Month: April 2017

While it might be too obvious to do an Earth Day program, it’s always good to remind ourselves that this tiny jewel is our only home.

Today’s program demonstrates the beauty of our home in music.

This is what’s at stake.

There is something mystical and powerful about the border between earth and water. Change happens here; sometimes subtle, sometime catastrophic, beautiful, terrifying. When a soul stands on that edge, it is transformed; it yearns for a journey, for movement, for something so completely other than the here and now — and magic happens.

The ambient music world is peopled with a wide variety of artists, making music all over the world. With differing focuses on gear, techniques, and sensibilities, the range of expression is vast.

Of those many varied artists, we don’t hear often enough about the women… the X (chromosome) Factor, if you will. As someone said to me recently, however: It’s not a matter of quality, but of exposure. There are more women electronic artists than you might imagine, and today we sample some of their work.

The basic premise of At Water’s Edge is that music is all around us, everywhere, in everything: in the hum of a city, in the pulse of construction machinery or a heartbeat, in footsteps, in laughter, in breath, in the shuffling of an impatient audience…

So our “reboot” show features a survey of recent and archive tracks built around “found sounds” — that is, sounds that occur in the material world. The artists might have altered them, or processed them, or left them as they are and built around them.