Transmissions from Echo Beach with Derek Westerholm and DJ Babs:
Playlist
from September 21, 2023
 |
View Derek Westerholm's profile
|
 |
View DJ Babs's profile
|
Description: Exuberance/Ebullience, banter, possibly an interview, context and connection, the familiar, the strange.
Find: Symphonies of Treble, Words Of Expectation, stab, skronk, shimmer, sheen, The New Sound of Now, Ideas for Walls, pleasure, pith, Flutter and Wow, Motorik, cowbells, disco akimbo, at least one Cantankerous Singer, The German Language, shards of glass, Ethiopian Punk, organic, synthetic, sawtooths & squarewaves, Library Riffage, yesterday's recipes, the wrong speed, intentional static, floating, ethereal, time and timelessness.
Thursday
8 - 10pm
(EST)
|
On
WFMU's
Sheena's Jungle Room
<-- Previous playlist | Back to Transmissions from Echo Beach with Derek Westerholm and DJ Babs playlists | Next playlist -->
Pop-up player!
(* = new)
| Artist | Track | Album | Label | Year | Comments | New | Approx. start time |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Music behind DJ: Sounds of the Ocean |
Beach Sounds
|
Ocean Sounds |
Sounds Of The Ocean |
2016 |
0:00:00 (Pop-up) |
||
| ? | 1950's or 60's Technology Commercial | - | - | ? | Ah, technology in the mid-20th century! | 0:00:19 (Pop-up) | |
| We Are The Physics |
Go Go Nucleo -> For Science
|
Your Friend, The Atom | This Is Fake DIY Records | 2012 | "We Are the Physics hailed from Glasgow, Scotland, and were founded in 2005. Originally known as We Are the Physics Club And Therefore, Everything We Say Is Fact, the quartet claim inspiration from bands such as Devo, The Skids, Polysics, Buddy Holly and Ex Models, and described their sound as "mutant science punk rock" (described by them as "...a way to make fairly derivative sound more interesting"). They have played gigs with Art Brut, Polysics, You Say Party! We Say Die!, Desaparecidos (band) and Thirty Seconds to Mars and have appeared on Marc Riley's Brain Surgery on BBC 6 Music. In a concert review, the BBC said of vocalist Michael M: "he doesn’t actually sing so much as run around like one of those aliens from Mars Attacks"." | 0:01:01 (Pop-up) | |
Music behind DJ: P.E. |
Motion Studies
|
NOPE Tapes Vol. 3 |
Wharf Cat Records |
2023 |
Released Sep 19, ahead of next month's next album... "New York experimental post-punk/electronic group P.E. are returning with the next installment of their NOPE Tapes series. NOPE Tapes Vol. 3 is out October 6 via Wharf Cat... ...A further exploration of the group’s pursuit of genreless shapes and improvisational funk creations... P.E. are playing a tape-release party at Knitting Factory at Baker Falls in New York City on October 11." |
* |
0:02:41 (Pop-up) |
| Devo |
Recombo DNA
|
Recombo DNA | Rhino / Warner Archives | 1977 / 2000 | "Recombo DNA comes from just after the era of recordings which produced both volumes of 'Hardcore Devo' on Rykodisc. Devo were in an inspired compositional fury during those post-basement Summer Of '77 punk-suffused years and the recordings from that time reflect their new emphasis on guitars and the distinctive addition of Alan Meyers on percussion. This recording was likely part of a series of 4-track demos which the newly reconstituted Devo was then prolifically producing, however, the original 4-track reel containing it could not be located. Our source was a first generation reference casssette mixdown from this reel." | 0:07:24 (Pop-up) | |
| Research Reactor Corp. |
Teenage Labrat
|
The Collected Findings Of The Research Reactor Corporation | Erste Theke Tonträger | 2020 |
Sydney, AUS punk weirdos... The lead singer explains - "BILLY: [Laughs] We’re definitely a goofy band! Which I guess it’s why it’s so fun to write and play the stuff. Obviously we take a lot of influence from Devo and The Screamers. Without trying to be too much of a theme band and flog a dead horse with the same idea all the time, initially we thought we’ll create a story for it and pretend it’s a corporation. A theme we talk about is nuclear war, without us being a fucking crust band, we’re more like ‘The googles do nothing!’ off The Simpsons [laughs]. We’re like a goofy the-world-is-ending-but-who-cares thing. It’s like we’re a cartoon or like Toxic Avenger or [Class Of] Nuke ‘Em High! We’ll see a scene of like a guy’s face melting and think it would be funny and use it like, oh your boss’ face is melting because you threw a chemical on them, and we’ll run with that and write a whole song about it [laughs]. //// We take little shreds, little elements of bands we like and make it our own. Me and Ishka are big fans of a lot of the goofy stuff coming out of the Midwest of America. The Coneheads are obviously a big one or CCTV or Goldman Sex Batalion, Big Zit, a lot of the bands that Mat Williams and Mark Winter from Coneheads are associated with. We just make music we like and it turns out we like goofy, silly music [laughs]. //// It’s nice that people come and watch us play but I think we’re more outskirt-ish in comparison to your bigger Sydney punk and hardcore bands. I love cranky punk and hardcore but it all just seems a bit serious, a whole bunch of people standing around in a room with their arms crossed looking pissed off is just really weird! It’s nice that people just come to our shows and just dance and be a goofball. We’re lucky that all of our best friends play in bands and they are all such cool people like Gee Tee and R.M.F.C., ‘Togas, Set-top Box. I find it really flattering when people say we’re all “the weirder Sydney punk bands”. I feel like no one from Sydney ever says that though…" |
