This week is all about new releases! We listened to tracks from four new albums that had just dropped in the last several weeks: Horixens, by Sevish; Hark, Ye Music Lovers, by An Exciting Event; Quarter Tone Partitas, by Frank Rothkamm; and HABAFROPZIPULOPS, by City of the Asleep.
After two weeks off to catch the Barbershop Harmony Society’s International Convention and Competition (congrats to Signature on their well-deserved win), and to take some time off, XEN RADIO returns with some non-western music from Kurdistan and India, along with some rock, electronic music, and jazz.
This week’s XEN RADIO featured some contemporary works along with some noise by David First and Chicken and the Chick Flicks, and of course, we continue through Veli Kujala’s Hyperchromatic Counterpoint.
Again, XEN RADIO opens and closes with the music of Veli Kujala and Ben Johnston. Their work is joined this week by Fretless Brothers, Jute Gyte, Löis Lancaster, Billy Stiltner, and Eliza Brown.
The first episode of June featured mostly new music I learned of since I started producing XEN RADIO — Elk Minister, Veli Kujala, and Elaine Walker are recent additions to my own awareness of xenharmonic music. And they complemented the music I had known about for a while, such as Cage’s Solos for Voice and the King Gizzard tracks.
Episode 9 is juxtaposition of two works, Tombo por Lou, composed and recorded by John Schneider on his recent album, Just National Guitar, and Mileece’s electronic music album, Formations. The show goes back and forth between the Mileece’s tracks and the movements of Schneider’s work. There’s something strangely similar about these two works, despite there obvious differences.
Continue readingOccasionally, XEN RADIO will take the time to feature a longer work. Episode 8 was just such an episode, dedicated to Terry Riley’s 1975 work for electronic keyboard, Descending Moonshine Dervishes. To fill out the rest of the hour, we paid another visit to some of Easley Blackwood’s Microtonal Etudes.
Continue readingFor this special edition of XEN RADIO, I was joined in the KPISS RV by the mircotonal rock band, The Mercury Tree. They’re in the midst of a tour all over the country and I was luck enough for them to make the time to visit the studio and to curate a playlist of xenharmonic/microtonal tracks that they love.
Continue readingXenharmonic and microtonal music is more than “classical” experimentations and deviations from 12-tone equal temperament (in fact, there’s really quite a bit to say about how loaded the term “microtonal music” truly is — but that’s a discussion for another day), so this episode is almost completely filled with tracks from the rock, jazz, and other streams of xenharmonic music.
Continue readingAfter a break of one week, XEN RADIO returned to the air with an eclectic mix of mostly “non-classical” tracks of microtonal music.
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