tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-68674188772122581132024-02-21T02:18:05.326-07:00Sunshine After DarkDisco on the radio with John HuckJohnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12652253269145932683noreply@blogger.comBlogger53125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6867418877212258113.post-31968590455276916562024-01-25T14:56:00.027-07:002024-01-25T15:06:55.302-07:00<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVWvM0hJu9KZWvMVNO3QmizEkM5YDBq-pOUY38yqHwrC0EFXjyyajQfQz0liAjbOC9yh95a5Uxnh0Kt-qDUw6Mt-aZIJfAjkEhxhg9x5Y_x1IVkU-IpYE-hH00wV04l12rq6OsYSO-6tXkj6bLdEKYWW0A3bmD6lwOGr_9lByPm-u08DuoAEMXwNeVGnQ/s1500/Sunshine200.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1500" data-original-width="1500" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVWvM0hJu9KZWvMVNO3QmizEkM5YDBq-pOUY38yqHwrC0EFXjyyajQfQz0liAjbOC9yh95a5Uxnh0Kt-qDUw6Mt-aZIJfAjkEhxhg9x5Y_x1IVkU-IpYE-hH00wV04l12rq6OsYSO-6tXkj6bLdEKYWW0A3bmD6lwOGr_9lByPm-u08DuoAEMXwNeVGnQ/w400-h400/Sunshine200.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p dir="ltr" id="docs-internal-guid-847c5528-7fff-3bd4-5051-d97cd36b4941" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span face="Arial,sans-serif" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">January 2024 - 200 Episodes of Sunshine After Dark</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">New Year's Eve is the ritual celebration of the final demise of the year, but January is the month when we actually shake off the mental remnants of the old and begin anew. This year, the month of January holds double significance for <i>Sunshine After Dark</i>: January 25th marks the 200th episode of the show and, within the ongoing chronological survey of disco I've been obsessively constructing on the show, I have finally reached the shores of <i>1979</i>, the year that disco crashed.</p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><br /></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">There's not much to say about the 200 episode mark (it's just a number, right?), except that I have now surpassed my previous CJSR show, <i>Clocks and Clouds</i>, which I co-hosted with my friend Chris Waterton, and which ran for 188 episodes, from late 2003 to the fall of 2007. I started <i>Sunshine After Dark</i> in the fall of 2019 because I wanted to rejoin the community of CJSR volunteers, where I have met some of the coolest people, and because I thought I should finally get around to really, truly listening to all the disco records that I had been collecting since 2004.<br /><br />Tim Lawrence's book, <i>Love Saves the Day</i>, set me on the path to collecting disco. Before then, I collected house and techno and knew there was underground disco beyond ABBA and the Bee Gees, but I didn't know what artists to look for. After devouring the book, which included lots of playlists, I started going to flea markets and slowly assembling the pieces of the story. Later, I picked up other books, like the collected <i>Disco File</i> columns of Vince Aletti, and eventually I had a pretty good idea of the major labels and major artists. I figured I had pierced through the veil of ignorance, and found the good stuff: Salsoul, Prelude, Larry Levan, Walter Gibbons, etc. But sometimes a little knowledge is dangerous. You think you know it all! Well, I had learned about the highlights. But I still harbored a notion that there was a lot of 'bad' disco, which I believed generally coincided with the supposed excesses of 1978 and 1979, when disco supposedly became 'commercial,' and which was to be avoided at all costs.<br /><br />But that simplistic story starts to break down when you encounter the songs in their original context, or the context that I've managed to recreate for the music on the show: namely, when you encounter them as individual points in a continuous stream of new releases, and when you play them together in mixes with their contemporaneous fellows. Instead of approaching each song from the point of view of having to pass judgement: 'is this good or is it bad', you starting asking yourself, 'could this be useful?' and 'what would this sound like next to this other song?' And then you start noticing little wonderful details all over the place.<br /> <br />And so the significance of reaching <i>1979</i> is more personally satisfying to me than 200 episodes, because my understanding of the musical developments that lead up to that precipice has been greatly expanded, especially over the past 12 months of <i>1978</i>. Previously, I knew that so-called Eurodisco had come to predominate and that this was, in a general sense, synonymous with "cookie-cutter" music and that disco might have gone on its merry path of "authentic" orchestral soul if that other style had not come along and ruined everything. But what I have come to appreciate is the shallowness and implausibility of this narrative. The division between these two styles on a musical basis is not so black and white as one might expect and both styles influenced each other in their development.<br /><br />The Europeans were emulating the orchestral sound of Philadelphia to begin with. Take the first Ritchie Family album, <i>Brazil</i>, which featured American singers, the usual orchestral players of the Philadelphia scene, but was produced by Jacques Morali. It sounds like an American record. The cinematic scope and dramatic scale of orchestral music became the register or measurement of scale (in the sense of size) for disco's sonic peaks. Arguably, that was true for American and European music alike. And with such a large vertical scale of dynamics, it was inevitable that the horizontal length or duration would reach towards the orchestral length of symphonies too, where structures are broken up into different connected movements, which artists like Alec Costandinos explored in albums like <i>Romeo & Juliet</i>. <br /><br />Vince Aletti talks about pace and changes as two elements to consider when listening to a longer suite-style disco pieces (or any disco music, really). Pace means the pacing of the changes between different sections of the composition. Do they keep you interested as a dancer? And the changes themselves: are they contrasting or gradual, do they catch your interest, are the hooks catchy, do they build on each other? This is the same kind of overall effect that a DJ wants to achieve when mixing records together, and on these longer disco records (usually 15 to 20 minutes long), this composition is "pre-coordinated" (to take a term from my library profession). Aletti was reviewing all the disco that came out. He would note that a certain record was Pop-disco or Euro-disco, but those were not a comment on their quality. There was a time and a place for them, just as there was for the traditional "Philly" sound. In putting the show together, I've really enjoyed playing with these different colours on the palette and finding fun ways to combine them.