This autumn is getting off to a strange start, as here in the Mojave High Desert there are carpets of little yellow wildflowers thanks to the hurricane, old Hurricane Hilary which soaked us all pretty good a month ago. Never seen so many weeds in late September. Happy Equinox from Desert Oracle Radio, celebrating 200 episodes with tonight’s show. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/desertoracleSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
From the TOO TIRED TO SAY ANYTHING podcast, a superb 30-minute piece of music that I listened to and loved over this morning’s coffee: THE REUNION OF BROKEN PARTS.
If you want to cool off in this brutal desert summer, you need to get up someplace higher, around 7,000 feet — the high-desert plateau around Los Alamos is real nice, at an elevation of 7,320′.
Lots of people have fallen in love with the climate and clean dry air up there, such as J. Robert Oppenheimer & Gore Vidal & William S. Burroughs. Burroughs was supposed to be a War Captain, following orders, but it never quite worked out that way. Instead, he would go to war with Human Language . . . using the weapon of the oppressor.
Not sure this will work, but let’s give it a shot:
For this guest mix I present you, the listener, with an absolutely stellar outing from an ambient DJ that hails from Hungary. Not only that, but the only female ambient DJ in Hungary. How cool is that? Beyond a measurable scale of incredibly cool.
Lepque started out as a radio DJ, but got the bug for digging into ambient via Peter Namlook and Jonn Serrie, and has been fighting for the pure ambient style for over 10 years now. The name ‘Lepque’ is a play on the word ‘Lepke’, which means butterfly in Hungarian. She claims that it comes from the moth symbol. Just as a moth seeks the light, but dies when reaching it, Lepque also prefers to stay in the background, within the cool and soothing darkness.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss what we know about ancient stones placed in the landscape and stone monuments, which are often visually striking and can be up to 6,000 years old.
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Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss megaliths – huge stones placed in the landscape, often visually striking and highly prominent.
Such stone monuments in Britain and Ireland mostly date from the Neolithic period, and the most ancient are up to 6,000 years old. In recent decades, scientific advances have enabled archaeologists to learn a large amount about megalithic structures and the people who built them, but much about these stones remains unknown and mysterious.
With
Vicki Cummings Professor of Neolithic Archaeology at the University of Central Lancashire
Julian Thomas Professor of Archaeology at the University of Manchester
and
Susan Greaney Lecturer in Archaeology at the University of Exeter.
Catching up on my podcast queue. I’ll always stop for a talk about megaliths.
Kate Molleson explores the life of György Ligeti with guest, Danny Driver
Not entirely sure this will work – BBC tends to resist any kind of embed – but I have to make a start on logging the podcasts I want to remember somewhere, so I’ll start here, and if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. This one showed up on my feed right after rewatching a chunk of 2001 the previous night, oddly enough. Somewhere, I have the 5CD box set of THE LIGETI PROJECT, which somehow never got logged here.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the influential painters at the heart of the French Impressionist movement: Berthe Morisot (1841-1895). The men in her circle could freely paint in busy bars and public spaces, while Morisot captured the domestic world and found new, daring ways to paint quickly in the open air. Her work shows women as they were, to her: informal, unguarded, and not transformed or distorted for the eyes of men. The image above is one of her few self-portraits, though several portraits of her survive by other artists, chiefly her sister Edma and her brother-in-law Edouard Manet.
(I’m actually trying to find an efficient way to log podcasts I like and want to track later. BBC won’t give me an embed, but it will apparently generate a QR code?)
This week is for catching up on my podcast queue. Hypnagogue is one of the best ambient, electronic and contemporary instrumental music podcasts out there. This one:
Just 90 more minutes of really tasty musical treats. Things get a bit droney for a while, and we spend a good bit of time with contemporary composers. Definitely an episode for those with eclectic tastes. We’re all over the map here.
I can’t figure out how to make it embed right now, so click through.
Listen now
