Akin_LittleRadioMix by rustyjoe
In January of this year my dear buddy from Melbourne, Gemma Turvey, came to Perth to play a show with me under our duo moniker, Akin. We intended to do more recording together in the time that Gemma was here, but alas, we kind of ran out of time and spent just a day in the studio playing some stuff. Furthermore, we lost a whole lot of the recorded data for a particularly good 30 mins or so of playing due to a dreaded computer crash. The particular piece that we were working on was an 'extemporisation' on Hans Eisler's To My Little Radio, originally a setting of a poem by Bertolt Brecht. Some of you may recognise this melody from the setting that Sting made of the piece in his beautiful song, The Secret Marriage.
We ended up with only about 2 mins of piano recorded to tape in the end. Nevertheless, I thought this was some of the best work we did together, and something about being surrounded by the hustle and bustle of India inspired me to do a remix/reworking of our recording, framed with a kind of subtle proto-electronica (almost sci-fi) feel. I feel I can hear the sounds of technology (including little radios) everywhere I go in Ahmedabad, and I was thinking a lot of the way Vangelis' soundtrack to Blade Runner (now approaching 30 years since its first release) uses radio and sounds of voice transmission in a really beautiful and sad way. The original story for Brecht's Little Radio has a similar melancholy to it, and a poignant reminder of the role that media plays in our lives (from songfacts.com):
To A Little Radio was written by Bertolt Brecht as he reached exile from the Nazi regime in 1933 and listened daily for news of the war.... Prophetically, in 1926 Brecht said, "Radio is one-sided when it should be two. It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him."
This second example below is another tune that we were working on, and is actually the first incarnation of a tune of mine called 'the seeker', which features in two guises on Taal Naan's Rhythmbred CD. It has a much more jammy, stream-of-consciousness flavour.
AkinJam_Jan09 ('The Seeker') by rustyjoe
