radiobombast

“Our Pandemic Radio Adventure” continues, and I’m back on my bullshit–by that I mean counting the mixtapes I’ve had to assemble for you. What must I have been thinking–that this would end soon? Dear listener, we have eleven months to go! Listeners will experience a hefty serving of music “randomly found in my twitter timeline”--there was a lot of that at this time. People and organizations were re...

It’s been a tough week, hasn’t it? INDEED IT HAS. This episode finds me  losing count of the number of times I’ve had to submit a pre-recorded program. Whatevs, counting is for nerds anyway. Trying to get through the week as best I can–by playing tunes that are “dear to me,” I say--but this is a lie! So many of these tunes were pretty new to me. Maybe they became “dear” quickly, but due to my supp...

This episode and the next are about clearing the decks, a “before and after” tableau, if you will. They are about how I cannot seem to perform the deck-clearing in a spontaneous, immediate way, and how I compensate (if that’s what I am doing) by making big changes at the level of concept. All of this is a fancy way of saying (as I seem to do with increasing frequency) that it was the end of one er...

More sandwich-making: the first few songs of this program provide me with comfort on a chilly fall evening in the Northeast, provenance be damned. Listening to the program I don’t really care where the songs came from, whether the artists are dear to me, whether I cared enough to buy actual records by any of these people, and so on. It’s an enjoyable listen, and at the end of the day do we care ab...

Here is a program that chased my dog upstairs (kudos to Cry Robot for that). Her taste is something of a mystery, though. There is plenty of the sublime to experience in this audio file. Where else are you going to hear Slum of Legs transitioning into Little Richard? That’s right, nowhere. In the spirit of making what management types call a “sandwich,” though, re. a few tracks in this selection w...

Honesty time. I dread these programs between the beginning of the lockdown and the death of George Floyd. Yet somehow this program has my energy. I can’t deny it. Maybe it is inescapable. I have this thing about noting the passage of musicians into the next life. Not sure where that comes from–possibly some feeling of responsibility, like it is my job to report current events? Sometimes I really f...

FAM. I am trying so hard to get back on the horse and process the last 39 months. I have to honor the muse when she appears.. I detect a weirdly naive positivity in this program’s energy despite what must have been happening in my life right around this time. Happy Mondays, Pia Fraus and The Room In The Wood seem like vestiges of an earlier sensibility. But who cares? So much of reception depends...

From my contemporaneous notes: "I have to say I enjoyed this show, it seems to demonstrate that I had made peace with pre-recording and had found a way to still be good." Wow, just wow. I suppose this is going to happen a lot, but I am just not as keen on this episode as I was at the time. Listening to these broadcasts from another time always brings up a jumble of associations--what was happening...

Welcome to Eighties night! Are you up for some Cocteau Twins? Shriekback? Breathless? Durutti Column? Crass? The Wedding Present? How about two versions of the same R.E.M. song? "Sure," I can hear you saying. "Sounds tubular." Public life had stopped when this broadcast aired, so why not time itself? I must say, though--as good as the segues are (some of them are quite good), this show doesn't hav...

"I keep falling asleep during this episode," my notes say, "but I assure you it is quite good." Here's hoping you can (a) stay awake and (b) find this assessment accurate. Despite the distance between then and now, it's tough for me to be objective. I know there are strong tunes here, but the segues seem weak to me. Plus, I just don't sound up for it. Hopefully you can excuse this--I'd had a bad w...

Bless me, listeners, for I have sinned! It has been 575 days since my last post. And to paraphrase the world’s most famous TERF, I solemnly swear I have been up to no good. Serendipity and dialectics: as I embark on a mission of piecing together the past, I find that this show performs a feat of alchemy, in piecing together various fragments of shows that I had planned on doing before the Great Lo...

Now it can be told! Methods and agendas disclosed in this week's blurb. It's all here. To begin we have to go back to the very early days of this program, when I decided (a) my library was not enough and (b) I had to chase the ghosts of my past and prove that I could follow the "rules" of my old radio station from undergrad days, which I was never good at doing. There's a lot to unpack there but I...

There is a weird symmetry to this post, as it comes (seemingly) at the end of the pandemic era even as I am trying to make sense of how it began. Maybe there was a point in dragging my feet all this time. Increasingly I think things happen as they are meant to, when they are meant to. My brain must be getting old, soft, and smooth. Everything shut down very quickly in the second and third weeks of...

  For months I left my page-a-day calendar on March 10, 2020. At first it was genuine shock and refusal. I probably thought in the beginning that it would just be a few weeks. After a while it was a more self-conscious, pretentious gesture, my own Hiroshima clock. God knows what I must have been thinking on the day after society stopped, but this program is a real "twilight" show, the first dispat...

  A great show awaits you, and in even better news, it's my show! The only element missing is Lady Catharsis, who has arrived by and by at a grudging respect for The Fall, tonight's featured artiste. Here is yet another posthumous Hall of Legends induction, since I lazily made the band charter members and then for whatever reason never asked to talk to the man himself. I need to start talking to p...

  One week to go before time stops. I guess this particular outing is a "grower." It seems forced early on; Kristin Hersh and Mogadisco don’t really go together nicely, for example, nor does Vanitas follow smoothly. The overall vibe smacks of the insincerity and LARPing that, I feel, characterizes many of these programs from the "before" time. "I like this Africa 70 collection a lot," I say, but I...

  The pandemic has made me extra-fond of this episode, because it's one of the last "specials" I did before the lockdown, but I think this episode might be suitable for the pantheon in any timeline. I had of course already inducted Coil into the Bombast Hall of Legends , in four stages, to go along with their "equinox" / "solstice" series. Early days! But here I wind up with airtime on what would...

Wednesday is my day of healing: first therapy, and then this. My therapist thinks my dj hobby is creativity. I think it is self-expression at best. I have never believed that djs are artists or that spinning and mixing records is a performance. I have done art and I have done performance; I may do these things again, god help us all. But for reasons of trauma those are in the past. There is plenty...

"Who’s listening?" I wonder out loud in my notes to this program. So much of the time on the radio I actually want to be "alone," at least left to my own devices. Sometimes the isolation gets to me and this must have been one of those times. Was I having some kind of premonition, or advance feeling of what the next 14 months would be like? Strangely this program seems "authentic" even though it is...

Shockingly I had stopped drinking, at least for this week, and had been working very hard at the gym with nothing to show for it. On this day I wrote down that I'd had a four-hour training at work just to be the backup to a backup on some issue or other. I had scribbled something less-than-profound, I'm sure, about the ongoing Democratic primary, but let's face it, I was done caring. Anyway, "a co...