PHAUNE RADIO is a little bug as curious and untameable as the strange sounds it airs 24h/7 on the world wild web and on on your mobile phones: soundscapes from the wider world, bald and hairy music, meetings with animals, archives from the future, eartoys….
Phaune Radio, it’s like night and day. More than 10 000 tracks for an handmade airplay : effervescent and tousled during the day, horizontal and experimental from 10:00pm (Paris Timezone).
Released on 1 November 1974, Autobahn was the album that marked the moment when Kraftwerk fully embraced electronic pop music and honed the futuristic, mechanized aesthetic that would become famous. The record was an international success in spite of some decidedly mixed early reviews; and its influence has been felt across a wide variety of genres in the half century since.
Herself a visitor of the band’s iconic Kling Klang studios in Düsseldorf, Elizabeth Alker considers Kraftwerk’s classical roots, placing the album in the context of Twentieth-Century German Classical Music (the musicians themselves have cited the expressionism of Schönberg and Stockhausen’s experiments with sound as key influences.) And, as can be heard in the iconic title track, which unfolds over twenty minutes, the band were borrowing from traditions of structuring music that harken back to older, classical forms, too (in the bringing back and development of themes). Elizabeth also plays contemporary tracks that share a musical kinship with Autobahn, and owe it too, perhaps, a debt of gratitude.
Available on BBC Sounds for 23 days and counting, at this time.
Some 1,000 years ago, a small band of Polynesians sailed thousands of miles across the Pacific to settle one of the world’s most isolated places—a small, previously uninhabited island they named Rapa Nui. There, they erected hundreds of “moai,” or gigantic stone statues that now famously stand as emblems of a vanished civilization.
Eventually, their numbers ballooned to unsustainable levels; they chopped down all the trees, killed off the seabirds, exhausted the soils and in the end, ruined their environment.
Their population and civilization collapsed, with just a few thousand people remaining when Europeans found the island in 1722 and called it Easter Island. At least that is the longtime story, told in academic studies and popular books like Jared Diamond’s 2005 “Collapse.”
A new study challenges this narrative of ecocide, saying that Rapa Nui’s population never spiraled to unsustainable levels. Instead, the settlers found ways to cope with the island’s severe limits, and maintained a small, stable population for centuries.
Very unusually among the virtuoso composer-pianists of the 19th century, Charles-Valentin Alkan spent much of his life as an apparent recluse.
He shunned the concert platform in favour of keeping his own company, reading, studying and creating some of the most spectacularly demanding piano music ever written.
Choosing a life like this meant that rumours flourished about him during his lifetime, as they have ever since. For instance, the story that he died when reaching for a volume at the top of one of his bookshelves, which then toppled forwards and crushed him, is now known to be a fabrication.
To see the quick corruption of the revolutionary minds and the ease with which the general population accepted conformism as the way to go through the life, it was an interesting experience which shaped my feelings about reality, when I’m thinking about history, and the sociological and psychological mechanisms of people and societies.
“One of them was called Cone of Variable Volume. It was very simple, just an exploratory film in which I tested the idea of a circle that would change its volume, by expansion and contraction. It was at four different speeds, from frenetic to so slow you could barely see it moving. To my surprise, I realised that it was doing something I had never noticed before. It was quite obviously breathing.”
