I’ve been fortunate to get a mention and a play in the latest Radio To Go Podcast – an excellent audio cast featuring some fine music from Birmingham and the West Midlands.
I met Robin Valk, the creator of Radio To Go at a meeting of the Birmingham Music Network – an event well recommended to any musician, promoter, journalist or otherwise interested party in the region – they meet on the last Thursday of each month, 4-6pm at The UCE Technology and Innovation Centre(TIC), Millennium Point, Curzon Street, Birmingham.
Robin is a very experienced Radio DJ going back some 30 years and could well lay claim to be Birmingham’s answer to the late John Peel. He now functions primarily as a broadcast and software consultant as well as putting together these excellent monthly podcasts.
When we met Robin interviewed me about Project X Presents for the May edition of his podcast and played The Valentine Court Flat One recording of Gudonya. For this, the July edition Robin again kindly provides an update on PXP and broadcasts – for the first time in any format – the piano version of Completion.
Completion is a fairly epic number clocking in at six minutes, largely based around one sweeping riff that builds and builds before abruptly halving time for a serene and uplifting mid section, before coming back to the main riff, bigger and louder than before. We performed a version of it in the first Project X Presents event in July 2006 with me at piano, a string quartet, acoustic drums and electric bass, triggered vocal samples specially recorded for the piece by Howard Marks and some electronic sounds. It provided a great link between the band music of Koala Grip and the DJ lead section from Marc Reck. The solo piano version provides the climax of my album.
The remainder of the podcast carries a great variety of quality music including two of my favourite local bands. The Love Child Electric are an indie guitar band at heart but offer great strings, harmonies and classical influence to mark them out as distinctive in both style and quality. 360 meanwhile are probaby best described by a word of their own invention, “skafunkapunkreggaerockers”.
I’d recommend the Radio To Go podcast to any fan of quality and diverse music – beats the actual radio any day.
Rich
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