<br /><br />Besides the lengthening of compositions to create suites, which I differentiate from the lengthening of songs by remixers like Walter Gibbons, who created peaks and valleys by introducing instrumental and drum-only break downs into conventional soul song structures, the Europeans were responsible for two other stylistic innovations that both appeared in 1977 and went on to become fully exploited in 1978. These were synthesizers and the rock attitude. Europeans had long been associated with synthesizers, and they weren't new to disco but usually they were employed in songs by groups like the Peppers or Bimbo Jet to play a melody in a funny sound.<br /><br />It turned out that synthesizers were really good at two things that other instruments couldn't do quite so easily: the ability to play chords and tones that were sustained for long stretches and that could be modulated in timbre and character; and the ability to be triggered by an electronic sequencer to create a hypnotic rhythmic pattern. These two characteristics could be combined, as they most famously were on <i>I Feel Love</i>, where slow modulation of the sound over a whole section of 32 bars or longer softens the rigidity of the octave-popping baseline without taking away from its hypnotic effect. Both of these aspects of synthesizers were highly compatible with the evolution of disco structures towards long, unfurling, seemingly unending music, not unlike a Wagnerian opera*. (*Can it be a mere coincidence that Jim Burgess won a prize for singing Wagner?). This gave producers a lot of room to experiment and explore.<br /><br />The second European innovation (or third, really) is what I'm calling the "rock attitude" or "rock-vocal". The song that really brought this forward was Santa Esmeralda's <i>Please Don't Let Me be Misunderstood</i>, which, truth-be-told, was more of a Spanish, flamenco style song than anything. But the straining vocal style of Leroy Gomez and the electric guitar solo introduced the strutting, peacockish intensity of the rock star into the sonic theatre of the dance floor, which gave dancers a fun new attitude to act out. This "rock-innovation" was the thing that I really did not expect to discover in 1978. I already knew about the synthesizer introduction. But I think the rock style had just as much effect. The two elements often show up together. As I say, it was as much about the attitude in the music as it was about the music itself. And really, it was less of an introduction and of more a revival of the rock attitude that was found in some of the very early disco DJs sets. Francis Grasso famously played <i>Whole Lotta Love</i> over top of <i>Chicago's I'm a Man</i>. And then you've got Barrabas, Babe Ruth, Titanic, etc. Interestingly, many of these groups were English or European.<br /><br />As I say, having been introduced in 1977, by 1978 these three elements had simmered together long enough and together were propelling disco in a new direction. Disco style became even more dynamic than it had been before, because new combinations of these elements were being created all the time. That's why the <i>Saturday Night Fever</i> soundtrack, while it sold incredible numbers, arguably had little impact on the evolution of the music. The non-Bee Gees songs on it were already a year old or more when it was release in December of 1977. Disco was already moving in new directions, full steam ahead. In 1978 you still got those longer suites of music, but they were toned down a bit. Take Amant, for example. Or Celi Bee's <i>Fly Me on the Wings of Love</i>. Apparently, the music for that 15 minute suite was supposed to be for the Rice & Bean Orchestra's version of <i>Dante's Inferno</i>, but instead it was converted into a song with more conventional lyrics.<br /><br />Putting the show together the past 12 months, I have to say that following the week-to-week development has been very compelling. Each release does something new, if incrementally, which creates a feeling of openness and possibility. I track my playlists and I generally don't repeat songs once I've played them. It's hardly surprising that I wasn't able to play all of my records from 1978, let alone records I don't have, but imagine if you were a working DJ back then and you had an hour or more of new music to learn every week.<br /><br />These days, there are so many dance music genres and thousands (I would bet) of new releases a day in each genre, it's almost unimaginable the volume to keep track of. But it is harder to find music that really is innovative once genres stabilize. Something new comes along for a while, its possibilities are exploited, and then, if it's lucky, it settles in to becoming a standardized template, like the blues. Even old school (rave) hardcore has devotees lovingly producing new tracks with original Amiga software. Nothing wrong with that. Music doesn't always have to be on the bleeding edge to be valuable or worthwhile. But it gets harder to sustain excitement and enthusiasm in a "scene", by which I mean an audience that's been following a genre or set of bands, without some element of the "new". Disco had that in spades in 1977 and 1978. I'm about to find out how it all plays out in 1979.<br /></p>Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12652253269145932683noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6867418877212258113.post-64566276338682002652023-10-12T12:56:00.002-06:002023-10-13T08:32:25.289-06:00SWEAT presents CyberFunk Halloween 2023<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhA2hc_8PPjS6tcbALTXJHSNZUpJc-aJPb04RRTLqwfI2l6VwCpgg9OT6t5v9J9fmJ_4Tarwj5KcrrfJSxuMNtg9tp8-qfvjRzpODX1fHgHM2bhWYPpNkhyphenhyphencwrMwZTIBE6k6w_5r-u8ED64wyNvRlkDl1UGD0qRihtvq3xVx4uDOFRNTFLzruXrgMX1g94/s1640/Cyberfunk23%20banner.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="1640" height="280" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhA2hc_8PPjS6tcbALTXJHSNZUpJc-aJPb04RRTLqwfI2l6VwCpgg9OT6t5v9J9fmJ_4Tarwj5KcrrfJSxuMNtg9tp8-qfvjRzpODX1fHgHM2bhWYPpNkhyphenhyphencwrMwZTIBE6k6w_5r-u8ED64wyNvRlkDl1UGD0qRihtvq3xVx4uDOFRNTFLzruXrgMX1g94/w640-h280/Cyberfunk23%20banner.jpg" width="640" /></a></div> <p></p><p>For Halloween this year, SWEAT presents CyberFunk 2023. Catch me in the techno basement on October 28th, along with headliner Overland (YVR), <span class="x193iq5w xeuugli x13faqbe x1vvkbs xlh3980 xvmahel x1n0sxbx x1lliihq x1s928wv xhkezso x1gmr53x x1cpjm7i x1fgarty x1943h6x xudqn12 x3x7a5m x6prxxf xvq8zen xo1l8bm xzsf02u" dir="auto">Simon Does, Bijou, Wet Floor, and AngelScience</span>. Plus 2 other floors with Night Vision showcase feat. Dunmore Park b2b Sahib and the Sweat Disco loft feat. David Stone. Tickets at <a href="http://grindstonetheatre.ca">grindstonetheatre.ca</a>. More details on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/693241486187555/?acontext=%7B%22event_action_history%22%3A[]%7D" target="_blank">Facebook</a>.