Showy McShowface with Jim the Poet:
Playlist
from December 21, 2024
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Classic overnight radio with that feel of an unanticipated fill-in! Hour-long installation pieces, murmurs in the dark, endless hurtling to the bottomless abyss! Hi Mom!
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Upcoming events:
- Wed. Dec 25th, Midnight - 3am:
Jim the Poet fills in for Radio Futura
- Wed. Dec 25th, 6pm - 7pm: Jim the Poet fills in for Seven Second Delay
- Fri. Jan 3rd, 2025, 6pm - 7pm: Jim the Poet fills in for Bucci
- Wed. Dec 25th, 6pm - 7pm: Jim the Poet fills in for Seven Second Delay
December 21, 2024: "Jim the Poet fills in for Rich Hazelton" [WFMU stream & FM radio]
Listen to this show:
MP3 - 128K | 
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| Artist | Track | Album | Comments | Images | Approx. start time | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jimmy Dawkins |
It Serves Me Right to Suffer
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Fast Fingers |
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0:00:00 (MP3 | Pop-up) | ||||||
| Éliane Radigue |
Naldjorlak (Los Angeles, 2020)
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Naldjorlak | Charles Curtis on chello |
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0:05:40 (MP3 | Pop-up) | |||||
| William Basinski |
El Camino Real
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El Camino Real |
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1:00:07 (MP3 | Pop-up) | ||||||
| Matisse Vrignaud |
Plenum
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Bells Works |
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1:50:04 (MP3 | Pop-up) | ||||||
| Eric Olson |
Luz
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Luz |
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1:59:16 (MP3 | Pop-up) | ||||||
| Charlie Martineau |
Saint Thérèse of Lisieux's Roses (excerpt)
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Saint Thérèse of Lisieux's Roses |
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2:19:20 (MP3 | Pop-up) | ||||||
| Brian Green |
Session 41
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Tibetan SInging Bowl Meditation | 2:43:04 (MP3 | Pop-up) | |||||||
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Listener comments!
greg g:
Handy Haversack:
Jim, all.
spodiodi:
Ken From Hyde Park:
Handy Haversack:
Sat. Dec 21st, Midnight - 3am
Wed. Dec 25th, Midnight - 3am
Wed. Dec 25th, 6pm - 7pm
Fri. Jan 3rd, 2025, 6pm - 7pm
Jim the Poet:
Handy Haversack:
Ah, now I can hear it was all part of the plan.
Bélarádió:
Beguiling Mysophilia:
jakee.jc:
Ken From Hyde Park:
chresti:
🌀🌀🌀🌀🌀😻
chresti:
Jim the Poet:
Éliane Radigue
2023
Éliane Radigue Naldjorlak
7.9
By Vanessa Ague
Genre:
Electronic / Experimental
Label:
Saltern
Reviewed:
May 9, 2023
In two performances spanning nearly 15 years, the avant-garde French composer and the cellist Charles Curtis investigate the allegedly unmusical sound of the wolf tone.
Éliane Radigue is drawn to the sound you cannot control. The French composer’s early pieces worked with electronic feedback; more recently, her Occam Ocean series has featured drone-like acoustic vibrations. In all her compositions, she observes how long-held tones waver and evolve, inviting us to tune into nearly imperceptible changes. Naldjorlak, composed with cellist Charles Curtis in 2005, was her first piece to be written for an acoustic instrument. Here, Radigue explores the cello’s wolf tone, a volatile note that’s very close to the resonant frequency of the instrument’s wooden body. A new release presents two versions of Naldjorlak—one recorded in Paris in 2006, and another in Los Angeles in 2020. In bringing these recordings together, the album presents the composition as a living, breathing document, illustrating how Radigue’s music embraces time’s unpredictability in both structure and performance.
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The composition of Naldjorlak was a closely collaborative effort. In an essay that accompanies the album, Curtis recalls spending time with Radigue in Paris, where the two developed a routine of music making together. Like much of Radigue’s work, the piece isn’t notated; instead, it’s fluid, growing from a set of parameters that anticipate and respond to an unforeseeable future. To play the piece, Curtis tunes his cello to its wolf tone and pulls his bow across different parts of the instrument, giving every pitch a hazy shroud. The wolf tone occurs naturally in the cello, but like electronic feedback at an amplified performance, it’s typically considered ugly or flawed. “Tuning to the wolf tone inverts the conventional function of tuning, which is to link an individual instrument to a social norm—concert pitch,” Curtis writes. “The search for self-sameness reveals a unit of distance we would not have discovered without having attempted to bridge it.”
While the motion of each note is unpredictable, the piece moves in broad sections that explore different patterns and textures. At first, a distant grumble grows into a full, beating resonance; later, trilling hums and shrieks burst out of the instrument’s highest reaches. These phrases emerge from quiet pauses and crescendo into swarms, but their movement is so delicate that a drastic shift may go unnoticed until it’s already gone. Peer closer and those shifts establish a sense of presence: guideposts that point the way through the wavery drones.
Though each of the album’s featured recordings present this general structure, the two performances take on different moods and act as companions to one another. The 2006 recording feels eerie and dark, woven from low, faraway rumbles and chilly hums. It occupies a nervous headspace, building an anxiety that’s never quite released. The 2020 recording feels like an answer to that tension—it sounds more assured and resolute, the cello’s wolf tone taking a richer, more resonant stance. It also feels more patient: Curtis’ bowings sigh like exhales. By the end, his cello whistles and floats with breezy ease, marking a departure from the 2006 recording, in which the ending evokes the howl from which the wolf tone takes its name.
When Radigue was creating her early feedback pieces, she often wondered how to control the sound, or if it could be controlled at all. With Naldjorlak, Curtis and Radigue yield to the cello’s wolf tone, a note with an inherent instability that many players would seek to avoid or correct. Instead of working around the wolf tone, Naldjorlak celebrates it—the music pays close attention to its every aspect, placing it front and center yet allowing it to roam. In a 2009 essay titled “The Mysterious Power of the Infinitesimal,” Radigue wrote: “This long journey through uncertain lands also enabled me to simply recognize what was already there, buried, hidden.” Naldjorlak serves as a reminder that if we listen closely enough, any sound can be music—and music, like all things, is changed in the current of time.
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Vanessa Ague writes about contemporary classical and experimental music. In addition to Pitchfork, her writing can be seen in The Wire, Bandcamp Daily, The Brooklyn Rail, The Quietus, and I Care If You Listen, among other publications. She currently lives in Brooklyn.
Contributor
Handy Haversack:
Handy Haversack:
spodiodi:
GERZ:
GERZ:
I lost it at the movies 🎥:
GERZ:
👁️ lost it at the 🎥:
GERZ:
tak:
Juli P:
J want breakfast lol
Juli P:
Jim the Poet:
spodiodi:
Juli P:
I did my dishes
May start cleaning more
Too much to du I'll sleep when sleepy
Jim the Poet:
fussy fizzix:
Juli P:
Hubig Pie:
spodiodi:
Hubig Pie: