Monthly Archives: July 2021

Saturday At The Movies

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Today, join us for a pro­gramme of music from the movies, today fea­tur­ing videogames and more.

Movies are where most peo­ple today hear orches­tral music, and there will be plen­ty of that today. But movie music is a much broad­er field than that, and today you’ll hear music from the movies of many dif­fer­ent kinds, from the very start of the genre (with Camille Saint-Saens) to the lat­est block­busters; from orches­tral music to rock, to Fifties songs. There is a slight bias towards fan­ta­sy and SF movies, but nev­er mind, we all need a bit of an escape these days.…

Today we’ll be fea­tur­ing music from The Elder Scrolls V — Skyrim: a clas­sic game sound­track from Jere­my Soule.

Con­tin­ue read­ing→

The Black Mass 24: Oil of Dog by Ambrose Bierce

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Join us on Fri­day at a lit­tle after 12 noon or 4pm Pacif­ic time for anoth­er episode in the land­mark radio dra­ma series The Black Mass, cre­at­ed by the late Erik Bauers­feld and his col­leagues at the Paci­fi­ca radio sta­tion KPFA in Berke­ley, Cal­i­for­nia, over fifty years ago. In 30 chill­ing tales of mys­tery, imag­i­na­tion and the human mind, The Black Mass brings you some of literature’s most haunt­ing sto­ries, by mas­ters of the craft — many of whom are best-known in oth­er fields. Our thanks as always to John Whit­ing, pro­duc­er of many of these record­ings, and of course to Erik Bauers­feld him­self. Today’s pro­gramme was orig­i­nal­ly broad­cast on March 4, 1964.

Note that the episode will not start until the track play­ing at the top of the hour has fin­ished, so the actu­al start time of the episode will be a few min­utes after the hour.

Today: Oil of Dog by Ambrose BierceCon­tin­ue read­ing→

Hits In Hi-Fi

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Today we’ll take a nos­tal­gic jour­ney back to the 1950s and 1960s and beyond, when music was on vinyl (don’t touch the play­ing sur­face!) and home audio was new and excit­ing­ly futur­is­tic… with Hits In Hi-Fi.

In the ear­ly days of stereo, a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of albums were released that were designed espe­cial­ly to show off the won­ders of this new way of pre­sent­ing musi­cal enter­tain­ment. Sounds “ping-ponged” across the stereo sound­stage; instru­ments appeared hard on one side and then hard on the oth­er… and there were a lot of space ref­er­ences, bloops and bleeps start­ing and end­ing the pieces — and once the Moog Syn­the­sis­er became avail­able, that was includ­ed in the mix too.Con­tin­ue read­ing→

Entente Cordiale

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It’s Sat­ur­day 24 July, and today we are pleased to present a selec­tion of clas­si­cal music from Britain and France.

In fact the empha­sis is some­what more on the French, but we’ll be hear­ing from a num­ber of British com­posers such as Elgar, Vaugh­an Williams and of course Fred­er­ic Delius, who, while born in Eng­land, spent the lat­ter part of his life across the Chan­nel.

From the French side we will be fea­tur­ing Poulenc, Fau­ré, Chopin (who was Pol­ish born but became a French cit­i­zen) Debussy, Rav­el and Berlioz, with per­for­mances both tra­di­tion­al and not so.

We also have a selec­tion of “cross-chan­nel” pieces in a some­what lighter vein.

Today you can also hear the lat­est edi­tion of “Where’ve You Been?” — details here — where we vis­it The Bor­der­less Project’s amaz­ing art instal­la­tion, at 12 noon or 4pm Pacif­ic / 8pm or mid­night in the UK — and don’t miss “Engines of Our Inge­nu­ity” — pre­sent­ed by the Uni­ver­si­ty of Hous­ton: the series about the machines that make our civ­i­liza­tion run and the peo­ple whose inge­nu­ity cre­at­ed them. The pro­gramme is broad­cast every 4 hours from 4am Pacif­ic.