<br /></p>Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12652253269145932683noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6867418877212258113.post-70323352010082412952023-06-20T09:59:00.007-06:002023-06-20T10:02:37.958-06:00Summer Break<p>I will be taking a bit of a break from producing new episodes of Sunshine After Dark in June and July, though I plan to make at least one episode for each month to keep the time capsule series going. New episodes will resume in August. In the meantime, my friends at CJSR, CHMA and CKXU will be airing past episodes at the usual times.</p><p>Thanks to all my listeners for their support! Perhaps this is a chance to catch up on some of the episodes of 2023, which are all posted on <a href="https://www.mixcloud.com/wijit/" target="_blank">Mixcloud</a>.<br /></p>Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12652253269145932683noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6867418877212258113.post-89701303747379922662023-01-28T12:10:00.006-07:002023-01-28T12:31:35.556-07:00Feb 4 - Keep It Real w/ Noosh & Wijit<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoBMGoBWy73u3JTtOYt6gxKw5ImOw-4ZQnLRpNnywMhZjo2cDljHWt4lS5d2kzTE6eB3acMynI7BaJzCPsOlwfAy52w4em4oFxxdyeVAXgNI45DBGSF4yYfOOu-icyLlwbMqjOJIkWNMjM2rTzkbwK57VXlIBurodyJa8kFlm1Bfsg64e4ZQsZ2Ith/s820/325607590_568122938194873_3869925524110389176_n.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="360" data-original-width="820" height="280" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoBMGoBWy73u3JTtOYt6gxKw5ImOw-4ZQnLRpNnywMhZjo2cDljHWt4lS5d2kzTE6eB3acMynI7BaJzCPsOlwfAy52w4em4oFxxdyeVAXgNI45DBGSF4yYfOOu-icyLlwbMqjOJIkWNMjM2rTzkbwK57VXlIBurodyJa8kFlm1Bfsg64e4ZQsZ2Ith/w640-h280/325607590_568122938194873_3869925524110389176_n.jpg" width="640" /></a></div> <p></p>Due to minor illness I was unable to play my previous two gigs for "Keep It Real" at the Grindstone Theatre.<br /><br />So I'm hoping to be third time lucky on <b>Saturday, February 4th</b> when I play with two of my long-time pals: DJ <a href="https://www.instagram.com/anushkaj_1/" target="_blank">Noosh</a> from <a href="https://www.facebook.com/connectyeg" target="_blank">Connect</a> and VJ <a href=" https://www.instagram.com/granularadventures/" target="_blank">Granular Adventures</a>.<br /><br />Great turn out last month for Jack Ryan from Calgary. Everyone agreed the sound was superb. Let's keep it going!<br /><p>No cover. 10:30pm to close. Or drop by early to hang in the lounge and say hi. The <a href="https://www.grindstonetheatre.ca/" target="_blank">Grindstone Theatre is</a> located at 10019 - 81 Ave, Edmonton.</p><p>Presented as a vinyl-only night by <a href="https://www.deadvinylsociety.com/" target="_blank">Dead Vinyl Society</a>.<br /><br />Here's the <a href="https://fb.me/e/3lQIfi2k2" target="_blank">Facebook event</a>.<br /><br /><br /></p>Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12652253269145932683noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6867418877212258113.post-75817947600500086862023-01-09T14:45:00.003-07:002023-01-09T15:00:28.723-07:00Antifreeze! Jan 14: Jack Ryan & Wijit<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhavKwrvLDINtZ4VR8NQKUqXEDgpBOh7NuP-d6Z4bB1BJ5muXyOmEaHd9eXY-8s0F01WVQwh4yGOL7l262sRPWIRFw35bT4oBeFIIT9ktLkGT7IsTbvWTZMh14ps6_DZ17Xa3qv0A23_H_f1EmH_0beWaQ-dBq3JnlkN8u2ZShelz0lgt2BaVwUJ1sw" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="360" data-original-width="820" height="280" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhavKwrvLDINtZ4VR8NQKUqXEDgpBOh7NuP-d6Z4bB1BJ5muXyOmEaHd9eXY-8s0F01WVQwh4yGOL7l262sRPWIRFw35bT4oBeFIIT9ktLkGT7IsTbvWTZMh14ps6_DZ17Xa3qv0A23_H_f1EmH_0beWaQ-dBq3JnlkN8u2ZShelz0lgt2BaVwUJ1sw=w640-h280" width="640" /></a></div><br /> <p></p><p>Antifreeze! upcoming on January 14, 2023, when I'll be playing techno, minimal deepness on vinyl with Jack Ryan from Calgary at the Grindstone Theatre. Ryan is one of the movers behind <a href="https://www.mixcloud.com/Excursionsfm/">excursions.fm</a> from a few years ago, among other things.<br /></p><p>No cover. 10:30pm to close. Or drop by early to hang in the lounge and say hi. The <a href="https://www.grindstonetheatre.ca/" target="_blank">Grindstone Theatre</a> is located at 10019 - 81 Ave, Edmonton.<br /></p><p>Presented by <a href="https://www.deadvinylsociety.com/" target="_blank">Dead Vinyl Society</a>, as part of their Keep It Real event series ("Dance Grooves on Vinyl"). <br /></p>Here's the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/2023062527883220?ref=newsfeed" target="_blank">Facebook event,</a> if you do that kind of thing.<br />Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12652253269145932683noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6867418877212258113.post-28114358310417429942022-12-22T10:42:00.015-07:002022-12-22T19:20:36.643-07:00Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Stayin' Alive<p><b>Notes about the <i>Saturday Night Fever Soundtrack</i></b></p><p>I've been tracking the disco releases of 1977, month by month, throughout 2022. It was a very significant year in a number of ways, with European synthesizer records like <i>I Feel Love</i>, and artists like Cerrone, Space, Kraftwerk and other records having a big impact on the development of a more abstract and extended musical style. 1977 was also the year that Studio 54 and the Paradise Garage opened. And after all of those things, at the end of the year, it was also the year when the movie <i>Saturday Night Fever</i> was released.</p><p>This blog post complements the commentary about the Saturday Night Fever Soundtrack in episode 149 of <i>Sunshine After Dark,</i> which I ad lib-ed after writing down these notes. My overall argument is a bit more refined there. I've cleaned these notes up a bit, but left them a little rough for the time being. The main sources for this post are: the soundtrack itself, Wikipedia, and two guardian articles, listed at the end. Another good source to look at is an article about the Brooklyn disco scene by Lenny Fontana.</p><p>I'm hoping the episode stays up on Mixcloud for at least a while (<a href="https://www.mixcloud.com/wijit/sunshine-after-dark-149-saturday-night-fever-deconstructed/" target="_blank">here's the link</a>). Mixcloud limits the number of songs from one album you can include in one show, so there's a chance the algorithms will pick up my flagrant disregard for this rule at some point.