Music broadcasting

The Music broadcasting projects

One of the many projects I have promised to share with you is my Music broadcasting project – 1 In Music ezine and I Write The Songs radio show. Because we believe that humans can love more than one genre of music and that all music all over the world has something unique to offer, we have created this independent online music magazine to bridge the gaps that segregate music genres among other borders. Between 2009 an 2012 I ran a couple of features on a radio show. The sublime radio show unfortunately no longer runs today but it was the brain child of Manchester-based, England-born Peru-rooted Geli Berg, who delighted her audience with what the Western world calls “World music”.

Memories of Cultural Collage

I enjoyed presenting the “singer-songwriter feature” that had me research international covers of the work of well-known singer-songwriters. I also presented the “Crossing borders” feature in which I explored collaboration across borders and genres. The features were appropriate for the overall show, cleverly named “Cultural Collage” by its creator Geli Berg. However, I grew ill-at-ease with the boundaries (necessary for any show) that the perspectives of genre separation was imposing to my natural way of experiencing music. Geli herself who obeyed these necessary rules is a very open music listener: her aim was deeper, to give a voice to music that is often sorely under-represented on the waves, a job that she did for 11 years without any financial rewards whatsoever. I still admire the time and passion this experienced presenter and producer has and shared on AllFM, the Mancunian radio station on 96.9FM. This taught me that if I were to put that amount of time and dedication into it, I needed to do what it is that I liked and believed in.

Another aspect that bothered me a bit is the bad name that pop can have. Sure, a number of artists are only using music to make money or to be famous, particularly in pop. I try to limit my judgement to whether I like a song or not and only based on that, do I tend to play it. There is enough to judge within a song and there is so little we truly know about people’s motivations or stories. Although I might not always be able to help myself from judging, I prefer not to. If a song is beautiful, if it is greatly interpreted (and I am not talking about melisma and runs, whistles and roar bells, although they won’t necessarily mean either that the song will be ignored) I mean interpreted in unique and heartfelt fashion, that the melodies and the lyrics, the instrumentation and arrangements harmoniously complement it all, then the song has a place in my heart and generally on my playlists.

The online music magazine is now available online at https://1inmusic.com and publishes interviews, reviews, and I have my own show on Canalside Community Radio 102.8FM called “I Write The Songs” since 2013 http://canalsideradio.net with the podcast published on https://mixcloud.com/tikiblack.

I hope you dance

There are more projects I would like to share with you and I will do it soon. The main image of this article displays something of the new logo I use for my work. I thought of creating a little word cloud or tag cloud to sum up the words that define the projects that I am involved in including the ones I spoke about here. There is definitely more to come as you will see from the logo and I am looking forward to unveiling these to you in the next few days/weeks.

In the meantime, have a wonderful 2017, and play, sing, create, love, enjoy, dance to music! As Lee Ann Womack sings in Maya Angelou’s favourite song “I Hope You Dance”, a song penned by Tia Sillers and Mark Sanders and played on I Write The Songs #104, I hope