0:09:29 (Pop-up) | |
| Research Reactor Corp. |
(Experiment 420)
|
The Collected Findings Of The Research Reactor Corporation | Erste Theke Tonträger | 2020 | More from lead singer- "BILLY: The Collected Findings Of The Research Reactor Corp. It’s basically our first two tapes and then a couple of new songs. Ishka who I make the music with, it’s just us doing it in our bedrooms, all home recording stuff. He’s a wizard at that stuff, I fucking suck at it! He plays in a thousand bands: Set-Top Box, all of the recordings are just him; Satanic Togas, all of the recordings are just him; on the last Gee Tee Chromo-zone record he does half of everything on the recording. Ishka is a big ol’ powerhouse! He’s awesome, he’s such an inspiring dude. It’s so cool that he is one of my best mates and that I get to make music with him.... //// The first Research Reactor tape, the first song on it, Ishka just recorded everything and I basically just one-shotted the vocals! It’s good ‘cause we’re into a lot of similar music, we see eye-to-eye. It just works. If Ishka has a day off and feels like making a song, he’ll send me the recording, a demo, while I’m at work and I might duck off to the bathroom and think of a cool line or idea for the song and just jot down notes in my phone. When I get home I’ll write the song and Ishka is a five minute walk away so I’ll go around and record it. He’ll then do some mixing on it and we’ll take it to practice or to the band and put it on our Facebook chat and ask them if they like it and we all just learn to do it as a live band from there. It’s a cool way of doing it. The new LP we have coming out, the two new songs on there are written with everyone playing on it; it takes longer to record that way though." | 0:11:35 (Pop-up) | |
| Dr. Sure's Unusual Practice |
Escalator Man
|
Escalator Man | Self Released (Bandcamp) | 2023 |
Released September 15, 2023. "“I’m going up,” sings Dougal Shaw, leader of Melbourne/Naarm weirdo-punk outfit Dr Sure’s Unusual Practice. The line, which opens the group’s new single ‘Escalator Man’, seems like an accurate forecast for the band’s future, having welcomed reams of freaks and oddballs into their orbit at last week’s BIGSOUND festival. //// ‘Escalator Man’ amplifies the art-punk and new wave sounds that dominated Dr Sure’s recent solo mixtape, BUBBLE. The full band joins in for ‘Escalator Man’, with drummer Miranda Holt, bass player Jake Suriano, guitarist Tali Harding-Hone and synth player Mathias Dowle combining with Shaw to make a racket akin to The Fall and the looser side of Devo. //// Dr Sure’s Unusual Practice will launch ‘Escalator Man’ at Naarm’s Curtin Bandroom on Saturday, 23rd September. ‘Escalator Man’ is a standalone single, but the band have teased that a third album, and follow-up to 2021’s Remember the Future? Vol. 2 & 1, is in the works. //// The writing of ‘Escalator Man’ coincided with a moment of liberation for Sure, who had just endured two years of chronic anxiety. “The clouds parted and I felt weightless and ecstatic,” he said. “I wanted to bottle that feeling. I tried to write something that would charge me up with that feeling whenever I sing it.”" |
* | 0:11:58 (Pop-up) |
| Scientists |
Subject Matter
|
Moth Eaten Velvet - Single | In The Red Records | 2023 | "The Scientists are a post-punk band from Perth, Western Australia, led by Kim Salmon, initially known as the Exterminators and then the Invaders. The band had two primary incarnations: the Perth-based punk band of the late 1970s and the Sydney/London-based swamp rock band of the 1980s." Since 2006 they are reformed, but only in recent years recording again. This is from Jan, 2023, this is the B-side to the third single from their 2021 album "Negativity". As for the parent album, "The Scientists’ powerful brand of deranged swamp-rock returned with a vengeance, when Los Angeles’ In The Red Records unleashed Negativity, an all-new magnum opus featuring the first new full-length album by the Australian band’s penultimate line-up in 35 years. //// The bruising 11-track collection features a Scientists configuration much beloved by connoisseurs of the band’s work: singer-guitarist Kim Salmon, lead guitarist Tony Thewlis, and bassist Boris Sujdovic, all veterans of the group’s defining 1981-85 outfit, and drummer Leanne Cowie, who replaced drummer Brett Rixon on the storming 1986 release Weird Love. //// Negativity is the third Scientists release and the first full-length album for In The Red. The current quartet cut the single “Braindead”/“SurvivalsKills” in 2018 and the five-song 2019 EP 9H2O SiO2, the title of which translates (in a hat tip to the lyrics of the group’s classic “Swampland”) as Nine Parts Water, One Part Sand. Those recordings were issued in conjunction with the group’s first two U.S. tours during that period. //// Salmon, who founded the Scientists in Perth in 1978, says with a laugh, ““My attitude was, old bands doing new stuff, it’s always rubbish. I just wanted to leave it alone. I thought, well, if we just snuck a single by every once in a while, we could get away with it.” //// Happily, rousing receptions during the band’s American treks and a sense that fans would welcome a new full-length project resulted in sessions for Negativity. The album was completed transcontinentally: With the band producing, Myles Mumford (who worked on both the earlier In the Red releases) and Jozef Grech recorded." | 0:14:43 (Pop-up) | |