<br /></p><p><i>Saturday Night Fever</i> had a huge impact on the way disco was perceived by a large number of people. Disco was not new in 1977. It was already recognized as a part of popular culture—the novelty record Disco Duck came out in 1976—but the movie and its soundtrack was arguably the moment when disco began to dominate the mainstream. Combined, the movie and soundtrack were a phenomenon unto itself. I'm going to focus on the soundtrack in this post.<br /></p><p>The soundtrack supported the movie release, but the album was the thing people took into their homes and interacted with in a way that you couldn't do with radio. And with the publicity and hoopla of a major Hollywood cinematic release creating public attention for the soundtrack release, it had a head start on sales. The soundtrack was released on November 15th, 1977. It spent 24 weeks at #1 on the Billboard album
chart from January to July and has sold over 40
million copies worldwide, one of the best selling albums of all time. <br /><br />One of the features of the disco scene up that point was that there were so many artists and new releases all the time, as I've shown over the course of this past year on the radio show. Keeping up with weekly releases would have been an impossible task for the casual listener. Disco was primarily about hot songs, whether they were found on 7", 12" or on an album. But here, finally was an album that was easily accessible, and that someone could listen to and know that hundreds of thousands of other people were listening to the same thing. It was like a public monument that everyone could visit and take the measure of for themselves to learn about this disco thing.<br /><br />The soundtrack acts much more like a conventional album, following the accepted conventions of album sequencing in a time when records had two sides, a listener had to flip the record over to hear the second act and the opening cut on each side was prime real estate.<br /><br />The soundtrack does not set out to highlight the DJ as the orchestrator of musical selection. It does not try to replicate the experience of a night of dancing, like <i>Disco PAAAAARTY</i> (1974) did, by segueing songs together. Nor does it present an authentic underground scene, like Scepter's <i>Disco Gold I</i> and <i>Disco Gold II</i> (1975) did, which compiled special extended cuts and included shout outs on the jackets to working DJs. Nor does it compile indisputable hits like <i>Philadelphia International Classics</i> (1977) did, released at the end of 1977 too and also a double LP.<br /><br />By de-emphasizing the role of the DJ in disco culture, this concept didn't need to be explained to a mass audience, and the disco experience could be presented as a variation on the conventional artist model, where stars performed and songs floated on the sea of top 40 charts, vying for success. The importance of labels in establishing a particular sound or set of artists was also down-played.<br /><br />The 2-record set is an elaborately constructed compilation, more like a musical than a DJ set with peaks and valleys. Like a musical, there are main characters and supporting characters. The Bee Gees are clearly the main characters of the soundtrack, even as they are not characters in the film, in the way that the Beatles are in Hard Day's Night, for instance. In fact, none of the new Bee Gees' songs had been written when the movie was filmed. Incidentally, Boz Scaggs' <i>Lowdown</i> was one song that the actors actually danced to during one of the rehearsal scenes. It was replaced by music written by David Shire, because the movie producers were unsuccessful in licensing the song.<br /><br />The reason you know the Bee Gees are the main characters, starts with the fact they are pictured on the cover, looking down on John Travolta in full strut. Also on the back cover, presiding over the only two other artists contributing new material, Yvonne Elliman and Tavares. In fact, the songs that both of these artists perform on the album were written by the Bee Gees.<br /><br />Next, when you look at record 1, side A, you see that it is packed with all the new Bee Gees songs, including Elliman's performance, which would be her greatest hit. So, even if a listener never heard the rest of the album, they would still come away with the impression that the Bee Gees were the stars. It doesn't hurt that the songs are undeniably catchy, right from the opening guitar riff of <i>Stayin' Alive</i>. But side A is essentially a conventional album side by a single artist.<br /><br />All the rest of the music on the album was either at least one year old at the time of release, or composed for the movie by David Shire, a movie composer who had created music for action films like <i>The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3</i> and <i>The Conversation</i>. The 'stale-ness' of the older music stood out to disco aficionado's at the time, both because new records came out every week, and also because the impact of European electronic sounds from Kraftwerk, Space, and especially Giorgio Moroder, who created the synthetic pumping glide of <i>I Feel Love</i> for Donna Summer, had a huge effect on the evolution of the musical style over the course of 1977. That style was moving away from the star model of hit songs and towards an extended, ecstatic experience, lost in repetitious and psychedelic instrumental numbers.<br /><br />But none of that is reflected in <i>Saturday Night Fever</i>. Instead, it's basically the sound of American disco from 1975 and 1976, plus the Bee Gees. The Bee Gees even said they felt they were making blue-eyed soul (Gibbs 2008), rather than disco. That this snapshot of the disco scene, frozen in time, was the blueprint heard by millions around the world means, arguably, that it was a conservative version of disco that took root in the mainstream.