Con­tin­ue read­ing→

The Black Mass 23: The Boarded Window by Ambrose Bierce

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Join us on Fri­day at a lit­tle after 12 noon or 4pm Pacif­ic time for anoth­er episode in the land­mark radio dra­ma series The Black Mass, cre­at­ed by the late Erik Bauers­feld and his col­leagues at the Paci­fi­ca radio sta­tion KPFA in Berke­ley, Cal­i­for­nia, over fifty years ago. In 30 chill­ing tales of mys­tery, imag­i­na­tion and the human mind, The Black Mass brings you some of literature’s most haunt­ing sto­ries, by mas­ters of the craft — many of whom are best-known in oth­er fields. Our thanks as always to John Whit­ing, pro­duc­er of many of these record­ings, and of course to Erik Bauers­feld him­self. This pro­gramme was orig­i­nal­ly broad­cast on Feb­ru­ary 12, 1964.

Note that the episode will not start until the track play­ing at the top of the hour has fin­ished, so the actu­al start time of the episode will be a few min­utes after the hour.

Today: The Board­ed Win­dow by Ambrose BierceCon­tin­ue read­ing→

Tarot @ Teatime 11 — Classic Spreads

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Tune in for Episode 11 of our pop­u­lar series, “Tarot @ Teatime”, with Hon­ey Heart and Wil­low Moon­fire, explor­ing the his­to­ry of the cards and how they may be read. Tune in to http://main.vcradio.org at noon or 4pm Pacif­ic / 8pm or mid­night UK time.

Episode Eleven
In Episode 11 we dis­cuss three clas­sic Tarot spreads and their use, includ­ing the Three Card Spread, the clas­sic five card French Cross, and the Nine Card Tableau.

Con­tin­ue read­ing→

Where’ve You Been 12: The Borderless Project

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Wednes­day, July 21st sees the pre­miere of a brand new episode in our series “Where’ve You Been?”, where we look at things to do and places to see in and around the Sec­ond Life Grid.

In Episode 12 we vis­it The Bor­der­less Project, an inter­ac­tive dig­i­tal art exhi­bi­tion that explores light: reflec­tions, struc­tures, move­ment, cre­ation and evo­lu­tion. The Project spans mul­ti­ple lev­els in a vari­ety of iter­a­tions that explore the theme using a wide palette of vir­tu­al tools. There are also sounds and music to aug­ment the visu­al expe­ri­ence. 

Con­tin­ue read­ing→

Three New Shows on Mixcloud

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We’re pleased to announce the addi­tion of three new pro­grammes to our Mix­cloud “Lis­ten Again” facil­i­ty. Lis­ten to them now at https://www.mixcloud.com/virtualcommunityradio/

“Where’ve You Been” Episode 11 fea­tures the amaz­ing Arca­di­an Rap­ture Remas­tered - an incred­i­ble cyber-deco shop­ping mall in Sec­ond Life.

“Tarot @ Teatime” Episode 9 dis­cuss­es how agency, func­tion, and con­text influ­ence the inter­pre­ta­tion of cards in a read­ing.  A spread of three cards is read to address two dif­fer­ent issues to demon­strate the impor­tance of con­text.

“Tarot @ Teatime” Episode 10 looks at The Major Arcana and var­i­ous way of think­ing about these twen­ty-two cards as a group. We dis­cuss the notion of The Fool’s Jour­ney, Jun­gian Arche­types, and the Major Arcana as a depic­tion of the inter­play between order and chaos.

Con­tin­ue read­ing→

Celtic Moods

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Today’s pro­gramme takes anoth­er look at the expan­sion of Celtic music and themes into sev­er­al dif­fer­ent gen­res of music.

Here we are fea­tur­ing musi­cians and music that start from the Celtic tra­di­tion and take it for­ward into oth­er realms, from Joanie Mad­den to Mendelssohn to Ger­al­do and his Orches­tra; from thun­der­ous­ly spec­tac­u­lar orches­tral arrange­ments (you’ll hear sev­er­al of those today) in the wake of River­dance, to inspir­ing music for a small Celtic ensem­ble and organ, played in the largest Goth­ic space in the world.Con­tin­ue read­ing→