| Scientist, PLEXXDUB |
Rainbow
|
Angels | ? | 2023 | I'm suspicious of this album in the streaming services, because it's not in discogs or any online discographies... However here's a song from it, released August 26, 2023. //// "Biography: Hopeton Brown [Born: April 18th, 1960 in Kingston, Jamaica] is better known as Scientist and sometimes known as Overton Brown, from Kingston, Jamaica was a protégé of King Tubby (Osbourne Ruddock), one of the originators of dub music. The Scientist burst onto the reggae scene in the mid ’70s with a reckless mixing style that seemed to outdo even King Tubby’s wildest extravaganzas. He began his career as an engineer at Studio One and soon after at Tubby’s in the late 70’s. Shortly afterwards, he gained a reputation with a distinctive mixing style. //// He left King Tubby's studio in 1982 and became the principal engineer for Channel One Studio, giving him the chance to work on a 16-track mixing desk rather than the four tracks at Tubby's. He came to prominence in the early 1980s and produced many albums, his mixes featuring on many releases in the first part of the decade. In particular, he was the favourite engineer of Henry "Junjo" Lawes, for whom he mixed several albums featuring the Roots Radics, many based on tracks by Barrington Levy. He also did a lot of work for Linval Thompson and Jah Thomas. In 1983 he left Channel One to work at Tuff Gong studio. //// He made a series of albums in the early to mid 1980s, released on Greensleeves Records with titles themed around Scientist's fictional achievements in fighting Space Invaders, Pac-Men, and Vampires, and winning the World Cup. The music on these albums was played by Roots Radics, his most frequent collaborators. //// “In the ’70s, I started building sound system audio amplifiers. I would then test the amplifier with test instruments to determine how the amplifier was performing. Everything would look normal, but when I played reggae music through the amplifier, it would over heat and the plates of the KT88 would run red, especially when I played a mix from the great King Tubby’s that had subsonic drum and bass frequencies as well as razor sharp high frequencies I would have to re -bias the KT88 and make other changes in order to accommodate reggae’s wide frequency response and high slew rate needs. I noticed when I played other types of music the amplifier would respond normal. I found that to be strange so I used King Tubby’s mixes as a platform to ensure that the amplifiers would not break down under extreme conditions. //// I was fascinated by his exclusive style of mixing and unique sound effects. It was the “Roots of Dub” dub album produced by Bunny Lee that became my favourite test album and also inspired me to want to meet him. One day, I was repairing a television for a friend who had worked for King Tubby’s, we needed a transformer and King Tubby’s was the only place who had those particular types of transformers I was so excited to meet this brilliant man and considered myself very lucky to have had this opportunity. After that, it became a regular place for me to buy special made power and output transformers for the amplifiers that I was building. King Tubby’s became impressed with my electronic skills and abilities at such a young age. I told him I wanted to build a mixing console, at first, it sounded like a joke to him we joked about making mixing consoles with moving faders and automation. Years later it became a reality in Neve’s moving faders and SSL’s automation with total recall.” | * | 0:18:20 (Pop-up) |
| The Fall |
Auto-Tech Pilot
|
Bend Sinister [Deluxe] | Beggar's Banquet | 1986 / 2022 |
Mark E. Smith enjoyed slipping references to the current technology of the day into songs... Usually pejoratively. I think it would be fair to say he was savage towards the idea; questioning why one would want to rely on technology whatsoever. Some thoughts on some of the lyrics from |
0:22:44 (Pop-up) | |
Music behind DJ: Pantha Du Prince & the Bell Laboratory |
Wave
|
Elements Of Light |
Rough Trade Records Ltd. |
2013 |
"Originally conceived as a performance for 2011's Øya festival in Oslo, the recording of Elements of Light is an impressive example of how versatile the lowly bell can be, and offers familiar beats and bass swells from Hendrik Weber's world shot through with giddy-making surprises. //// The lowly bell might not figure much in the history of minimal techno-- or, indeed, much contemporary music at all-- but it's a percussive instrument that holds much attraction for German producer Hendrik Weber, aka Pantha du Prince. Strip the bells out of "Lay in a Shimmer" from the high-benchmark Pantha release Black Noise and it simultaneously loses its twinkly elegance and errs a little too close to humdrum genre fare. Back in 2011 Weber appeared at the Øya Festival in Oslo where he took his obsession up a notch by collaborating with a collection of musicians on a series of bell-oriented tracks under the name Pantha du Prince and the Bell Laboratory. The name neatly tied into Weber's fascination with the instrument and electronic music's past; the original Bell Laboratories were where Max Mathews developed one of the first computer programs to play music back in the 1950s. At Øya the group played a piece titled Elements of Light, the name given to this studio recording of their efforts. There's a lightness to it that belies the literal heaviness at the center of the album-- an instrument named the bell carillon, made up of 50 bronze bells, bearing a combined weight of three tonnes." |