<br /><br />One final point about the Bee Gees as the main characters. It is notable that there are no solo artists included on the soundtrack who might steal their limelight. Besides Yvonne Elliman, who was a minor artist, Tavares, Kool & the Gang, KC & The Sunshine Band and the Trammps were all vocal groups, and so of a kind with the Bee Gees, but none of these groups were presented as a group of personalities. Walter Murphy, Ralph MacDonald, MFSB and David Shire all contributed instrumental numbers. <br /><br />Okay, so, once you've finished with the Bee Gees' opening side and you flip over to side B, you get a disco hit right away, <i>A Fifth of Beethoven</i>. This was actually a #1 hit on the Billboard Top 40 chart in 1976, but it had minimal impact in the underground charts. I couldn't find it on any charts in the Disco Files column for the same period (starting July 1976). It is actually a super fun and catchy song. A good cut to grab people's interest off the bat, with a tune recognizable to almost anyone. Crucially, also an instrumental cut (see paragraph above). This is followed by Tavares' version of <i>More Than A Woman</i>, which echoes the Bee Gee's own version on side A, like a reprise, reinforcing the importance of the main characters. Interestingly, the Tavares version was the one that charted. Next you get the first number by David Shire, the movie composer, which would recall for listeners the connection of the soundtrack to the movie, followed by <i>Calypso Breakdown</i>, a genuinely fun instrumental number featuring a long, drawn-out groove that is easy to get into as a dancer. This is almost like the intermission music, setting up the second act to come.<br /><br />Side C, the second record, starts with another David Shire number, <i>Night On Disco Mountain</i>. It's an echo of the opening number of side B, being a disco version of a popular classical music melody. Also a tad campy, but fun and very dramatic. This sets up an equally fun and slightly silly number from Kool & the Gang, <i>Open Sesame</i>, which begins with the declaration "Open Sesame!!" followed by the sound of a gong that dies away for a very long time before a sharp snare hit starts the song proper. This is a legit number, but it's from 1976, and it serves to set up the next batch of Bee Gees songs—their previous hits—both in terms of the time frame, but also to put them in the company of other disco groups, and more to the point, predominantly black disco groups. <i>Jive Talkin</i>' from 1975 and <i>You Should be Dancing</i> (1976) remind listeners that the Bee Gees are the stars of the soundtrack, but also that they had legitimate disco hits under their belts. The closing song from KC & the Sunshine Band, <i>Boogie Shoes</i>, from 1975, serves the same contextualizing role that <i>Open Sesame</i> does.<br /><br />If you've made it through the first three sides of the album and are still hungry for more, side D delivers solid numbers from the supporting cast: David Shire's <i>Salsation</i>, MFSB's <i>K-Jee</i> and the Trammps' <i>Disco Inferno</i>. <i>Disco Inferno</i> was a big hit at the start of 1977. It was released to select DJs on New Year's Eve. The Trammps were well established as producers of solid, if predictable disco chuggers by that point. This characterization of the band comes up a number of times in commentary from Vince Aletti on their releases during this period. Like <i>Calypso Breakdown</i> at the end of side B, this is a long song, almost 11 minutes and is probably the biggest disco hit outside of the Bee Gees numbers. So the soundtrack ends on a high note, a long extended, high-energy song bound to leave an impression. A solid anchor track. As previously mentioned, though, the Trammps are not in danger of overshadowing the Bee Gees on this album, given the sheer number of Bee Gees songs included. For good measure, they also aren't pictured on the album jacket. That distinction seems to have gone only to artists who had recorded new material, but I think you could make the argument that <i>Disco Inferno</i> is now closely associated with the film in the popular imagination, so it seems a bit odd.<br /><br />In presenting my version of this soundtrack album on my radio show, I am more interested in everything around the Bee Gees songs than the big Bee Gees songs themselves. Not that they aren't interesting in their own right, but those songs were launched into a different galaxy far, far away from the underground disco scene—the galaxy of top 40. This album just happens to have been the vehicle. So if you imagine a cast picture of this musical journey, I've cut out the Bee Gees to look around them, a bit like the way Tom Stoppard created a play focusing on a pair of minor characters from <i>Hamlet</i> in his play <i>Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead</i>. <br /><br />David Shire's music is actually really great. Vince Aletti wasn't so sure, but to me, yes, it's very dramatic and it's obviously sound track music, but the session playing is top notch and the songs buzz. Since they never got a release outside the album, I'm featuring that music on the show. I really do love campy songs, so I also can't pass up the chance to play Walter Murphy. Even though the supporting cast numbers were somewhat passé at the time, they are generally well chosen, especially the MFSB and Kool & The Gang songs. I'm also really intrigued by the idea that Boz Scaggs's <i>Lowdown</i> was the song the movie actors actually danced to.<br /><br />Another few interesting factoids about the film. Saturday Night Fever was filmed in Brooklyn, New York, between March and May of 1977. It was based on a June, 1976 article in <i>New York</i> magazine called "Tribal rites of the new Saturday nights" written by Nik Cohn, recently arrived in America from the UK. Later, he admitted that most of the article was made up and was actually based on his observations of mod culture and specific people he grew up with in the UK. He did actually go to Brooklyn, but did not spend much time if any in the Odyssey 2001 club. He walked around during the day to get a sense of the locale.<br /></p><p>The Bee Gees were in the middle of recording an album when they were approached about creating music for the movie, and so some of the songs they had written for that album ended up as the core of the soundtrack. The band made the suggestion that the title of the movie be changed to <i>Saturday Night Fever</i>, because of the song <i>Night Fever</i>. <i>Stayin' Alive</i> was going to be called <i>Saturday Night</i> or something like that, but because there were already a lot of songs called <i>Saturday Night</i>, such as by the Bay City Rollers, they changed it to <i>Stayin' Alive </i>(Gibbs 2008). </p><p>Interesting to note that the film was about a dance competition and Chic had, just the same month, released its song <i>Dance, Dance, Dance</i> inspired by the movie <i>They Shoot Horses, Don't They</i>, which was about a dance competition in the 1940s.</p><p></p><p><b>References</b></p><p>Aletti, Vince. <i>The disco files, 1973-1978: New York's underground, week by week. </i>s.l.: DJhistory.com.<i><br /></i></p><p>Fontana, Lenny. 2021. "Brooklyn stories: The kings of disco - before Saturday Night Fever." <i>Faith (3),</i> 3. 20-21.</p><p>Gibbs, Robin. 2008. "Flashback: 21 January 1978." <i>The Guardian,</i> 2008-01-20. