FROM ANDROMEDA AND BACK RADIO: SKIES THAT DO NOT FADE
At the art store where I worked, one of the young hipsters immediately yelled, "Tchaikovsky!" and began conducting with her hands.
I'll never forget that moment.
We had gone from, say, Throwing Muses to Tchaikovsky, and I remember thinking: How cool was that?
Here was music making its own case.
It didn't plead. It didn't demand. In its own way, it rocked.
And then, after that glorious interlude, it was back to alternative rock.
The funny thing was that the classical piece had not seemed out of place. It held its own. It brought to the table its own heft, its own weight. It wasn't preachy. It wasn't better than.
It was simply another fiber in the fabric of the day.
And maybe that's the way great music should be heard.
Not fenced off by genre. Not placed behind glass. Not approached because someone tells us it's important. Just dropped into the middle of our lives alongside everything else we love and allowed to make its own case.
Tonight, From Andromeda And Back Radio is going to do exactly that.
Rachmaninoff—my second favorite composer after Bach—is always on my mind or somewhere nearby. You know how you'll be listening to something that hits on all cylinders, like Morcheeba or Swum, or you'll go off on a glorious run of The Low End Theory and Strangeways, Here We Come, and then, for reasons you can't quite explain, you suddenly feel the need to drop some Beethoven or Mozart on the deck?
Well, it's crazy.
Like most listeners, I like to take journeys, which is why I love soundtracks so much—such as The Searchers, or, coming up, the absolute mastery of Ennio Morricone. And I cannot wait to talk about him!
Rachmaninoff is like that for me. Those three glorious symphonies and those epic piano concertos are always lurking somewhere nearby.
Sweep. Endless sweep.
You can see skies that do not fade and steppes like oceans.
And if you've got a radio station, why not have some fun and try to entice people into taking these Magellan-esque journeys with you?
So what better way to push our boat out into the sea, unfurl our sail and set off than with the Adagio from Rachmaninoff's Second Symphony as our Sirens?
Crashing rocks excluded, of course. Always crashing rocks excluded!
So let's search these strange seas of sound—together.
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