Idyllic Music

This week, it's headphone electronica. Music created with the meticulous detail that only listening through headphones can reveal. It's mixed, produced and, ultimately, consumed by people wearing headphones. It's created by indie musicians working with twenty first century tools to create, edit and perform their work. Headphone electronica isn't for dancing yet it can be danceable rather it is for focusing or letting your mind drift.

This week we look at emotional isolation. It seems the more we reach out the less we feel. It might be the continuing reliance on the intrawebs or fragmentation of society but increasingly many of us are alone and not by choice. Next time you are at a restaurant and see a couple glowing with the bluish tint of their separate mobile phones or simply sitting together but not talking, you'll understand what I mean.

This week, we'll look at at the sweet and lowdown. It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing. Ellington knew it and Irving Mills codified it but many of today's singer-songwriters from Jack Johnson, John Mayer, Nora Jones and notably Amos Lee's "Sweet Pea" have taken it to heart. From it's pre-war origins, swing music's rhythmic style based on a triplet subdivision of the beat was what moved hips out on the dance floor.

This week, we'll examine the drought. At any one time a goodly part of the world experiences Meteorological Drought with consequences measured in tens of thousands or even millions of lives. The images of drought, the cracked and barren soil, the dust clouds and snapshots of fishing boats stranded in a dry lake bed speak to the loneliness of emotional drought. So too do the 6 songs on this edition of Idyllic Music.

This week, we'll look at the downcast and sorrowful. Baruch Spinoza defined sadness as the transfer of a person from a large perfection to a smaller one. All the songs on the show this week have an underlying sadness. They are small vignettes of personal loss and helplessness and yet they are not uncomfortable or painful. There is a soul cleansing purging quality that makes you feel raw and renewing.

This week, we'll look at the great American art form as it finds its way into the 21st century. Jazz continues to evolve in ways that are both striking and familiar. Just as Charlie Parker and Charlie Christian took popular music and stripped it to its core before radically making it their own, today's musicians are taking the cut and paste technology of hip hop and using it to disassemble, rearrange and rethink the process of improvisation.

This week, we'll take a look at idea that the visible world is pervaded by invisible forces or spirits, which affect the lives of the living. It's a belief that predates most mainstream religions and remains in many ways we may not immediately recognize. Much of today's electronic club music employs many techniques shared by shamanism. The beat, repetitive vocal samples and binaural beats. There is a reason we call it Trance.

This week we'll try unlikely pairings. Nowhere are they more readily accepted than in music. When Joe Venuti's violin first played jazz, or Kraftwerk hit the top of the charts with computer music, listeners nodded and said "Yeah'. When Kate Bush brought the mystery of Eastern European harmonies to the west or the Beatles covered Little Richard new rock n' roll music, the world got a bit smaller, less separate and more inclusive.

This week, we'll feature music inspired by the Orb. Of all the bands that inspired us and helped formulate the scope of this program, it was The Orb's determination to move the mind as well as the hips. Blending the pioneering electronica of Tangerine Dream and the beats of Chicago's warehouse scene with the deep dub of Scratch Perry and Byrne and Eno's Bush of Ghosts sampling, The Orb remain a central pillar of today's electronic music.