Disquiet

While lawyers sort out the legality of radio stations making copyright-protected music available for free download, the podcast-ization of FM proceeds apace. Today’s example: a May 18 program from the Australian radio show Ultima Thule, featuring material from what it describes as the “Fripp-Eno-Hassell creative nexus.” This means solo work by Brian Eno (much of it unhelpfully cited on the show’s playlist, available as a PDF file, as originating on the Eno instrumental box set, which was culled from various Eno albums), and tracks by Eno with Robert Fripp (from their recent reunion CD, Equatorial Stars, on which Fripp’s guitar is far more recognizable as guitar than it was in their earlier collaborations, like Evening Star and No Pussyfooting) and by Eno with trumpeter Jon Hassell (including the opening track, from their Fourth World, Vol. 1: Possible Musics recording). So, more to the point: Eno is the nexus. You can download the MP3 directly here, and subscribe to the Ultima Thule podcast here. Compressed at AM-quality 56kbps, the 36-megabyte file is an hour and a half long.

Some call it a “podcast,” while others simply call it a very large MP3 file. In either case, brainwashed.com’s latest podcast (file and, by extension, date: podcast050511.mp3), weighing in at almost 100 megabytes, contains a sequence of tracks by musicians and record labels whose websites are hosted at brainwashed.com. They’ve dubbed this entry the “dubcast” edition, because it focuses on music influenced by dub, including songs by the Tear Garden, Twilight Circus, Dome, Tortoise, Strategy, Greater Than One, Bomb the Bass, Meat Beat Manifesto, Sandoz, Annie Anxiety and Out Hud. The one long file is set up radio-broadcast style, with spoken intros and outros for the songs, and it includes the occasional slice of dead air generally associated with college FM broadcasts, but it’s all good stuff. These aren’t new songs, necessarily; the Tortoise entry, for example, “Goriri,” dates back to the milestone Macro Dub Infection compilation, now a decade old. The superb Greater Than One’s thunder’n'rain-laced “Dub Killer,” likewise, dates from 1990. The whole thing clocks in at a little over an hour. More info at brainwashed.com/podcast. Because they often contain previously unreleased music, these brainwashed podcasts are worth keeping an ear on.