Underdog

Got a heads up about “CBC E” the other day, looks like “a small cell of CBC-based electronic music insurgents” has some worthwhile plans to keep our national public radio relevant.

Here’s a quote from the Facebook group:

First, let’s just say that nothing is written in stone, so at this point we’re just blue skying what CBC E can become. The project was conceived and created by a small team of CBC producers who’s primary duties lay elsewhere within the corporation. A few of us work at CBC Radio 3 in Vancouver, and some others are scattered throughout the CBC across the country. Resources at this time are scant, so for the next little while we’ll be baby-stepping towards our goals.

For the time being, the CBC E community will mostly live on Facebook, Twitter (https://twitter.com/cbcelectronic), and possibly other social media sites such as YouTube, Soundcloud, and Flickr.

The immediate plan is:
:: Post at least one track per day, (the “Nocturnal Transmission”).
:: Post links as we find them to tracks, videos, news festivals and other bits of content we like.
:: Work to improve the quality, breadth and rotation on the Electronic radio stream. (http://radiostreams.cbc.ca/cbc-w7vcr-128.m3u)
:: Encourage artists to sign up as members to the CBC Radio 3 website and upload their tracks and mixes. This serves a number of purposes, namely to allow us to program their music on the CBC Electronic radio stream and feature it in podcasts and whatnot.

The dream:
:: To build a passionate national community around Canadian and select international electronic music.
:: To offer a series of regular electronic podcasts, both track samplings as well as mixes.
:: To create an independent editorial strategy that allows us to post interviews and features on artists, scenes, festivals and anything pertaining to this culture.
:: To build an sizable audience around the radio stream that will justify investment of more time and resources.

This is a step in the right direction, hopefully by spreading awareness and just making generally awesome electronic music, this idea can come to fruition.

Its funny how misleading the “RIP Michael Jackson” is at the end this Youtube clip. It gives you the impression that he died during the infamous Pepsi debauch.

... The first ten.

Diggy laughed at me the other day for mistakenly referring to “Gold Panda” as “Panda Bear”. See, Diggy was promoting Gold Panda that night and I was thinking about the new Panda Bear album, “Tomboy”. Panda Bear is essentially two of the main guys from Animal Collective and, usually, I would stay away from such Pitchfork fodder but what i had heard sounded interesting. So, finally got the chance to listen to it and…its good. Its unabashedly poppy but it has this psychedelic gloss on top, that i dig. My initial response was that it reminded me of Simon and Garfunkel (because of the two harmonizing vocals), meets “Pet Sounds” meets Tough Alliance. But with songs like “Drone” it has just enough experimentation to make it intriguing. So, evidently it is the year of the Panda and Panda love.

New vid from New York’s Cubic Zirconia. Do yourself a favour and catch their live show if you ever get the chance, it is well worth it.