0:27:34 (Pop-up) |
|
Music behind DJ: Pantha Du Prince & the Bell Laboratory |
Particle
|
Elements Of Light |
Rough Trade Records Ltd. |
2013 |
"Some artists embellish computer music with organic instruments, while others improvise using hardware rather than software, as Juju & Jordash and the Moritz von Oswald Trio do. Hamburg's Hendrik Weber, better known as Pantha du Prince, dives deeper into the former approach on his fourth album, Elements of Light, a collaboration with Norwegian percussion group The Bell Laboratory. Performing at European festivals since 2011, the pairing is apt, even obvious: Chiming bells, treated with delay to form dashing kaleidoscopic patterns, are well established as the producer's signature sound." ... ""Particle" is a particularly impressive example of how versatile the bell can be as an instrument, especially when it juxtaposes ominous, church-like clangs with lighter tones that skip and twist across its surface. It's positively giddy at times, never quite ending up where you expect, bringing in familiar beats and swells of bass that anchor it in Weber's world, then constantly pulling rugs out from underneath the listener. To give away too much would spoil the surprises that are crucial to making this album work, but a small glimpse of its magic can be found in the turn into Tom Waits-style pots-and-pans percussion that is unexpectedly teased out during a section of "Particle"." |
0:33:32 (Pop-up) |
|
| Lee "Scratch" Perry |
Science, Magic, Logic (Dub)
|
Science, Magic, Logic | Jam Ra | 2017 | "I don’t know where my songs come from. I dream them. My first musical memory is a song called Don’t Give the Old for the New. I didn’t hear it on the radio. I heard it in my head when I was little. Then I wrote it. Music is my rain. Music is my name. I’m a dreamer....Living in Switzerland is the high life. Riches and fucking and fame. I feel like Merlin the Magician. There is magic here everywhere...My favourite items of clothing are my telepathic clothes. My socks are telepathic. My pants are telepathic. Everything I wear is telepathic! I have a cap that I like a lot. It gives me my telepathic power." Interesting fact: In Jamaican patois, "science" refers to socery and black magic. | 0:41:17 (Pop-up) | |
| Vonsoh |
Albert Einstein
|
2007 bis 2010 audio snacks | Fair Splitter | 2023 | Vonsoh is a German producer, songwriter and emcee, and has been active since 2003. This track has him confidently proclaiming that he is a genius of the highest order, his main focus being tracks, beats, sex and weed. Additionally he is informing everyone that nobody is better than him, his style is very unique and pushing the boundaries of hip hop. He is also very keen for us all to know that he "lives the HUSTLE every night". That being said, this beat is sick and this tune is living rent free-in my head this week so...maybe he's right? | 0:44:52 (Pop-up) | |
| Viagra Boys |
Research Chemicals
|
Consistency of Energy | Year 0001 | 2016 | When this dropped in 2016, it was a sign of things to come. This is a visceral slice of punk and everything I love about this band. The Weiner Dog and Shrimp appreciation is an amazing bonus. Of their sound, bassist Benke Hockert says "we almost wanted to make what electronic music tries to accomplish but with rock and where something is just like very repetitive but the slightest change to how something is done. It makes it so it doesn’t sound repetitive. I’m really inspired by a lot of Devo and even Motörhead and that driving sound. It’s a mix of all sorts of inspirations, it’s not just punk." In current news VB have just started their tour with Queens Of The Stone Age...and released a new video for Trogolodite last week! It's claymation! | 0:47:50 (Pop-up) | |
| The White Stripes |
Girl, You Have No Faith In Medicine
|
Elephant | Third Man | 2003 | Elephant is the fourth studio album by the American rock duo The White Stripes. It was released on April 1, 2003, through V2, XL, and Third Man records. The majority of the album was recorded across two weeks in April 2002 and produced without the use of computers, instead utilizing an eight-track tape machine and various gear no more recent than 1963. The song is about the placebo effect, and suggests that the girl in question's misery is in her head, and she herself has the power to feel better. This is Meg White's least favorite song of the band's because she finds the meaning behind the song problematic. She even made Jack White remove some lyrics before agreeing to record the song. In response to this, Jack would tease Meg by changing the lyrics to "Meg, you have no faith in medicine..." when performing it live. | 0:54:05 (Pop-up) | |
| The Plasmatics |
Test Tube Babies
|
