hearts of space | news

Pgm 807 "GOSSAMER" : Week of June 29TH...

Texture in music is not something you hear much about. Yet it's fundamental to the sound of music and the musical experience, a result of instrumental combinations, rhythms, timbres, harmonies, and how you put it all together. Today we have almost total control of musical texture in the studio.

The much-reviled new age genre is full of artists and composers who create amazingly sophisticated textures in their recordings. Like most things, it's worth taking the time to find the good ones — their refined sounds can take you emotional places worth going. On this transmission of Hearts of Space we'll try to do just that, on a textural-melodic journey called GOSSAMER.

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Pgm 806 "INDIAN SUMMER SOLSTICE" : Week of June 22nd...

The buttery softness of the bansuri flute is a good indication that we're headed into the dreamy, sensual world of Indian music this time. When it comes to quietly ecstatic, subtly skillful music making, Indian classical music is hard to beat; these days it's often enhanced by electronics and a bit of studio magic. And here at the official beginning of summer, it's just the thing to get you in tune and flowing with the season.

Music is by ANOUSHKA SHANKAR (Ravi's daughter), JAI UTTAL and BEN LEINBACH, CHINMAYA DUNSTER, PAUL AVGERINOS, MANOSE SINGH, DAVID PARSONS, and AL GROMER KHAN. It's a warm weather raga...on this summer solstice edition of Hearts of Space.

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Radio Channel update

All new programs today:

1      805      EQUILIBRIUM    a Middle Eastern electrofusion journey
2      804      DOWNTEMPO TO SPACE   from electrogrooves to electrospheres
3      797      WORLDS BEYOND   a cosmic electronic journey
4      794      ACROSS THE VIEW   a RICHARD BURMER retrospective
5      777      HALL OF MIRRORS   a journey through the electronic looking glass
6      780      ALEGRIA   the romantic, playful, epic music of Cirque du Soleil
7      773      CIRCADIAN RHYTHMS   slow music for those fast summer nights
8      766      FLOATING GARDENS   globally warmed spacemusic for summer
9      739      AFRICA WEST 2   the quiet side of the west African soundscape
10    741      SUMMERTRONICA 2   warm-blooded ambient for high summer
11    735      SUMMERTONES 2   searching for the slow, deep sound of summer
12    737      INDIAN SUMMER   sultry charms of the Indian soundscape
13    637      THE WOOD   the Arabic oud and its progeny, ancient and modern
14    672      DUENDE   a journey in the Andalusian soundscape
15    699      BLUE IN GREEN   lyrical space jazz for summer
16    632      GATHERING SPIRITS   a journey in the tribal-ambient soundscape
17    627      KINETIC FLOW   the moving sound of electronic spacemusic
18    455      EQUATOR   the spacemusic of heat
19    531      AFRICA NORTH   an Arabic desert-rim journey to Africa North
20    532      SLOW HEAT   globally warmed spacemusic for summer
21    233      LAGOON   an etheric journey in the tropical soundscape

Pgm 696 "POSSIBLE MUSICS" : Week of June 15th...

The unearthly lead instrument at the start is a trumpet, alchemically transformed beyond recognition by maverick avant-garde composer JON HASSELL and producer BRIAN ENO. It's hard to convey how revolutionary this music sounded when it was released in 1980. The album kicked off a projected series called "Fourth World" music — a fusion of Third World ethnic sources and sophisticated electronics. Hassell pronounced the genre "classical by structure, popular by textural appeal, global-minded."

On this transmission of Hearts of Space, we track the evolution of the Fourth-World vision to a new generation, on a program called POSSIBLE MUSICS. Artists include STEVE ROACH, VIR UNIS, AMIR BAGHIRI and BRANNAN LANE, BIFF JOHNSON, APERUS and ALPHA WAVE MOVEMENT.

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Pgm 805 "EQUILIBRIUM" : Week of June 8th...

