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The Mire

DIY Radio

It's interesting to find pirate radio stations popping up throughout Simon Reynolds's essays on the Hardcore Continuum ( which we've been posting on our site as part of The Wire 300 ) and how important they are for disseminating music that's too quick/difficult for mainstream media to keep up with or handle. In a timely way then, I ran across this video guide on how to build your own low powered radio station, via the free103point9 blog (a NY-based arts radio organisation) from Radio Free Berkeley . I suppose now that podcast technology is fairly common and easy to use the thought of building your own analogue radio station from scratch can seem exhausting if not pointless... Still, maybe broadcasting via the radio spectrum can beat the internet for a feeling of specificity to a place/scene, something that sometimes gets filtered or flattened out through the ease of the Really Simple Syndication of iTunes/Blogger/YouTube/MySpace technology... ...

The Mire

Guitar Craftsman

Keith Rowe and Fred Frith are perpetual reference points for The Wire – two figures who turned the electric guitar on its head (or more accurately on its back). While such techniques aren't exactly mainstream these days – the only tabletop or laptop guitarists from the hit parade who spring to mind are either Nashville Country types or Canadian blues guitarist Jeff Healey – the history of these anti-technique techniques does hang heavy over newer practioners. I imagine those who take a tangential approach to the instrument days get heartily sick of being constantly compared to Rowe and Frith – and rightly so. The tabletop guitar approach can, sometimes, be in danger of being fetished as much as the loose-strapped guitar-slinging style. Weirdly refreshing, then, to watch the video vignettes sent to me by American guitarist Morgan Craft . Because of the visuals you can't see what he's doing with the guitar, and it leaves your mind free to...

The Mire

Adventures In Modern Music 29 January 2009

The Wire's Resonance FM show last thursday was presented by Edwin Pouncey, with tracks by KTL, Khatate and many more, plus a guest mix by the excellent British label Singing Knives (home of Part Wild Horses Mane on Both Sides, The Hunter Gracchus, Stephanie Hladowski, Directing Hand etc). Full tracklisting and download is available in the On Air area of the site now...

The Mire

Wire 300/Reynolds and the Hardcore Continuum

New on www.thewire.co.uk : The February 2009 edition of The Wire is the magazine’s 300th issue. To mark the event, we have commissioned a series of exclusive online essays by a number of our regular writers and contributors that examine various musical trends and initiatives that have emerged during the lifetime of the zine (ie since the publication of its first issue back in the summer of 1982), and that still inform, influence and animate our world today. The essays will be posted here regularly throughout February. As part of The Wire 300 online, we're putting up all of Simon Reynolds's essays documenting the rise of Hardcore, Jungle, Garage ... and beyond. Simon's new introduction is now online, plus pieces on Hardcore Rave and Ambient Jungle . Further articles will be going up daily. For me, it's not an exaggeration to say that, without this writing, I might...

The Mire

ISB on Resonance

Great looking show on Resonance FM tonight: ISB January 27th, 2009 · No Comments This evenings Clear Spot is produced and presented by Ed Baxter. Ed discusses the musical career of lysergic Scots folk experimentalists The Incredible String Band with Adrian Whittaker. Whittaker is the author of Be Glad: An Incredible String Band Compendium. Hux Records have recently released Tricks of the Senses, a collection of rareties assembled and annotated by Adrian (reviewed here by The Guardian’s Robin Denselow). Ed also - via telephone - talks to Mike Heron, Robin Williamson, Malcolm LeMaistre and Rose Simpson about the past and present. Genesis P. Orridge, Salman Rushdie, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Séamus Ennis, Bob Fass, Alex Harvey and Joe Boyd are among those name-checked. Plus exclusive audio and an update on the search for Licorice. Clear Spot, Tuesday 27 January, 8pm - 9pm. Ed wrote a British Folk primer for us, back in...

The Mire

You can't get with Mr Smith

Sometimes the development of music technology is quite breathtaking – think of Final Scratch, Ableton Live, all those real-time scratch and processing programmes. Microsoft's Songsmith falls way, way, way, outside this category, to such a degree it's quite astonishing. A programme designed so you can just sing into a microphone, and it'll pick up the melodies and concoct an appropriate backing you. The results are, without exception, jawdroppingly , side-splittingly appalling . You can pretty much hear the mix of rigid, codified algorithms (switching between simple chord progressions where the voice allows) and random melodic detours (just to keep things moving along). Essentially, they've managed the perfect simulation of a hotel bar band desperately vamping along when they've got no idea where the tune is going. A reminder that, in these days of fuzzy logic and artificial intelligence, computer software can still sound astonishingly luddite.

The Mire

Funky on Rinse FM

Like many, I've been warming to Funky, the [rather weirdly named] new thing on London Pirate Radio stations like Rinse FM . Perhaps we'll warm to the name itself after a while; 'funky house', the label which used to be listed on flyers plastered on lamp posts for over-25s raves all over the M25 Orbital area, suggested an attempt to organify house, to give it a certain feng-shui'd, ergonomic ease of use. Funky, though, is significantly different, and it's understandable that the second part of the moniker has been dropped. So 'Funky; will do for now. Of course, 'Grime' sounded weird to start with, but now perfectly captures the cold-concrete intensity of the music. Listening to Rinse FM sets by Fingerprint and Marcus Nasty, the elements of soca and dancehall are pretty subtle, but are such an essential ingredient. It's often moving against the 4/4 beat, generating that push and pull feel which gives it a feeling of democracy, somehow (ie, you...

The Mire

Ready for the breakdown

A study reported in The Guardian , suggesting an inverse relationship between complexity in pop and fluctuations in the stock market ( "Beyoncé's new single spells economic doom" ) is the kind of thing that gives studying pop music a bad name. Apparently, Phil Maymin, New York University's professor of finance and risk engineering (the job title is intriguingly vague whether he's pro or anti risk) suggests that the prevalence of singles with "low 'beat variance'" often coincides with the stock market being due for a fall. The most obvious flaw in this is that Beyonce's new single is actually, in a post-Timbaland style, actually pretty sophisticated. There's a lurking sub-base in there, an offbeat (and atonal) keyboard lick through the verse, and a Joey Beltram style Mentasm stab in the chorus. The dance moves it demands are the kind of elliptical hip swaying of the video, not some kind of skinhead stomp. It almost makes me wonder if R&B; might...