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2008/jan/20/features.musicmonthly17">https://www.theguardian.com/music/2008/jan/20/features.musicmonthly17</a>. Accessed 2022-12-22.</p><p>Khomami, Naomi. 2016. "Disco's Saturday Night Fiction." <i>The Guardian</i>, 2016-06-26. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/jun/26/lie-heart-disco-nik-cohn-tribal-rites-saturday-night-fever">https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/jun/26/lie-heart-disco-nik-cohn-tribal-rites-saturday-night-fever</a>. Accessed 2022-12-22.</p><p><i>"</i>Saturday Night Fever." <i>Wikipedia</i>. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturday_Night_Fever">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturday_Night_Fever</a>. Accessed 2022-12-22.</p><p>"Saturday Night Fever (soundtrack)." <i>Wikipedia</i>. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturday_Night_Fever_(soundtrack)">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturday_Night_Fever_(soundtrack)</a>. Accessed 2022-12-22.</p><p>Whitburn, Joel. 1983. <i>The Billboard book of top 40 hits: 1955 to present.</i> New York: Billboard Publications.<br /><br /><br /></p>Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12652253269145932683noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6867418877212258113.post-25526634402473532542022-12-09T16:31:00.000-07:002022-12-09T16:31:05.952-07:00December 17 - KEEP IT REAL Techno B-Day celebration w/ Orlesko & Wijit<p>My fellow sagittarian Orlesko and I will be playing techno on vinyl at the Grindstone Theatre on December 17th to celebrate our joint birthday. 10pm to close. No cover.</p><p>It's part of the vinyl DJ series KEEP IT REAL promoted by Dead Vinyl Society. If you do Facebook, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/520114183305975" target="_blank">check out the event here</a>. I'll have some brand new biscuits to play as well as techno classics.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3i2bneOmWYU6QQUz_IqgJtt3ux3XaRalAvfG6_LW6GSuNjxITAp-4IXslprN7ycEYrcFPzY2fceyoDEFXkuQfVW569lq0ko-Q2hYXNaSQie4dLVebD0a-vhB4HqvQXH0IiPzxDeojIrWc0Y3slEWfHDVzvIYo-y8hX3eKQ3Xb0IcblpLp9Oqh9t0c/s820/keepitrealbanner.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="360" data-original-width="820" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3i2bneOmWYU6QQUz_IqgJtt3ux3XaRalAvfG6_LW6GSuNjxITAp-4IXslprN7ycEYrcFPzY2fceyoDEFXkuQfVW569lq0ko-Q2hYXNaSQie4dLVebD0a-vhB4HqvQXH0IiPzxDeojIrWc0Y3slEWfHDVzvIYo-y8hX3eKQ3Xb0IcblpLp9Oqh9t0c/s16000/keepitrealbanner.jpg" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12652253269145932683noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6867418877212258113.post-61513211982386232812022-11-03T10:30:00.002-06:002022-11-03T10:30:30.995-06:00CJSR FunDrive 2022<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgY109wdAH1pj5NZGpnUsnWJEyf4HleTh7A_SgykUTH_tzLYOfp5gnysZ5LOCZI5vuDwzIGBS9cX0WyibesbqS8N2ayzwYXITkqkt7siA9MjE-xFsc_9Cq-RHJhH78lvETrpTwlRvHjAinw1hwcYx7Xo0Zf_DCS3dcZR0wCNsaoxAnlhEukpJCNgk0o/s768/multi-car-banner-768x292.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="292" data-original-width="768" height="244" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgY109wdAH1pj5NZGpnUsnWJEyf4HleTh7A_SgykUTH_tzLYOfp5gnysZ5LOCZI5vuDwzIGBS9cX0WyibesbqS8N2ayzwYXITkqkt7siA9MjE-xFsc_9Cq-RHJhH78lvETrpTwlRvHjAinw1hwcYx7Xo0Zf_DCS3dcZR0wCNsaoxAnlhEukpJCNgk0o/w640-h244/multi-car-banner-768x292.png" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p> </p><div class="post-body"><div><p>Tonight (November 3rd) I'm doing my first
live-to-air radio broadcast in over two years! What's the occasion, you
ask? It's CJSR's 2022 fundraising drive, aka FunDrive! My friend
Prosper Prodaniuk will join me to help me convince all the listeners why
they will get a warm feeling from supporting CJSR and community radio
in Edmonton.</p><p>We're live from 7-9pm MDT (0100-0300 UTC/GMT) on CJSR 88.5 FM in Edmonton. Or you can stream us worldwide through <a href="https://www.cjsr.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://www.cjsr.com/</a> or through radio streaming apps like Radio Garden.</p><p>Donate online through <a href="https://www.cjsr.com/2022/10/fundrive-2022/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://www.cjsr.com/2022/10/fundrive-2022/</a>
and check out the cool swag this year. You can choose Sunshine After
Dark as the show you want to support (money goes to the station, but I
get to bask in the prestige of having generous supporters).</p><p>If you want to hear all the reasons why you should donate to CJSR, tune in tonight!</p><p>Oh, and of course you will hear nothing but disco bombs, live and direct.</p></div></div>Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12652253269145932683noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6867418877212258113.post-71697094963371337782022-08-09T19:01:00.002-06:002022-08-09T19:03:28.222-06:00Poétique Du Mixtape and Knowledge Graphs<p>This really doesn't have much to do with disco, except that I usually find a way to make everything about DJing, which I find endlessly fascinating on a theoretical level. DJing is about connecting lots of things which may be quite similar to each other or may be wildly different. Stéphane Girard has theorized the different facets that make up the identify of each selection a DJ plays in his <a href="https://www.tamere.org/nos-livres/poetique-du-mixtape/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"><b>Poétique du mixtape</b></a> (Les Éditions de ta Mère, 2018), a book I finally finished reading recently. They are:</p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>L'identité générique (what genre or genres does the song relate to?)</li><li>L'identité auctoriale (here, Girard is focused on what the name of the artist connotes)<br /></li><li>L'identité linguistique (what lyrical content does it carry, which includes the song title)<br /></li><li>L'identité spatiale (where did it come from? What scene? What continent?)<br /></li><li>L'identité temporelle (what point in time does it come from?)<br /></li><li>L'identité harmonique (the musical content)<br /></li><li>L'identité symbolique (think cultural capital: is it obscure or a mega hit?) </li></ul><p>Generic, temporal and spatial facets already take you pretty far to establishing a framework for triangulating a "position" for each piece of music relative to everything else. That's one reason I always try to figure out the release year and geographic origin for every song I play on the show.</p><p>Sidenote: there's a <a href="http://popenstock.ca/dossier/lart-des-dj " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">thematic dossier</a> related to Girard's book with more writings and some mixes. Girard really knows his way around the DJ scene, referencing everyone from minimal icon Ricardo Villalobos to SOPHIE, Detroit's Omar-S, Pete Tong, and the Discwoman collective. He is thoroughly familiar with all the major writing on DJing to date. The highlight of the book is an in-depth analysis of Montreal superstar Tiga, and the development of his persona over the course of multiple mixtapes and albums. You can tell this book was a labour of love. The only trick is that it is only available <i>en français. </i><br /></p><p>Figuring out which musicians were working with who, or in the same
