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PGM 573R "SONGS WITHOUT WORDS" : Week of August 28th...

If the synthesizer freed composers to create new sounds, and the electronic studio enabled them to create new sound images, then the equivalent liberation for singers would be to abandon words...and create a language of pure sound.

These are what vocalist LISA GERRARD calls shapes: improvised, but precisely felt sounds that meet the emotional demands of the music — but are free from the restrictions of words.

But language has been called no less than "the defining characteristic of human civilization," "the one prime mover of human evolution...technology and social achievements."

Yet the tradition of singing without words has a long history. It extends deep into ancient cultures, moves though folk, sacred and choral music, and has been reinvented today by jazz and avant garde singers — and a new generation of vocalists, searching for a broadly inclusive spirituality in their music: a non-verbal language of the soul.

On this 25th Anniversary retrospective series edition of Hearts of Space, a  program called SONGS WITHOUT WORDS. Music is by THOMAS BARQUEE, STEPHAN MICUS, LISA GERRARD, DAVID HYKES and the HARMONIC CHOIR, VAS, and THOMAS OTTEN.

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PGM 885 "MAGIC CARPET" : Week of August 21st...

The power of music to create mental travelogues is one of its most distinctive qualities. But if you just listen to the instruments and the notes, you miss the proverbial forest for the trees. You have to let it take you away.

The "magic carpet" of biblical myth had a similar power: floating on air, it could take you anywhere. On this program, the art of travel by sound: we'll follow a path through a series of sonic worlds, flying to a place of rare beauty and deep feeling on waves of sound called MAGIC CARPET.

Music is by OPEN CANVAS, STEVE ROACH & JEFFREY FAYMAN, TONE GHOST ETHER, FORREST FANG, HANS CHRISTIAN, SIVIA NAKKACH, and TIM CLARK.

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PGM 884 "AFRICAN HEARTBEAT" : Week of August 14th...

The music of the vast African continent is many-faceted and influential. Our colleagues at the public radio program AFROPOP have built a 20-year series around it. For Hearts of Space, the search for African sounds is a bit of a challenge — by far the largest proportion is infectious dance music with a joy-per-minute index that's off the charts.

Yet along with the dancing and celebration, we find moving ballads, lullabies, ambient and contemplative pieces, especially in the West African countries of Mali and Senegal. It's a rhythmic, soulful sound, featuring melodic percussion instruments like the mbira and the balafon, and the West African harp called the kora.

On this transmission of Hearts of Space, another journey into the quieter rhythms of the African soundscape called AFRICAN HEARTBEAT, with music by MAMELANG, SAMITE, VIEUX FARKA TOURE, TAJ MAHAL & TOUMANI DIABATE, OMAR KA, BAABA MAAL, KEVIN NATHANIEL, LUDOVICO EINAUDI & BALLAKE SISSOKO, and BOB HOLROYD.

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Under the hood

The things we do, beloved spacefans, the things we do.

Like having our intrepid webmaster JOSEPH JACOBS and our equally intrepid programmer STEPHEN BROSSEAU spend the last two weeks rebuilding the online databases that make possible the magic that is HOS.com.

This is some very geeky stuff, I admit. But oh, so necessary.

Not only because all of our content navigation, program and album table listings, program playlists and all the Now Playing information aka metadata displayed in our spiffy new Flash player comes from this database — not only that, but your sacred personal favorites and your hard-won personal playlists also find their digital home there.

So when we mess with our online database, we do it ever so carefully, because if it gets screwed up...well, let's just say you wouldn't be happy with us, and we'd be even more unhappy.

You can't make this stuff up: moving to Flash to deliver our streams required us to create two new databases that lived on our two Flash servers, in addition to the primary database that lives on our web server. This meant three databases in three different data centers in three different states. Does this sound like a recipe for trouble?

The problem is keeping all the data in sync, and keeping it safe. We only change our program data once a week, but our user data changes every minute of every day. And mission-critical data must be backed up, which is even harder when it's always changing and you have three different databases to back up.

Long story short, having three separate databases just didn't work very well.

So we rebuilt the whole system from the ground up. Now all three servers (web and Flash) get what they need from the same database. This master database automatically copies itself to a backup database every time you make a new favorite or we add a new program. It's safer, more secure, and a whole lot simpler than the old system.

Safe journey :: SH

PGM 883 "DESERT REALMS" : Week of August 7th...

The desert...a place where sun, heat, wind and sand conspire to make life a challenge for even the strongest organisms.

For humans, it's where civilization ends, and we confront the earth at its most elemental —
vast space, rugged terrain, extreme conditions, contemplative solitude, and often, eerie silence. It's no wonder the desert continues to be a major source of inspiration for ambient musicians.

On this transmission of Hearts of Space, another superheated journey in dehydrated spaces called DESERT REALMS. Music is by STEVE ROACH & BYRON METCALF, RUDY ADRIAN, BRUNO SANFILIPPO & MAX CORBACHO, and MARTIN, KLAMPT & ROWND.

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