New Hope For The Wretched | Plasmatic Media | 1989 | The Plasmatics were an American punk rock, hardcore punk and heavy metal band formed by Rod Swenson and Wendy O. Williams in New York City in 1977. We've played them a few times and also talked about them a few times. New Hope for the Wretched was their debut record and released on October 2, 1980 by Stiff Records. Jimmy Miller, former producer of the Rolling Stones and Motörhead (a band Plasmatics would collaborate with in the future), was the initial producer for the album. He had a heroin addiction from the day he arrived in New York City and he was virtually useless to the project, nearly bringing the whole project down with him. Stiff Records fired Miller, and the album was finished by engineer Ed Stasium and manager Rod Swenson over in England. In addition to songs like "Corruption" and "Living Dead", linked to TV smashing and automobile destruction, the song "Butcher Baby" featured, as with the live shows, a chainsaw sawing through a guitar in place of a guitar solo. Stiff released it as single and it peaked at No. 55 on the UK Singles Chart, with the album reaching the same position on the UK Albums Chart. The liner notes for the record proudly proclaimed that during the recording of the cover of "Dream Lover" (originally by Bobby Darin) the musicians were isolated from each other while recording and, during the instrumental break, could not hear what each other were playing. Also, don't forget to check out their appearance on SCTV's "The Fishin' Musician" | 0:57:24 (Pop-up) | |
| Oppenheimer Analysis |
Science
|
New Mexico (RE) | Minimal Wave | 2015 | Oppenheimer Analysis (OA) is Andy Oppenheimer and Martin Lloyd. They first met at the 1979 World Science Fiction Convention in Brighton, England. They quickly became good friends, sharing an interest in the work of David Bowie, electronic music and early synthesizer bands such as the Human League and Soft Cell. They also shared a love of old science fiction movies, 1950s graphics and comic book imagery and a fascination with post-World War II propaganda, the politics and aesthetics of the Cold War, and the social impact of the atomic bomb. In 1982 Andy and Martin began writing and recording together at Feedback Studio in Battersea, and performed several times as Oppenheimer Analysis at The Bell, Islington, the 1983 World David Bowie Convention in Hammersmith, the Starzone Birthday Party at Camden Palace, the 1984 European Science Fiction Convention in Brighton and other live venues. Their first demo tape and the later twelve-track “New Mexico” cassette were sold at gigs and by mail-order, and were reviewed in Melody Maker, Sounds and Soundmaker. Oppenheimer Analysis later became recognized among electro-music aficionados as a pioneering combo which has influenced other bands during the club and home-recording phase in the early 1980s. | 0:59:26 (Pop-up) | |
Music behind DJ: Blue Fashion |
She Blinded Me With Science
|
Halloween Instrumentals |
iDownloadPty |
2019 |
Wait for it...wait for it....wait for it...... And like I wasn't going to include this somehow!! I would sit on hold to this music for all eternity. |
1:02:48 (Pop-up) |
|
Music behind DJ: Cobra Man |
Research Project
|
New Driveway Soundtrack |
Goner Records |
2017 |
Cobra Man is a Los Angeles Power Disco band led by members Andy Harry and Sarah Rayne. The band is known for their 7 piece high energy spectacle shows and their collaboration with Worble skate collective. It's a shame this is stuck under the voice because it's a really cool little song! |
1:07:46 (Pop-up) |
|
| Stereolab |
University Microfilms International
|
Margerine Eclipse (Expanded Edition) / Rose, My Rocket Brain! (Tour Single) | Duophonic / Warp | 2004 / 2019 | This track was originally from limited tour single "Rose, My Rocket Brain!" for the Margerine Eclipse tour. Vinyl limited edition - 500 copies + 3" CD version. According one "user review" - "Three of the most inspired post-Mary [Hansen, R.I.P. 2002 in a bicycle accident] Stereolab songs, all three of which reveal their considerable charms after repeated listening. Replacing some of the weaker Margerine tunes with this trio would have made for an record nearly as impressive in its own way as Sound-Dust." | 1:18:04 (Pop-up) | |
| Thee Oh Sees |
Blank Chems
|
Intercepted Message | In The Red Records | 2023 | "It’s always a toss-up which style of guitar music John Dwyer and his rotating cast of Osees collaborators will lean into with each new album. Last time it was hardcore, but sometimes it’s prog or krautrock or metal. Dwyer has vowed to make music at a prolific clip for as long as possible, taking inspiration from old punks who claimed they wanted to die onstage. Perpetual engagement with Osees (or Oh Sees, Thee Oh Sees, OCS, or however else he decides to spell it) means weaving with the ever-shifting tide of Dwyer and his collaborators. His primary co-conspirator on Intercepted Message is “keyboards guru” Tom Dolas, whose taste and style defined the album’s overall vibe. “This record should have Tom’s fucking face on the cover,” Dwyer recently underlined. The songs vacillate between synth pop, new wave, disco, garage rock, and post-punk; synths and keys take the opening hook of the first three songs. Put snappily, it’s the band’s keyboards album. //// The essential Osees elements are still very much accounted for: the assertive hammering rhythm guitar riffs, the scrambling chaotic lead guitar solos, and the seemingly instinctive “ow”’s and “woo”’s that Dwyer yelps before a big drop. This lineup’s two drummers, Dan Rincon and Paul Quattrone, propel these songs into the stratosphere, creating a monolithic attack when they play in unison and a chaotic landscape when they drift apart. At its best, Intercepted Message harnesses all that adrenaline with exacting precision. “Blank Chems” opens with a rigid, driving synth that provides an underlying current to rapidly climbing guitars that amplify anxiety. What makes the song, however, are the swaths of open space. Guitar chords are left to ring out; big open mouth staccato breaths become prominent percussive textures. The gulfs between the action emphasize some of the best reasons to listen to this band—to delight in every jolt, every thrash, every “ow, ow.”" | * | 1:22:04 (Pop-up) |
