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PGM 928 'APPARITIONS' : week of October 29th...

[BORIS KARLOFF]  Scorpio...gateway to the underworld. Once again we return to the dark times, the world of witches and sorcerers, ghosts and goblins, spirits...and shades. It's an emotional terrain encoded in our genes: ancient and primal, ruled by fear and revulsion, death and decay...an atavistic legacy from the days when magic and mystery ruled the earth.

Today, we have Dark Ambient Electronica to exorcise those lingering demons, an art form that conjures up strange, disturbing, melancholy worlds...with sound. Think of it as sonic therapy for your inner phantoms.

On this transmission of Hearts of Space, a ghostly, necromantic journey for Halloween, on a program called APPARITIONS. Music is by CIRCULAR, VOICE OF EYE, SOUNDING THE DEEP, DAN POUND, HUMAN METRONOME & 33 TETRAGAMMON, ROBERT RICH & B.LUSTMORD, and TOR LUNDVALL.

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PGM 927 'RUSSET and AMBER' : week of October 22nd...

In the history of brilliant unintended consequences, the cello...ranks high. A descendant of the bass violin, it was invented by Italian luthiers in the 17th century, and based on a technical innovation: to make the instrument smaller, they wrapped gut strings with wire to augment the bass.

The cello's musical roles expanded rapidly in the 18th century due to its more convenient size and versatility. Today, no western instrument has the emotional range and depth; from its foundational role in the orchestra and the string quartet, to its uncanny vocal emulations and profound solo flights...the cello seems to have no boundaries.

On this transmission of Hearts of Space, we feature the dark harmonies and plaintive tones of the cello, on an autumnal soundscape called RUSSET and AMBER. Music is by DAVID DARLING, MARTIN TILLMAN, HANS CHRISTIAN, MAYA BEISER, and ANGELE DUBEAU.

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PGM 926 'THE CROSSING' : week of october 15th...

Rolling down the on-ramp to autumn...the world is changing faster now. The last warm days of Indian summer are a brief blaze of glory in a fading world. The light mellows, then burns, as the color palette deepens. Fruit trees make a final effort, drop their seeds, then retire for the winter. Acorns bang on the roof, and the squirrels work overtime to gather the crop. Birds head south, as spent leaves skitter across withered fields. Soon, the rains will come, with life-giving water for the next cycle.

On this transmission of Hearts of Space...we echo these changes with an ambient-electronic journey for autumn called THE CROSSING. It's a metaphor for the challenge of an epic journey across great distance and uncertain fate, with music of deep drones and complex timbres.

Music is by DAVID HELPLING & JON JENKINS, STEVE ROACH, PHILLIP WILKERSON, and STEVE BRAND.

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PGM 925 'CONJURING the ETERNAL' : Week of October 8th...

The folk music of the Eastern edge of Europe — Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Moldavia and Macedonia — has its own harmonic signature and vocal expression.

It's a sound that carried the emotions of ordinary people across time during a period when music was nothing but "user generated content" — part of a cultural arc that stretched across popular, secular and sacred music, and (in the words of Hungarian ethnomusicologist IREN LOVASZ) "a helper and healer in life-and-death situations and the events that turn and shape one's fate."

On this transmission of Hearts of Space...a collection of Eastern European songs, traditional and newly inspired, on a program called CONJURING THE ETERNAL. Music is by MARTA SEBESTYEN, IRINA MIKHAILOVA, STELLAMARA, IREN LOVASZ, MISHA ALPERIN, and BRIAN KEANE & OMAR FARUK TEKBILEK.

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Hearts of Space iPhone app goes live!

Well, it was like watching the proverbial paint dry, but on October 7th Apple finally approved our iPhone app and released it to the app store. Here's the link to the app page at Apple.com. If you want to download the app directly on your iPhone, search for "hearts of space" in the App Store app. It'll cost you the grand total of 99 cents, which will buy some beer and pizza for our programmers.

As an introductory special, we've opened up access to THIS WEEK'S SHOW without a subscription. If you don't already have an account, just register for free — you can do it within the app. Once you've entered you email and password once, the app will remember it and sign you in automatically.You can use the same email address and password for free service on our main web site using our Flash player.

To use all the features of the app, you need either our "AAA" All Archive Access Plan, OR, our "Radio Channel + This Week's Show" combo plan. To keep the price as low as possible, you have to do this on our web site, not in the app.

The app has one feature that we have yet to introduce on our web service: if you have either of the plans above, you can skip a show in the Radio Channel if you'd prefer to hear something else. Just tap the >>| icon on the Now Playing screen.

Here's what it looks like (click the image for a full size view):

     

A BIG FAT THANKS to ace programmers PAUL YAGO and JOHN ZORKO, project manager JOSEPH JACOBS, code wrangler and API spinner STEPHEN BROSSEAU, and project nervous system and customer support LEYLA HILL. Yours truly did the graphics.

It's really nice to finally see this thing out in the world! Now, on to Android...

:: SH

PGM 816R 'BORDERLANDS' : Week of October 1st...

A border can be a boundary...or a grey area — a line of demarcation...or a zone of ambiguity.

Borders between countries are political boundaries; they can be the scene of violent confrontation, as in the Middle East, or so remote that few people ever see them.

Outside of politics, a border can be a barrier...or a zone of transition. In music, we often find ambiguous borders between styles and genres — in fact, much of today's fusion music is interesting because it deliberately disregards borders. There's a lot of information...at the borders.

On this transmission of Hearts of Space, a journey in ambiguous, transitional spaces called...BORDERLANDS. Music is by RUSSEL WALDER, EVAN BARTHOLOMEW, DEBORAH MARTIN & J.ARIF VERNER, KIT WATKINS, AMONGST MYSELVES, and RICHARD BONE.

[ view playlist ] [ view Flickr image gallery ] [ play 30 second MP3 promo ]