Wednesday 27 March 2013

Bowie and Beyond: A Music Fan's Guide to Berlin



Slightly off piste for Neal Beard, but I just heard about this programme coming up on BBC6 - Bowie and Beyond: A Music Fan's Guide to Berlin.
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I've always been a big Bowie fan, especially of his Eno-Fripp-electronica-infused-Berlin-era, so this programme piqued my interest, especially as I'm due to go to Berlin in a few weeks.

Blurb below...

Here writer and broadcaster Danny Robins looks at what has made the German capital into a rock n roll mecca, exploring the cultural and social forces that have shaped the city's rich musical history from Weimar times, via the Bowie years, to the techno revolution of the 90s and the still vibrant present day music scene.


Danny follows in Bowie and Iggy's footsteps, on a guided tour with former recording engineer Thilo Schmied, who takes him around some of the pair's old haunts and shows him round the legendary Hansa studios where they recorded, in the shadow of the wall and within shooting range of the East German border guards. Bowie and Iggy inspired a creative influx of bands and singers in subsequent decades. Danny meets producer Gareth Jones, who worked with Depeche Mode and Nick Cave at Hansa, and Mute Records founder Daniel Miller, still a resident of Berlin.

Saturday 16 March 2013

Noise: A Human History





Noise: A Human History 

This new series coming up on radio four sounds interesting... I like the title anyhow!

A bit more about the series below-

Noise: A Human History is a thirty-part series for BBC Radio 4, starting Monday 18 March, 2013. We hope it will be a vivid and richly textured exploration of the role of sound in the past 100,000 years of human history. Recorded on location around the world, it will take us from the shamanistic trance-music of our cave-dwelling ancestors, the babel of ancient Rome, the massacre of noisy cats in pre-revolutionary Paris, and the sonic assaults of trench warfare, right through to our struggle to find calm in the cacophony of a modern metropolis. This is not about sound in the abstract: it is about sound as a matter of life and death, pain and pleasure, feeling and intellect. People, and their past behaviours, are at the heart of it. The series is written and presented by Professor David Hendy from the University of Sussex and made in collaboration with the British Library’s Sound Archive. The book of the series will be published by Profile Books in March, 2013.

Friday 8 March 2013

The Bells

The Bells (a song for Trotty) - a new track now up on Soundcloud!