At Water’s Edge is back on the air this week, and back at the water’s edge, albeit reluctantly. It is perhaps too obvious, but this week’s topic is “After the Storm.” The music is beautiful, and mournful.

It’s easy to broadly describe the principal color of the warmer seasons as “green”. But the green of spring is vastly different from the green of late summer and early autumn. The light of autumn, with dust in the air and the changing angle of the sun, is warm and beautiful. Even as life is withdrawing for winter, the earth’s cloak becomes its most beautiful.

On this edition of At Water’s Edge, we drift through the greens of autumn with works by metlay!, Arcticology, usr/sbin, EugeneKha, Tony Gerber, poemme, Thom Brennan, Lucette Bourdin, Jack Hertz and Wolfgang Gsell, Altus (of course), M. Nomized, Cloudwalk, and Cousin Silas.

On this edition of At Water’s Edge, another of our challenge episodes, this one having birds as its basis. We received over an hour of music from five artists: Museleon, Glenn Sogge, Skoddie, playman54 and Carbonates on Mars.

The challenge was to take field recordings of coastal North Carolina birds that we recorded, and do… something… with them. As with the frogs, the field recordings had to be the only source material, but artists could do anything they liked with them — cut them up, process them, turn them upside down, whatever. These samples were the source material.

We’re winging it for the rest of the episode (see what I did there?), with tracks from the Radio Spiral library, including works by Bing Satellites, poemme, Robert Dorschel, Specta Ciera, John Vorus, Gregory Bond, Dan Pound, Shawn McClure, and Lucette Bourdin.

This summer has been ridiculously, painfully, destructively hot. 
So what do we do? The only thing we can — we make music.

Even here in North Carolina, where it’s been raining so much that I often have a moat around my house, it’s still hot as blazes (and humid, but that’s a different topic).

Elsewhere, fires rage, and environments unaccustomed to heat are experiencing record-breaking temperatures. So today we illustrate it with music from the RadioSpiral library.

Late summer is its own phenomenon, where the heat settles in, the colors slowly begin to fade and turn golden, and a few leaves already start to fall.

As high summer wanes and the light begins to change, the colors of the earth change. Early harbingers of autumn begin appearing, in random golden leaves, in the occasional fallen branch, in the angle of the sun.

As autumn approaches, the harvest begins to come in. Fruits fall from trees, leaves fall, and although perhaps temperatures haven’t yet begun to follow suit, the feeling is in the air. On this edition of At Water’s Edge, we fall.

Every now and then, it’s nice to take a quiet day. Here in coastal North Carolina, it’s been raining for weeks on end. Today brings that kind of gentle rain that makes it a good day to stay inside.

On such days, one is inspired by gentle pursuits: reading, visiting, listening to quiet music. Today will be a day of droney drift to accompany the drifting rains…

We’ll hear a variety of long form ambient music from some of our favorite artists in the Spiral archives.

On this edition of At Water’s Edge, we bring you another challenge! This is the first of a series of field recording challenges that we have put out, and it seemed appropriate to do this during high summer.

Glenn Sogge caught some lovely, dense sounds in Door County, Wisconsin, and in Troutdale, Oregon. The challenge? Using only these sounds, make music. The artists could alter them however they liked, but the frog files must be the only source material used. The results were misty, mysterious, crunchy and wonderful.

The remainder of the program is devoted to froggy life by way of the RadioSpiral library.

This week’s show theme suggested itself through the weather. It’s been raining off and on for a few days, and the sound of it is rather wonderful here. We feature music of Max Corbacho, Dan Pound, Sensitive Chaos, Robert Rich, Janne Hanhisuanto, Robert Carty, Syndromeda, Thom Brennan, Ari Porki, Forrest Fang, Tim Kays, Palancar, Loren Nerell, and Charles Denler.

Rain has been one of the more popular subjects of music, especially in the ambient genre, for what are probably obvious reasons. Even by itself the sounds of rain evoke their own moods, depending on the nature of the rain itself.

Here in coastal North Carolina, the rain can sometimes be a comfort, but when it comes with tropical winds, can be disastrous. I’m happy to say that lately the rains have fallen in the former category. So today we bring you comfortable rain. Ahhhh…..

Today’s topic was elusive. Something about summer heat, but that might have been too obvious, not to mention overdone. Okay then, something else about being near the water? Yawn. 

But then Mom mentioned the local tales of Blackbeard the pirate, his treasure, and a buried princess. So this edition explores mysteries, secrets, and shadows. We’ll tell you what we know of Blackbeard and his legendary presence in this part of the world.

Today’s episode of At Water’s Edge is called “Origins”; we explore our roots, our beginnings, our origins. That can take many forms, depending on your personal mythos, so we go exploring in the Garden, in polar ice, in the stars, in the roots of trees, and more.

As you may know, recently I moved to a little town on the inland waterways of North Carolina — so, yes, we are still at water’s edge. I’m here for my mother, but interestingly, despite our all scattering to the four winds when we were younger, my father was born in a little town about 50 miles from here, and much of that side of the family has been rooted here for generations.

Our personal beginnings, our cultural beginnings, our planetary beginnings… we all start somewhere, and those starting points all help define who we are individually and collectively. Who we are as individuals is a culmination of all those things, and what we do with the knowledge of those things along the way.