bring back the Spark

Whiteshell Provincial Park, Manitoba, Canada, photo: gurdonark CC BY

The good folks at Canada's Spark CBC public radio program just released the podcast of their October 10-13 episode and podcast, which features the following songs, many of which are Mixter remixes:

"Oslodum 2004" by DJ Dolores
"Snow Geese at Hagerman Wildlife Preserve" by Gurdonark
"290907 cello pizz Fm 01" and "290907 drums 03" by Nurykabe
"Mike Shinoda - saturday" by mikearase
"Restless Sleep" by Gurdonark
"Keep It Clean" by Charley Jordan
"Unusual Travels II (first part)" by MarcoNicola
"Lightin" by Antony Raijekov
Download the MP3, or subscribe to the podcast.

This is a really cool podcast of an episode of the live radio show, which addresses cool ways technology can be used. For example, one of my pieces is the background ambience for a discussion of the "warbike", this cool sound-design instrument which allows one to pedal through a neighborhood while the bike converts the local field ambience into song. I will run the risk of speaking in third person to say that the warbike is a very gurdonark kind of music-maker, and there is a sense of "right radio" about being the background ambience for such a piece.

To me, the whole point of making Creative Commons pieces is to be that little buzz of ambience in the back of a radio spot thousands of miles away about innovative African weblog aggregators. This Spark program, coupled with a kind use of mixter material in Marco Raaphorst's soundtrack for the Dutch radio play "Flick Radio", makes me glad that ccmixter provides a platform to give people a one-stop place to find things to use on the public radio. I'm also reminded to make atmospheric instrumentals, as such simple pieces which can be "dropped into" a podcast about technology or a youtube about Second Life architecture tend to get picked up the most.