studio or for the same label is another way that people look to find
connections (something shared in common? similarity or difference?) to
explore music. One way that people have attempted to map these kinds of networks is with so-called linked data, which is, in broad terms, a schema-less data format ideal for sharing and combining data from different sources. The <a href="https://linkedjazz.org/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Linked Jazz</a> project is an example of this approach. The idea is that you can continue to add data at any time and then use special query languages to carry out the type of network analysis that is common in various applications today.<br /></p><p>Linked data, the semantic web and knowledge graphs are things I study in my professional capacity as a librarian and I recently published an article that proposes using the mathematical ontology of philosopher Alain Badiou to theorize knowledge graphs. You can check it out <a href="https://kula.uvic.ca/index.php/kula/article/view/192/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">over here</a> in the very 'cool' journal KULA along with many other impressive papers about metadata and knowledge.<br /></p>Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12652253269145932683noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6867418877212258113.post-54795306078462870612022-07-21T19:18:00.010-06:002022-07-23T15:10:53.452-06:00Jacques Morali and the Euro-Philly sound<p> This month (July 2022) I've gone all-in on the time-capsule specials where I recreate the sound of a particular month in disco history. Now that I've reached the half-way point of 1977, it is hard to ignore the rising dominance of the Euro-disco sound. When I started the show, I was keen to explore early disco history to demonstrate that it had an edge and dynamism that somehow got lost as the time went on in bland over-long European productions. But now, I've come to recognize how difficult it is to separate the European style from the main progression or story of the genre. DJs were paying attention to everything coming out, and the European artists were just part of that: Cerrone, Giorgio Moroder, Alec Costandinos, Silver Convention, Belle Epoque, and so on. Import records were important, and some of the stylistic innovations stretching the genre were coming from Europe, especially the glut of full-side, 15-minute suites that were prominent in the summer of 1977, and which I have been playing out on the show.</p><p>Casablanca Records chief Neil Boggart apparently is responsible for making the suggestion of turning Donna Summer's Love To Love You into a long side back in 1975, and Tom Moulton created one of the first suites the same year when he linked all the songs on the first side of Gloria Gaynor's LP Never Can Say Goodbye into one long suite, but the Europeans took the full-side records to a new level with songs like Love and Kisses' <span>I've Found Love (Now That I've Found You), Belle Epoque's Black Is Black, and especially Giorgio Moroder's From Here to Eternity, all songs I've played on the show this month. There's a lot more I could say about this, but the point I wanted to make on this post was to draw attention to the close link between the orchestral, Philadelphia sound and the European disco sound. And the quintessential example of this is the case of </span><span><span>Henri Belolo and Jacques Morali, two Europeans who would play a big role in the Euro-disco sound by producing groups like Ritchie Family and the Village People.</span> </span></p><p><span>Henri Belolo from Morocco met Jacques Morali from France and the two decided to work together to create music in the style of Philadelphia International with members of MFSB, including drummer Earl Young. Peter Shapiro recounts this progression in his book Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco (2005). Shapiro puts their music in the camp category from the get-go, but to my ears, there's a lot more similarity between the Ritchie Family's first album, Brazil, and the Philadelphia sound they were copying, than you would expect. That record really pops sonically, just like the Philly records. Also, my personal tolerance (appreciation, </span><span><span>even</span>) for the light-weight, ridiculous, or just over-dramatic aspects of European pop has gotten quite high since I started the show, so it kind of works for me. "Deliciously bad taste," as Shapiro puts it? Yes, I'm probably guilty of that charge myself. But it is delicious! There is another aspect of orientalism or exoticization of different cultures in the music that deserves a critical analysis, which is beyond the scope of this post. A topic for a later post, perhaps. <br /></span></p><p><span>Here is an excerpt from Shapiro's book (p.218-219. Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of disco. 2005. Faber and Faber: London):<br /> <br />"They recruited three singers – Cheryl Jacks, Cassandra Wooten and Gwendolyn Oliver – to become the voices and faces of the group that was called the Ritchie Family after the arranger, Ritchie Rome. Although it was a pretty pale imitation of the Philly sound, 'Brazil' reached number eleven on the American charts and was followed by other over-orchestrated and ever more ridiculous travelogues like 'Peanut Vendor', 'African Queens', 'In a Persian Market', 'Quiet Village' and the medley 'The Best Disco in Town'. Jacks, Wooten and Oliver laid the shtick on thick with their theatrical over-enunciation, Morali's lyrics were the cheapest fantasies imaginable ('I am fire/ I am sex / I am brown and I'm beautiful / A gyrating, vibrating, heartbreaking sister') and Rome arranged as if he was scoring a Busby Berkeley movie, but the absurdist nature of the project was highlighted by their album covers, which were even kitschier than the lyrics.</span></p><p><span><br /> Morali and Belolo went from the high camp of the Ritchie Family to what may be the most subversive group in the history of popular music [i.e., the Village People]. Of course it wasn't intentional - just the deliciously bad taste of men raised on Johnny Halliday and Charles Aznavour - but to explode Kenneth Anger camp into hypertrophic cartoon characters so absurd that only children and grannies from Arkansas could possibly like them was probably the most effective weapon in the battle of assimilating gay culture into mainstream America this side of the pill and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy."