hello! it’s time for another mid-month-music-media content dump. hope you’re good. tell me if you are! or not! i’ve made some crazy big life decisions this month, but that’s for another time x
sound service station
i did an hour long psych/folk/rock show on kitchen as a cover show on the bank holiday. all because i was listening to meshkalina by traffic sound when maddi said she needed cover. the sounds are so nice!
how we standardized music
a half an hour podcast exploring when and why musical notes became standardised to the specific frequencies that we in the western world think of as, e.g., A today. A today is 440 hertz specifically, which was decided in america, and then adopted by european countries in a big meeting at the bbc in 1939, not long before ww2. what happened before! was standardisation useful! were the engineers really the tech bros of the time! more questions! answered!
top 15 songs mistakes you can’t unhear
i refuse to put on any new episodes of any television shows after 10pm (i’m sleepy!!) and as a result, i end up watching a lot of content that kay puts on on youtube. the idea of telling people i’m watching youtube on the tv makes me cringe so badly, and yet i do it multiple times a week! and i fuckin love nile red! the man made hot sauce out of latex gloves! own it! also we stopped getting a tv license cos the bbc is transphobic as hell so i’m going to ride that high horse right over you saying ‘youtube? on the tv?’
sometimes the content kay puts on is nile red, and sometimes she tries more explicitly to hit a note that i’d like to see too, which is sweet. like this one!
not entirely sold that all of these are ‘mistakes’ but elvis presley switching up a lyric to sing about a guy in the audience being bald and then crying laughing for the rest of the song is comedy gold. also axl rose at the end of sweet child of mine genuinely asking where do we go now? because there were no lyrics written for that final breakdown? amazing. also also does anybody else mind trying gamely to belt out ain’t no sunshine on singstar at their friend’s house and then feeling trapped in the seemingly endless repetition of i know i know i know i know i know i know i know while worrying that everyone else is getting bored???? just me?
ken okuda on worldwide fm / my analog journal
i didn’t go out for hogmanay this year. i was invited out x 2 (just to be clear!!) but both were on the other side of town and i was tired and hungover from december 30th, like going out on a whim on a thursday night and then being too fucked for the post-office pub on a friday. i vibed at home to some my analog journal mixes and plotted my dj career arc — time well spent — where i found ken okuda. those are some linga sound sounds right there. now enjoying his worldwide fm show!
the rise of the red hot chili peppers: our brother, hillel
had been meaning to watch this documentary for a while and finally got around to it one sunday night when josh suggested a co-viewing experience. i’m a chili peppers head through and through, so it’s unsuprising that i really enjoyed it, but overall i think you would get sth from it even if you’re not. it hits the gold standard of documentary making in terms of only talking to the actually relevant parties (anthony kiedis, flea, and about four other musicians or family members who were there for the early days), and all are remarkably candid and openly emotional about the formation of the band and their sudden rise to stardom.
because i am 33 i came to the chili peppers around the time of the by the way era, and the end of californication. i remember being 10 or 11 and someone at school saying that californication was about sex! i think that was how i learned the word fornication, lol. soon after (christmas 2003, in fact), i got the band’s second greatest hits album which focuses on their back catalogue from the early 1990s until that point. for a particular period of my tweendom, i would play tony hawk’s pro skater 2 and blast the greatest hits album, like, all weekend, and so while i became intimately familiar with the likes of give it away and under the bridge from blood sugar sex magik, anything predating that — so, anything from the hillel slovak years — remained quite opaque to me.
it is only as an adult i have gotten into that part of their catalogue and oh my god. it’s so exciting. so aggro, so funky. hearing directly from flea and anthony how they ended up playing together in the combination that would become red hot chili peppers, the stories of the first gigs, and the early footage — seeing those clips, i felt this excitement rising up in me as if i was discovering something brand new that i needed to tell all my friends about. so i’m telling you!
also very poignant, having heard flea talk a lot recently about his passion for the trumpet and his long term desire to be a jazz trumpter, when he says that hillel asked him to learn bass to come and play in a band with him, and so he did. really makes so clear that a) one decision can literally change your entire life path and b) it’s never too late to return to your passions!
breakdown of blue monday by new order
thanks jen for sending! i always think i’ll find it boring to watch these song elements videos but every time i bother to lock in, it’s enjoyable. i loved seeing how all the elements came together on blue monday, an all time dancefloor banger. i think i heard it for the first time in my bedroom, but imagine instead that had been in the club.
coming up:
24 may: kelham block party, factory floor
12 june: la rumba 9th birthday, sidney & matilda
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