| Sleaford Mods |
Big Pharma
|
More UK Grim | Rough Trade Records Ltd. | 2023 | From an 'Exclaim!" review by Calum Slingerland / Published Sep 20, 2023 //// "On a day where the United Kingdom moved to water down its climate policy, Sleaford Mods have returned to show listeners that things are as UK Grim as ever with a new EP. //// The duo of vocalist Jason Williamson and producer Andrew Fearn will share the six-song More UK Grim on October 20 via Rough Trade Records. //// Arriving ahead of a fall tour of Europe and the UK, More UK Grim was created concurrently with the Mods' aforementioned LP, and works to "critique and celebrate our turbulent times" with the duo's trademark "mix of insight and wit, outrage and compassion." //// "Big Pharma" is the first of these tracks to arrive, complete with an animated video directed by Sean Sears you can view below. In the visual, a round, pink protagonist grapples with the health consequences of a "wellness" routine centred around drinking urine. //// Williamson shares of the song's inspiration in a release, "The term 'Big Pharma' has been uprooted from its original place, one that rightly threw critique at the pharmaceutical industry as it produced more and more products that would ruin lives on a mass scale. Instead now, Big Pharma is more familiar as a term used by right wing and industrial groups trying to mask the financial aims of their arguments with some kind of critical thinking panache-type legitimacy. It just feels wrong. It feeds on hopelessness, widespread fear and generations of unfettered misinformation linked to the limited critical perception we as the masses are burdened with." //// The vocalist adds, "There has to be lots of personal responsibility held to account too. Recently Big Pharma has been adopted by the anti-trans movement, so you can see that high performance bigotry and personal financial interest are never too far away. Much like the next version of the latest smart phone, the features are largely the same." Sleaford Mods - Big Pharma (Official Video) | * | 1:26:18 (Pop-up) |
| Hak Baker |
Telephones 4 Eyes
|
Worlds End FM | Hak Attach Records | 2023 | Released just a few months ago in June. From The Guardian (by Jenessa Williams) - "Singer-songwriter Hak Baker: ‘The old guard is being priced out of London’ //// Time in prison helped the east Londoner reflect on his life. He’s now releasing a brilliant album that considers race, class solidarity – and the odd flirty, boozy night out //// Hak Baker is harking back to the east London of his childhood, before the oat milk lattes and experiential advertising creatives moved in. “Old boys taking me boxing, or to the scrap yard to flip tyres for 40 quid: that stuff gave me a sense of belonging,” he says. “But now when I look out my window, it’s just not the same. That old guard is being priced out, and if you say hello to someone in the street, they look at you like you’re weird. That’s not where I came from. Not at all.” //// Gentrification is one of the glum topics on the singer-songwriter’s debut album World’s End FM, alongside a host of others: colonialism, surveillance, depression. Then there are joyous songs like Doolally, where Baker flirts and boozes around a party sounding like the Streets on Fit But You Know It. Few other British albums this year are as vibrant, and true to life’s contradictions. “When people are low and it feels like world war three is on the balance, it’s hard to believe in yourself,” he says of its paradoxically cheery end-of-days vibe. “But if we’re all gonna die, I don’t want to spend the time being sad about it.” //// Born to Jamaican and Grenadian parents, Baker was raised on the Isle of Dogs, singing in church and raising his mother’s spirits after long shifts as a social worker. As a teen, he discovered grime via MCs at his local youth club (alongside one Dizzee Rascal), before finding his own schoolyard fame in rap collective Bomb Squad, a way “to be with your friends as much as possible – you felt safe in that bubble of brotherhood”. //// In his mid-twenties, though, Baker was jailed for two years for robbery. “Where we’re from, you only know about keeping it moving, trying to provide for your family,” he says. “Prison gave me time to assess what I actually wanted for myself. If you’re not doing that in jail, then what the fuck are you doing?” //// Inside, Baker learned the guitar, and having fallen for the wistful acoustics of British band Daughter, he coined his own genre, G-Folk, as a way to tell stories in his infectious cockney cadence. “I felt I could encapsulate the world of working-class people. It’s always shit, it’s always hard, but we still hold on to the idea of working together for a better place to survive. You never know; one day, whoever runs the country might actually listen to us.” But he doesn’t suggest that he and his people are always unified. Windrush Baby explores the heartache of cultural displacement: his mum crops up to complain that black Britons have “let go of the very strong values that we used to have”, but the song welcomes his burgeoning black audience, coming around to a genre-hopping sound. “A lot of black people are scared to back something that they don’t see as strictly ‘black’, like grime or drill. But rock and blues came directly from us and our struggles too. This is a way for me to connect.”" | * | 1:29:04 (Pop-up) |
