Favoriting Showy McShowface with Jim the Poet: Playlist from December 21, 2024 Favoriting

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Classic overnight radio with that feel of an unanticipated fill-in! Hour-long installation pieces, murmurs in the dark, endless hurtling to the bottomless abyss! Hi Mom!

On WFMU | 91.1, 90.1, 91.9 FM & wfmu.org
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Upcoming events:

Wed. Dec 25th, Midnight - 3am: Jim the Poet fills in for Radio Futura
Wed. Dec 25th, 6pm - 7pm: Jim the Poet fills in for Seven Second Delay
Thu. Dec 26th, 3pm - 6pm: Jim the Poet fills in for Fabio
Fri. Jan 3rd, 2025, 6pm - 7pm: Jim the Poet fills in for Bucci

Favoriting December 21, 2024: "Jim the Poet fills in for Rich Hazelton" [WFMU stream & FM radio]

Listen to this show: MP3 - 128K | Pop-up listen Pop-up player!

Playlist image Favoriting

Artist Track Album Comments Images Approx. start time
Jimmy Dawkins  It Serves Me Right to Suffer   Favoriting Fast Fingers   
Favoriting
0:00:00 (MP3 | Pop-up)
Éliane Radigue  Naldjorlak (Los Angeles, 2020)   Favoriting Naldjorlak  Charles Curtis on chello 
Favoriting
0:05:40 (MP3 | Pop-up)
 
William Basinski  El Camino Real   Favoriting El Camino Real   
Favoriting
1:00:07 (MP3 | Pop-up)
Matisse Vrignaud  Plenum   Favoriting Bells Works   
Favoriting
1:50:04 (MP3 | Pop-up)
 
Eric Olson  Luz   Favoriting Luz   
Favoriting
1:59:16 (MP3 | Pop-up)
Charlie Martineau  Saint Thérèse of Lisieux's Roses (excerpt)   Favoriting Saint Thérèse of Lisieux's Roses   
Favoriting
2:19:20 (MP3 | Pop-up)
Brian Green  Session 41   Favoriting Tibetan SInging Bowl Meditation      2:43:04 (MP3 | Pop-up)


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Listener comments!

Avatar Swag For Life Member 12:00am
greg g:

Hey Jim!
Avatar Swag For Life Member 12:01am
Handy Haversack:

Let. It. Snow.

Jim, all.
Avatar Swag For Life Member 12:01am
spodiodi:

greetings, Jim and all
Avatar 🌮 Swag For Life Member 12:03am
Ken From Hyde Park:

Cool, another chance for Jim the Poet Bingo. Pick a time slot and if Jim is filling in, you win that square!
Avatar Swag For Life Member 12:04am
Handy Haversack:

↳ Ken From Hyde Park @12:03
I'll take

Sat. Dec 21st, Midnight - 3am
Wed. Dec 25th, Midnight - 3am
Wed. Dec 25th, 6pm - 7pm
Fri. Jan 3rd, 2025, 6pm - 7pm
Avatar Swag For Life Member 12:05am
Jim the Poet:

Rich will be back next week!
Avatar Swag For Life Member 12:06am
Handy Haversack:

Stream went silent, but I have too many cats on me to get up and see if the terrestrial is working ...

Ah, now I can hear it was all part of the plan.
  12:06am
Bélarádió:

🐿️❓
Avatar 12:12am
Beguiling Mysophilia:

👋
  12:16am
jakee.jc:

Really thought the stream cut—forgot about it for a while, then assumed neighbors were doing the usual midnight construction
Avatar 🌮 Swag For Life Member 12:22am
Ken From Hyde Park:

Excitedly waiting for the foghorn set.
  12:24am
chresti:

Naldjorlak (Los Angeles, 2020) by Éliane Radigue (Naldjorlak)
🌀🌀🌀🌀🌀😻
  12:25am
chresti:

Yay foghorns!
Avatar Swag For Life Member 12:26am
Jim the Poet:

Naldjorlak

Éliane Radigue

2023
Éliane Radigue Naldjorlak

7.9
By Vanessa Ague

Genre:

Electronic / Experimental

Label:

Saltern

Reviewed:

May 9, 2023

In two performances spanning nearly 15 years, the avant-garde French composer and the cellist Charles Curtis investigate the allegedly unmusical sound of the wolf tone.

Éliane Radigue is drawn to the sound you cannot control. The French composer’s early pieces worked with electronic feedback; more recently, her Occam Ocean series has featured drone-like acoustic vibrations. In all her compositions, she observes how long-held tones waver and evolve, inviting us to tune into nearly imperceptible changes. Naldjorlak, composed with cellist Charles Curtis in 2005, was her first piece to be written for an acoustic instrument. Here, Radigue explores the cello’s wolf tone, a volatile note that’s very close to the resonant frequency of the instrument’s wooden body. A new release presents two versions of Naldjorlak—one recorded in Paris in 2006, and another in Los Angeles in 2020. In bringing these recordings together, the album presents the composition as a living, breathing document, illustrating how Radigue’s music embraces time’s unpredictability in both structure and performance.

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The composition of Naldjorlak was a closely collaborative effort. In an essay that accompanies the album, Curtis recalls spending time with Radigue in Paris, where the two developed a routine of music making together. Like much of Radigue’s work, the piece isn’t notated; instead, it’s fluid, growing from a set of parameters that anticipate and respond to an unforeseeable future. To play the piece, Curtis tunes his cello to its wolf tone and pulls his bow across different parts of the instrument, giving every pitch a hazy shroud. The wolf tone occurs naturally in the cello, but like electronic feedback at an amplified performance, it’s typically considered ugly or flawed. “Tuning to the wolf tone inverts the conventional function of tuning, which is to link an individual instrument to a social norm—concert pitch,” Curtis writes. “The search for self-sameness reveals a unit of distance we would not have discovered without having attempted to bridge it.”

