Nevada Test Site north of Las Vegas. Back in the early 1990s, SLC producer Scott Carrier found the Basin & Range, near Nevada’s “Battle Mountain,” beautiful, lonely, dreary, and full of sagebrush, solace and stories. And more of Bernie Krause’s Desert Solitudes. A special from Hearing Voices, “Desert Air 2- of 2” (29:00 mp3):
Remember when 4MB of RAM and an 80MB harddrive was bleedin’ edge? Here’s a WordPress theme with some history: Retro MacOS Theme.
via Josef.
I haven’t tried this, but if you have frequent ProTools probs, you might give this shareware a go: ProTools Prefs & Database Helper (Mac 10.4.x). It finds-&-deletes Digidesign databases (.ddb) and preference files (.plist) to help debug Pro Tools perturbations.
An Ars Technica article compiles the latest illegal music download research in “A $13 billion fantasy: latest music piracy study overstates effect of P2P.” These studies conclusively show P2P sharing nets cost the industry somewhere between $0 and $13B ($US) yearly. Doncha just love research?
Another band on the free net label Comfort Stand Recordings I’ve been playing lately (like The Coconut Monkeyrocket) with an affinity for audio appropriation is Martinibomb.
Martinibomb, “The Love God” (4:54 mp3):
Martinibomb, “cha l’ectro cha cha” (5:32 mp3):
In planning our next bike trip I stumbled upon Wikitravel, “a project to create a free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide.” E.g., check Route 66 or Santa Fe Trail, nice play-by-play of the route for travelers.