Music behind DJ: Pantha Du Prince & the Bell Laboratory |
Spectral Split
|
Elements Of Light |
Rough Trade Records Ltd. |
2013 |
"Pantha Du Prince gives the visual treatment to “Spectral Split,” a track from his collaborative album with the Bell Laboratory Elements Of Light. The clip not only sheds a light on the process of making the music, but also the inner-workings of the bells that they used to craft it. Check it out here:" Pantha Du Prince & The Bell Laboratory- "Spectral Split" (Official Music Video) |
1:32:14 (Pop-up) |
|
| Gorillaz |
Man Research (Clapper)
|
Gorillaz | Parlophone | 2001 | Gorillaz was a shield of sorts for Damon Albarn, who wanted to expand his palette into reggae, dub, hip-hop, and soon further global influences. If you revisit interviews from that era, Albarn talks about how he was drifting further from the guitar-based aesthetics of his younger days; he even felt hemmed in by Blur in terms of what kind of rhythm he could explore. It is true, Britpop was simply...spent at that point in time. Albarn's musical experimentations...with Gorillaz and beyond have for the most part been really consistent. | 1:36:31 (Pop-up) | |
| Big Audio Dynamite |
E=MC²
|
CBS | 1985 | In 1985, Big Audio Dynamite released a song that would go on to become one of their most popular tracks. “E=MC2” was a unique blend of rock, punk, and dance music, and it soared to the top of the charts in both the US and the UK. While the song’s main focus is on the power of music to unite people of different backgrounds, there are several references to scientific concepts throughout the lyrics. For example, the line “I’m the metro, you’re the retro” may be a reference to the idea of time dilation, a concept central to Einstein’s theory of relativity. Other lines in the song reference the mysterious and elusive nature of quantum mechanics, such as the phrase “Schrödinger’s cat in a box”. The band’s frontman, Mick Jones, has said that the song was inspired by the idea of bringing together different musical genres and cultural influences. He wanted to create a song that would showcase the power of music to unite people from all walks of life. His research was successful. | 1:41:01 (Pop-up) | ||
| Le Tigre |
Phanta
|
Le Tigre | Mr. Lady Records | 1999 | Apparently, this song is about a group of cult members who decided doomsday was arriving and their best bet was to disappear into the wilderness. That may be the case, but this song is included because it's fantastic and there's a lot of scientific noises and references within! | 1:45:26 (Pop-up) | |
| Crack Cloud |
Graph of Desire
|
Crack Cloud | Deranged Records | 2018 | Crack Cloud are a Canadian musical and multimedia collective based in Vancouver, British Columbia, formed by drummer and frontman Zach Choy. "I think we live in this time now where all the archetypes are set down on the table. New sounds are exciting, and taking sounds from all these different places, it’s fun to hear different things in one package, as opposed to locking yourself into a box. There’s always been a leap of faith to this project. " | 1:48:42 (Pop-up) | |
| New Model Army |
White Coats
|
Thunder and Consolation | Parlophone | 1989 | It's arguable to say that New Model Army were one of the last who upheld a classic punk/postpunk aesthetic. While Justin Sullivan always courted controversy and contradiction in his lyrics, this song definitely sets the stage for the current lapse in faith in science. And let's be real, there's some bad white coats out there...to be sure. Through many lineup changes, NMA continue to endure. | 1:50:22 (Pop-up) | |
Music behind DJ: Emeralds |
Science Center
|
Does It Look Like I'm Here? |
Ghostly International |
2010 |
1:54:32 (Pop-up) |
||
| Grandaddy |
Chartsengrafs
|
The Sophtware Slump | V2 | 2000 | This is one of the greatest romantic odes to the dangers of environmental collapse as well as the isolation that progress and science... sometimes brings us. “I didn’t have some grand hidden agenda,” Jason Lytle says of the lyrics and imagery. “It was just basically being out and about, observing people and behaviours, and the way things seemed to be going.” | 1:58:38 (Pop-up) |
<-- Previous playlist | Back to Transmissions from Echo Beach with Derek Westerholm and DJ Babs playlists | Next playlist -->
RSS feeds for Transmissions from Echo Beach with Derek Westerholm and DJ Babs:
Playlists feed | 
MP3 archives feed
| E-mail Derek Westerholm,E-mail DJ Babs | Other WFMU Playlists | All artists played by Transmissions from Echo Beach with Derek Westerholm and DJ Babs |Listen on the Internet | Contact Us | Music & Programs | WFMU Home Page | Support Us | FAQ
Live Audio Streams for Sheena's Jungle Room: Pop-up | 128k MP3 (More streams: [+])
Listener comments!