While the motion of each note is unpredictable, the piece moves in broad sections that explore different patterns and textures. At first, a distant grumble grows into a full, beating resonance; later, trilling hums and shrieks burst out of the instrument’s highest reaches. These phrases emerge from quiet pauses and crescendo into swarms, but their movement is so delicate that a drastic shift may go unnoticed until it’s already gone. Peer closer and those shifts establish a sense of presence: guideposts that point the way through the wavery drones.

Though each of the album’s featured recordings present this general structure, the two performances take on different moods and act as companions to one another. The 2006 recording feels eerie and dark, woven from low, faraway rumbles and chilly hums. It occupies a nervous headspace, building an anxiety that’s never quite released. The 2020 recording feels like an answer to that tension—it sounds more assured and resolute, the cello’s wolf tone taking a richer, more resonant stance. It also feels more patient: Curtis’ bowings sigh like exhales. By the end, his cello whistles and floats with breezy ease, marking a departure from the 2006 recording, in which the ending evokes the howl from which the wolf tone takes its name.

When Radigue was creating her early feedback pieces, she often wondered how to control the sound, or if it could be controlled at all. With Naldjorlak, Curtis and Radigue yield to the cello’s wolf tone, a note with an inherent instability that many players would seek to avoid or correct. Instead of working around the wolf tone, Naldjorlak celebrates it—the music pays close attention to its every aspect, placing it front and center yet allowing it to roam. In a 2009 essay titled “The Mysterious Power of the Infinitesimal,” Radigue wrote: “This long journey through uncertain lands also enabled me to simply recognize what was already there, buried, hidden.” Naldjorlak serves as a reminder that if we listen closely enough, any sound can be music—and music, like all things, is changed in the current of time.
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Vanessa Ague writes about contemporary classical and experimental music. In addition to Pitchfork, her writing can be seen in The Wire, Bandcamp Daily, The Brooklyn Rail, The Quietus, and I Care If You Listen, among other publications. She currently lives in Brooklyn.
Contributor
Avatar Swag For Life Member 12:29am
Handy Haversack:

Speaking of which, we're trying to figure out a time to get over to LaMonte Young's Dream House during this break.
Avatar Swag For Life Member 12:31am
Handy Haversack:

↳ Jim the Poet @12:26
Which relates to the Irish revolutionary Wolfe Tone and the later band the Wolfe Tones somehow, I'm just assuming. I am not a fancy, big-city Haversack, and this is the first I have heard of the wolf tone. I like it. I like it.
Avatar Swag For Life Member 12:54am
spodiodi:

🕸️ hmm
Avatar 12:57am
GERZ:

After listening for an hour I lit more candles and have to say this is the first time I've felt the Christmas spirit.
Avatar 12:58am
GERZ:

The mulled wine is helping also.
  12:59am
I lost it at the movies 🎥:

1980 or so, recalling finally listening to The Residents’ “Eskimo” album playing as just so out there, unusual, & even scary. Now it seems “quaint” & a novelty. Relativity?
Avatar 1:04am
GERZ:

↳ I lost it at the movies 🎥 @12:59
I met "The Residents" several times and thought they would be these dark and mysterious artists. They are a bunch of nerdy computer geek types that had a major impact on my life in the 80s. I got to see the old warehouse loft in the SOMA district of San Francisco where they did all those one minute movies...pre-MTV. They were having a moving sale and I wish to hell I still had the fuzzy pink box set of '45s I bought from them. Hello Skinny!
  1:15am
👁️ lost it at the 🎥:

↳ GERZ @1:04
Wow, priceless memories & events & items. Letting-go is half the battle. Not very good at it, yet learning as time marches rapidly on. ♾️ Loop.
Avatar 1:19am
GERZ:

↳ 👁️ lost it at the 🎥 @1:15
Letting go. Yup. Moving on Jan. 15. It's hardest to let go of lovers and then spaces and places.
Avatar 1:24am
tak:

hello, this is my fav Basinski track. I listened to it while doing the camino. happy solstice
Avatar 1:39am
Juli P:

Non sleep want
J want breakfast lol
Avatar 1:43am
Juli P:

I should get festive & stay up all night.
Avatar Swag For Life Member 1:45am
Jim the Poet:

This music might put you to sleep
Avatar Swag For Life Member 1:59am
spodiodi:

thanks, Jim. hope you are too
Avatar 2:06am
Juli P:

↳ Jim the Poet @1:45
Nothing's putting this mind to sleep rn lol
I did my dishes
May start cleaning more
Too much to du I'll sleep when sleepy
Avatar Swag For Life Member 2:07am
Jim the Poet:

I think there is some kind of hypnotic micro tonal note I can play let me see here
  2:09am
fussy fizzix:

this is so soothing thank you
Avatar 2:15am
Juli P:

↳ Jim the Poet @2:07
Ty it's very peaceful!
Avatar 2:48am
Hubig Pie:

Hola. This sounds soothing.
Avatar Swag For Life Member 2:55am
spodiodi:

very nice... thanks, Jim the Poet
Avatar 2:57am
Hubig Pie:

↳ Hubig Pie @2:48
Oopsie, that's been said already. This is pastoral?
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