Today the mediasphere is alive with a new kind of "world music." The old masters of the great ethnic traditions have a global audience, while DJ's sample beats and create new mixes for the intelligent dance floor. Almost any musician can have their own studio and release their music worldwide online — with photos, video and text on sites like MySpace.com. The good ones travel, perform, and build worldwide networks of collaborators and audience. The Internet ties it all together. For these musicians, even in the midst of all the political struggles of today — it really is a new world.

On this transmission of Hearts of Space, a journey in the Middle Eastern electronic fusion zone called EQUILIBRIUM, with music by SMADJ, MERCAN DEDE, STELLAMARA, ANOUAR BRAHEM, MICHEL BABABILA, PAUL AVGERINOS, ELIYAHU SILLS and more.

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Category tweak: Ambient/Downtempo

Our sharp-eyed users (you know who you are) will undoubtedly notice this, so here's the official story:

After about five years on active duty, we are retiring our old Genre listing Ambient/Trance/Techno in favor of the simpler and more accurate Ambient/Downtempo. All the tables and menus in both the RADIO and ALBUMS sections have been updated to reflect this.

While there was some wiggle room in the meaning of these terms in 2001, at this point Techno generally refers to an established category of electronic dance music, and so does Trance. While the term "trance" can also describe spacey psychoacoustic electronic music, we already had a category for that: Electronic Space.

Ambient remains a bit of a catch-all term, and seems to be serving its purpose in the taxonomy of atmospheric music — namely, contemporary atmospheric/electronic music that is not organized around new age ideas and images, even if it sounds virtually identical. Thank you, Brian Eno, we're stickin' with it.

In cases that are ambiguous, we will simply assign the album, track or program to multiple genres, including our own "catch-all" — Contemporary Instrumental.

New ALBUMS section navigation page

Today we promoted a new feature to the live site we've been working on for the last few weeks — a new "albums navigation" page. To see it, just click the ALBUMS button on the main menu bar. [NOTE: If you've already loaded the site before reading this, you'll need to hit the "refresh" button on your browser to reload the menu bar with the new link. Then click ALBUMS and stand back!]

The reason for this new feature is that we quietly doubled the size of the albums section of the site about two weeks ago, and our old method of loading all the albums in one long page just got too unwieldy. [You can still do it the old way if you want by clicking the category links — ARTIST, TITLE, GENRE or LABEL —in the black "sub-navigation" bar for the albums section, but we think most people will use the new page, which gives much more choice and control.]

All the new titles in the Albums section come from the Celestial Harmonies family of labels: Celestial Harmonies, Fortuna, and Kuckuck. We've had a very cordial and productive 20+ year relationship with Eckart Rahn, the man behind these fine labels, and we're delighted to be able to feature this special selection from their vast catalog.

The list of new additions reads like a "who's who" of early and middle period HOS programs: Chaitanya Deuter, Peter Michael Hamel, Popol Vuh, Eberhard Schoener, Steve Roach, David Parsons, and many more. Full access subscribers can now stream any or all of these classic albums, either whole or by the track.

Over time we'll be adding more labels and individual artists to the ALBUMS section to realize our vision of a "dream collection" of space, ambient and contemplative music online. One day it might even be bigger than the RADIO collection. And because we're negotiating direct licenses with the source labels and artists, we'll be able to offer downloads of many of these titles as well.  Ooops! I think I just spilled our next project...

:: Stephen Hill

Pgm 804 "DOWNTEMPO TO SPACE" : Week of June 1st...

In these hypercreative high tech times we live in, new styles of electronic music have the half life of rare atomic particles. Yet while the sounds, the styles and the artists change, the goal of the music stays relatively constant. Whether it's all about stirring you up...cooling you out...or creating a soundscape to work, dream or discover in — each generation finds its own way to do it. On this transmission of HEARTS of SPACE, we dance off and float home, on an electronic journey from DOWNTEMPO TO SPACE.

Music is by REINMAR HENSCHKE, THRILLSEEKERS, SEQUENOX, PARALLEL WORLDS, ELUV, SATORI, ARCHETRIBE, HAR, and CYBERCHUMP.

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