Derek Westerholm:
DJ Babs:
Your Pretend Boyfriend:
ultradamno:
Feldy:
Scott_Oz:
🌏🌞🍻😎🤙💨🍺🍺
DJ Babs:
Robm:
DJ Babs:
WR:
Tied to my computer doing report updates but at least I can listen and turn it up loud.
Your Pretend Boyfriend:
DJ Babs:
Derek Westerholm:
Robm:
ultradamno:
Robm:
Your Pretend Boyfriend:
Derek Westerholm:
laurapanic:
laurapanic:
Robm:
Your Pretend Boyfriend:
laurapanic:
laurapanic:
Derek Westerholm:
Robm:
Robm:
Derek Westerholm:
Derek Westerholm:
Derek Westerholm:
ultradamno:
Do you know No? Another Ozzie group with Suicide love (formed by former Rowland S Howard bandmate Ollie Olsen)... www.discogs.com...
?:
Derek Westerholm:
DJ Babs:
laurapanic:
DJ Babs:
Derek Westerholm:
laurapanic:
Your Pretend Boyfriend:
Robm:
Robm:
Derek Westerholm:
Derek Westerholm:
laurapanic:
Derek Westerholm:
DJ Babs:
Derek Westerholm:
DJ Babs:
Derek Westerholm:
Derek Westerholm:
Robm:
laurapanic:
ultradamno:
DJ Babs:
Kristine:
DJ Babs:
Robm:
DJ Babs:
northguineahills:
DJ Babs:
Robm:
DJ Babs:
Kristine:
Robm:
Kristine:
DJ Babs:
DJ Babs:
ultradamno:
Your Pretend Boyfriend:
Scott_Oz:
🌏🌞🍻😎🤙📲🚗💨
DJ Babs:
DJ Babs:
northguineahills:
DJ Babs:
northguineahills:
DJ Babs:
northguineahills:
DJ Babs:
Your Pretend Boyfriend:
DJ Babs:
DJ Babs:
DJ Babs:
Derek Westerholm:
Kristine:
Derek Westerholm:
DJ Babs:
Derek Westerholm:
Your Pretend Boyfriend:
Robm:
northguineahills:
DJ Babs:
Robm:
ultradamno:
DJ Babs:
DJ Babs:
ultradamno:
dowjonesandtheindustrials.bandcamp.com...
ultradamno:
Feldy:
ultradamno:
Derek Westerholm:
Robm:
laurapanic:
Your Pretend Boyfriend:
Derek Westerholm:
DJ Babs:
Robm:
DJ Babs:
DJ Babs:
DJ Babs:
DJ Babs:
gsdoubleu:
Robm:
DJ Babs:
gsdoubleu:
Bob Barth:
DJ Babs:
DJ Babs:
gsdoubleu:
Bob Barth:
Robm:
ultradamno:
gsdoubleu:
northguineahills:
ultradamno:
DJ Babs:
DJ Babs:
ultradamno:
Bob Barth:
ultradamno:
Note: Meg was the cool one.
Bob Barth:
Scott_Oz:
🌏🌞🍻😎🤙💨🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺
DJ Babs:
ultradamno:
DJ Babs:
Bob Barth:
ultradamno:
DJ Babs:
Derek Westerholm:
Derek Westerholm:
DJ Babs:
Derek Westerholm:
Mr Fab:
Scott_Oz:
Derek Westerholm:
DJ Babs:
Derek Westerholm:
DJ Babs:
Kristine:
Scott_Oz:
Your Pretend Boyfriend:
laurapanic:
v-dawg:
DJ Babs:
Derek Westerholm:
DJ Babs:
Derek Westerholm:
Rich on the Appington:
Kristine:
DJ Babs:
Derek Westerholm:
gsdoubleu:
DJ Babs:
DJ Babs:
Kristine:
shellioh:
Derek Westerholm:
DJ Babs:
shellioh:
Derek Westerholm:
shellioh:
DJ Babs:
Derek Westerholm:
shellioh:
DJ Babs:
DJ Babs:
Your Pretend Boyfriend:
Scott_Oz:
WR:
Richington:
DJ Babs:
DJ Babs:
DJ Babs:
DJ Babs:
Derek Westerholm:
DJ Babs:
Your Pretend Boyfriend:
DJ Babs:
Your Pretend Boyfriend:
DJ Babs:
Derek Westerholm:
Kristine:
Derek Westerholm:
DJ Babs:
DJ Babs:
gsdoubleu:
Derek Westerholm:
Kristine:
Derek Westerholm:
DJ Babs:
Kristine:
Kristine:
gsdoubleu:
DJ Babs:
DJ Babs:
WR:
Onward.
Scott_Oz:
🌏🌞🍻😎🤙💨🍺🍺❣️🌻
DJ Babs:
Your Pretend Boyfriend:
Kristine:
gsdoubleu:
DJ Babs:
Your Pretend Boyfriend:
Kristine:
Your Pretend Boyfriend:
Derek Westerholm:
DJ Babs:
Derek Westerholm:
Derek Westerholm: