The Player Piano was the Tupac Hologram of its day. The most thrilling of our inventions are the ones that return to us a person we’ve lost or that recall a scene from the past that we couldn’t have experienced or a place we couldn’t have known. There’s a rush, a kind of zipwire effect. [...]
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Posted 22 April 2012
† Steve Bowbrick
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Also tagged: 2Pac, BBC, Broadcasting House, classical, history, Igor Stravinsky, Media, memory, Pianola, Playel, Radio3, rapper, recording, reproduction, Rex Lawson, Tupac Shakur, uncanny
I love a bed. I should leave it to a radio production expert to explain what I mean by a bed, but since I don’t have one to hand, a ‘bed’ is the radio term for sound (usually music) played under the presenter’s voice during a link. In music radio it stops things going dead, [...]
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Posted 13 April 2012
† Steve Bowbrick
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Also tagged: 6Music, Africa, audio, background, BBC, bed, DJ, Gilles Peterson, John Humphrys, Liberia, location, presenter, radio, Radio1, Radio4, Sound, studio, Today, Zane Lowe
The ‘Spirit of Schubert’ finished a week ago. It was Radio 3′s biggest ‘takeover’ yet – over 200 hours of output devoted exclusively to the work of Franz Schubert. Every one of his ‘performable works’ was played, many in brand new versions, some for the first time ever. It was a remarkable thing – and [...]
Everybody knows the best book about Twentieth Century music is Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise but there’s another brilliant book set in the same period – Wilfrid Sheed’s The House That George Built, a history of the golden age of American popular music. It’s about the generations of American songwriters, starting at the turn [...]
A remarkable story about Victorian platform innovation Radio is in flux. First-wave digital platforms are in danger of being eclipsed – even before they’ve achieved anything like full adoption. Second-wave platforms are evolving fast, but usable over-the-air IP – a kind of holy grail – is probably years away so radio stations are investing in [...]
It has been my privilege, over the last few years, to write a few pieces for Britain’s best music (and arts and movies and stuff) magazine The Word – including, a couple of issues back, an article about the curation boom (my articles about Wikipedia and archiving the web are on the web site). The [...]
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Posted 04 June 2011
† Steve Bowbrick
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Also tagged: CD, covermount, curation, economics, editor, free, magazine, Media, Publishing, select, word
You might want to know: I work at BBC Radio but these are the opinions of a civilian radio nut and not those of the BBC. I’ve developed a bit of a radio crush on a new station called Amazing Radio. Amazing‘s a national digital station mounting a head-on challenge to the music radio status [...]
6 Music ran a lovely series of programmes about this year’s Mercury nominees. They did a simple thing and recorded the artists introducing the tracks, describing the inspiration and the creative process for each song. It’s like watching a movie with the director’s commentary switched on. Superb night-time radio (and unimpeachable public service output – [...]
Radio 3 have improved the quality of their live online stream – it’s an experiment called #PromsXHQ (‘XHQ’ for Extra High Quality). For the final week of the Proms you can listen at 320kb/s AAC: a big improvement but not, on the face of it, a big deal. I think it’s important, though.Why? 1. It’s [...]
Everyone says music is getting more physical again. We continue to get our daily sounds from ever more insubstantial sources, floating above us like those glittering landscapes in Neuromancer, but we’re going to more concerts and festivals than ever and buying more stuff while we’re at it (merch. fancy limited editions. Even musical instruments are [...]
