Tuesday, November 22, 2005

Tuesday Afternoon Loose Ends

As I type this I am listening to a Red House Painters cover of a Cars song, "All Mixed Up," and, as usual, Mark Kozelek, the man behind Sun Kil Moon, makes it haunting and remade and wonderful. I wrote about *Tiny Cities* in the blurb about last week's This Week's. Last night on All Things Considered, Will Hermes had an audio review of *Tiny Cities.* The review includes snippets of songs from the album and from Modest Mouse. You can listen to it here.

Speaking of NPR, this morning's Morning Edition had this audio article about the financial/business struggles of the ogres and trolls over at Clearchannel Radio. The gist? They are soulless fatbastards who apparently are not as good at fatbastarding as they thought they were. None of you need to read a screed against commercial radio, and I don't need to write one, but it's good to hear that their business model of flooding markets with sound-alikes is struggling. Mind you, it might be Clearchannel's incompetence more than consumer rejection of the formatting. I'd like to think the latter, but I can't envision a public clamor for stations broadcasting much different than what they do.

Speaking of radio: I was listening to the Red House Painter cut on www.kexp.org, a public radio station out of Seattle. Check out the website: it has different streaming choices, offers podcasts, and archives live performances in their studio and programs up to two weeks after broadcast. Weeknight between 6pm - 9pm PST they have specialty programs: two of them, Best Ambience on Mondays, Wo'Pop on Tuesdays, offer three hours each of African music and world music, respectively; when I can't listen live, I use the archives - I don't miss one. Most of the time kexp broadcasts Variety Mix. Each of the DJs (who have as much autonomy as possible) has a different sound, and you can go back through the playlists to get a sense of each personality. Me, I recommend Stevie Zoom, Monday and Tuesday nights between 9pm - 1pm PST and Sunday afternoons 12pm - 3pm PST. He has the largest palette of the bunch. (And as a bonus, I waited until this week to mention kexp - if you tune in for a taste, you'll have missed last week's fundraising drive. You're welcome.) blckdgrd.

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