Bill & Bjork

Tune in to Yarra Valley FM 99.1 this Thursday (March 1) from 9 pm to catch some great ambient music on SoundScape. You can also get it streamed live from the website.  

Our first ambient artist is Billy McLaughlin. Billy is an acoustic guitarist, composer and producer from Minnesota, United States. McLaughlin has won the Minnesota Music Award 5 times. He has recorded on the Narada label. He has released 17 albums.

Billy is of Irish ancestry, and graduated with honors from the University of Southern California. McLaughlin now resides in his home state of Minnesota where he is raising his two boys. 

In 2005 Billy announced via his website that he is suffering from focal dystonia, which severely limits his ability to play guitar. He then began teaching himself to play his distinctive hammering style "left-handed," with the neck of the guitar toward his right shoulder. A documentary entitled "Changing Keys" was made about this phase of his career. 

He returned to performing publicly in 2006 both solo and with his band. During his December 2006 concerts with Simple Gifts, the quartet he formed in 2005 to play Christmas music, he performed the hammering style left-handed and more traditional strumming style right-handed, using separate sets of guitars tuned for the manner in which he was playing. 

Our second artist is well known, but perhaps under-played. Bjork is such an eccentric artist that I simply can't do her justice with a short blurb on this blog... I recommend you start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bj%C3%B6rk then go here: www.bjork.com

Our Goon Show this week will be 'The Stolen Postman'.

Do your head in...

Tune in to SoundScape this Thursday (Feb 16) on YVFM 99.1 for wonderful ambient music, or get it streamed live from the 'net.

We will be featuring the music of London based ambient group Blackfilm, who  are seeped in dark, atmospheric and epic cinematic pieces, with orchestral nuances and muffled piano (“Interference”), spectral voices and effective interlude transitions. “Blackfilm” brings a post-structuralist film noir quality to the forefront of pieces characterized as sweeping, ghostly, orchestral, downtempo and, of course, epic. Brilliant “Stalingrad” figures prominently in this idea; its ten-minute duration encompasses abandoned Cold War ambience and ominous post-urban sibilance alike.

Our Goon Show will be 'The Kippered Herring Gang'.

Enter the drone zone

I'm back on deck, and you can tune in to SoundScape to hear some wonderful ambient music this Thursday (Feb 9) from 9 pm on Yarra Valley FM 99.1 or get it streamed live from the website.

We will feature some music by Sheila Chandra, who was born in London, of Indian descent.

She started of singing pop numbers, but soon became dissatisfied with keeping that up.

Chandra went on to release a number of albums in the 1980s, at times experimenting with her voice as an instrument through a range of techniques. In the 1990s she released three albums on Peter Gabriel's Real World label, these were in the minimalist ‘solo voice and drone’ style which she developed especially for live performances, so that she could perform alone on stage with only the occasional taped drone for accompaniment.

Vocal stamina issues caused her to abandon live performances in 1994 and she only returned to the concert stage in 2007.

Our Goon Show will be 'The Policy'.

AWOL

This Thursday (Feb 2) SoundScape will be hosted by a guest Presenter. Straight from 'The Bat Cave', Dom 'BB' Troughton will be serving up his selection of great ambient tracks. BB has given me a hint of what's on the menu, and it includes John Cale, Nick Cave, Warren Ellis, Michael Nyman, Harold Budd with Ravi Shankar. 

Knowing  BB, he'll divert into strange and unfamiliar territory along the way, so be prepared for some surprises!

Tune in from 9 pm to YVFM 99.1 or get it streamed live from the website.

The Goons will be 'The Missing Battleship'.

Ambient Australia Fair

Tune in to SoundScape this Thursday from 9 pm (Jan 26) to celebrate ambient music on Australia Day. 

YVFM 99.1, also streamed live from the website.

We will have a definite Oz flavour to our ambient, with Australian artists such as Catherine Duc, David Hudson, Oren Ambarchi, Dead Can Dance, Pendulum, Inauditus, Steve Roach and Sarah Hopkins.

From ancient didge drones to elec guitar to 'I'm not sure how to describe it', we cover years of Australian ambient.

Our Goon Show will be 'The Giant Bombardon'.

70's Vinyl gems

For some wonderful ambient music, tune in to SoundScape on YVFM 99.1 or get it streamed from the website. This Thursday (19-01-12) we will be traveling back to the mid 70's with some vinyl.

First up will be a couple of pieces from the legendary Rick Wakeman's 'Journey to the Centre of the Earth'. 

Then we will be able to really spin out with side 2 of Alan Parson's seminal album 'Tales of Mystery and Imagination'.

The Goon Show this week will be 'The Red Fort'.

Salvaging Britney Spears

Tune in this Thursday (Jan 12) from 9 pm on YVFM 99.1 or get it streamed live from the website.

SoundScape will be exploring the concept of salvaging songs this week. Recycling and re-using isn't just for milk bottles and tyres, as intangibles such as music can also be given the rescue treatment. After all there's a lot of music out there that would be much better if only someone would change it, recycle it, revamp it or resample it.

And I found a lot of that happening out there. Taking a tune that has been made for commercial success, which, let's face it, is what commercial radio is all about, and taking it beyond its original 3 minute pop diva soundbite is an ambient experiment that is catching on. 

The most used concept is to slow the whole song down by 800%. This can be a success on a wide variety of music genres. We will be playing a range from the mundanity of Justin Bieber, to the pure bubble-gum pop from the likes of Britney Spears and Beyonce, to the still commercially acceptable avante garde of Lady Gaga, to the harder edged Eminem and Portal, to theme music like The X-Files and Flight of the Bumblebee, to the realm of your computer with Windows themes and the Nyan Cat, all the way to luminaries such as Edith Piaff and the Chemical Brothers.

The Goon Show this week will be 'The Space Age'.