<br /></span></p><p><br /></p>Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12652253269145932683noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6867418877212258113.post-869732873063660892022-06-09T19:29:00.009-06:002022-06-16T19:21:43.144-06:00Catch me June 11 with the 780 Soul crew<p> **<a href="https://www.mixcloud.com/wijit/sunshine-after-dark-125-pride-recharged-set/" target="_blank">Listen to my full set-list from this evening</a>**</p><p>Catch me on Saturday, June 11 at the <a href="https://www.revival-edmonton.com/" target="_blank">River City Revival House</a> with Freddy B and the 780 Soul crew. They've got a regular soul night going on Saturdays, and this week they've invited me so we can throw down some disco jams in celebration of Pride in Edmonton. All vinyl! No cover charge! We'll get started around 9pm. If you're heading to Fruit Loop's <a href="https://www.fruitloop.ca/new-events/pride-recharged" target="_blank">Pride Recharged</a> party upstairs at the Starlite Room, come say hello.<br /></p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitrwEzP_dxUI25ZAdhkz3e8Q9GDNVytCJsDgf7kddwi1pJ6BnJFg4OleFbCPerqg8vw5YCTIZLD6Cm0OgeeuTk7Gu38i_7_bgSqOBGTxj2erT8UmMjJ6juNh3S5URttjROSYGnQTT1uXaCB2eOcSgVby-FURBBd7d816S_q-47sW1eJqtA4lrffP7m/s750/0A8A9D26-F545-4D47-9A23-A2AF8A5A1A22.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="750" data-original-width="750" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitrwEzP_dxUI25ZAdhkz3e8Q9GDNVytCJsDgf7kddwi1pJ6BnJFg4OleFbCPerqg8vw5YCTIZLD6Cm0OgeeuTk7Gu38i_7_bgSqOBGTxj2erT8UmMjJ6juNh3S5URttjROSYGnQTT1uXaCB2eOcSgVby-FURBBd7d816S_q-47sW1eJqtA4lrffP7m/w640-h640/0A8A9D26-F545-4D47-9A23-A2AF8A5A1A22.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p>Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12652253269145932683noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6867418877212258113.post-389931650252226362022-05-12T19:33:00.004-06:002022-05-12T19:36:40.237-06:00Disco In the Park - July 30-31<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEOaSmb1dMp_t-JjTd0cMWRfWF19l3pdpv5ppn09F3CVPn_JkuzYzEcQOULedsFGhwfCEEq1a3S-xeJHd9UcXqloxGf2CKH_uiU1UWkgGen5VLIa0BNgmwq4t2qmMWDki0EuMWfNKehSDYWkidgneV_uAr4Y_3e_CK2aNl1Os-7ZsJo3A2dFHIMyJz/s4528/SWEAT%20FB%20-%20%2022.05.03.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2370" data-original-width="4528" height="334" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEOaSmb1dMp_t-JjTd0cMWRfWF19l3pdpv5ppn09F3CVPn_JkuzYzEcQOULedsFGhwfCEEq1a3S-xeJHd9UcXqloxGf2CKH_uiU1UWkgGen5VLIa0BNgmwq4t2qmMWDki0EuMWfNKehSDYWkidgneV_uAr4Y_3e_CK2aNl1Os-7ZsJo3A2dFHIMyJz/w640-h334/SWEAT%20FB%20-%20%2022.05.03.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>Advanced tickets now available for Disco in The Park 2022! Be sure to check out <a href="https://www.discointhepark.com/">https://www.discointhepark.com/</a> for details.<br /><p></p>Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12652253269145932683noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6867418877212258113.post-79524512021880292452022-04-07T19:58:00.009-06:002022-04-15T14:11:50.327-06:00Raebot & Wijit at Grindstone April 23rd<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVpjoOrGDQhPa5lsmbJ-NKGPnRHkg5ezqx8vmxP23CBbV_lGBVr8xR38lfnhPpDsN1aMLrTFJbSSiVBiKHHPGXNqIcpgYupSUfB2IF8KUax_vXzJ_Tt921OD5T0rImKEkvSsKvXRkUCZAKhcHc3-xdq55MH8Gnwr73PaTCNXmvyzuNkQGcmZXSuClf/s1080/278382050_5053466028035567_2093058877800844260_n.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1080" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVpjoOrGDQhPa5lsmbJ-NKGPnRHkg5ezqx8vmxP23CBbV_lGBVr8xR38lfnhPpDsN1aMLrTFJbSSiVBiKHHPGXNqIcpgYupSUfB2IF8KUax_vXzJ_Tt921OD5T0rImKEkvSsKvXRkUCZAKhcHc3-xdq55MH8Gnwr73PaTCNXmvyzuNkQGcmZXSuClf/w640-h640/278382050_5053466028035567_2093058877800844260_n.png" width="640" /></a></div> <p></p><p>The Raebot & Wijit All-Star DJ Team will play an all-vinyl set of <i>Cosmic Grooves</i> on Saturday, April 23rd at Grindstone Theatre -- What's the occasion, you ask? Why, it's the inaugural night of<i> Keep It Real</i>, a monthly party featuring all-vinyl DJing and a rotating cast of irregulars -- Raebot and I a<span class="d2edcug0 hpfvmrgz qv66sw1b c1et5uql oi732d6d ik7dh3pa ht8s03o8 a8c37x1j fe6kdd0r mau55g9w c8b282yb keod5gw0 nxhoafnm aigsh9s9 d3f4x2em iv3no6db jq4qci2q a3bd9o3v b1v8xokw oo9gr5id hzawbc8m" dir="auto">re
gonna go looking for the sweet spot between Italo, electro, techno,
and maybe a bit of house. And it'll all be channeled through the tube
(valve) amplifiers of a MasterSounds rotary mixer for your auditory
pleasure -- Doors at 10:30 pm. NO COVER -- <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/514913153421650">https://www.facebook.com/events/514913153421650</a><br /></span></p><p><br /></p>Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12652253269145932683noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6867418877212258113.post-53343374526660612362021-12-30T13:06:00.004-07:002021-12-30T13:09:43.768-07:00New Local Music<p>Alberta can be a frosty place in the winter (it's minus 28 C today – that's minus 18.4 F!), but those of us who live here are always finding ways to channel our inner hibernators into creative projects. On episode 102—my last show of 2021—I feature new songs from two Alberta-based artists, Ali Wick and Joses Martin. </p><p>Calgary-based <b>Ali Wick</b>'s debut single <b>Hello Love</b> is due for a January 28th, 2022 release. This catchy, feel-good song was recorded at <a href="https://www.velveteenaudio.com/" target="_blank">Velveteen</a> in Edmonton. Ali's got more planned for 2022, so be sure to keep an eye out for her on social media (<a href="https://instagram.com/aliwickmusic" target="_blank">Instagram</a>, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/aliwickmusic" target="_blank">Facebook</a>, <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwifzsTepIz1AhXtHzQIHS3yCY4QFnoECAIQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwwhttps://www.tiktok.com/@aliwickmusicW7Bt3DK8c6Dn" target="_blank">Tiktok</a>). I was immediately reminded of disco chanteuse Karen Young's confident vocal style, and so in episode 102 you can hear one of Karen's hits right after Ali's song.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS2wESw5ZEvSZBQXa7y1dvD2VOiegiFjsQqVgVajUkzSFnHoOcjI1jlcRIL4fXyWud-xVHNRQb4nY8MQCS1bJmu6ETtCH_35OarP0-Oj7v64OCCNZjSLyj7A1tdBai77cp8TH7h0fw924/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1440" data-original-width="1440" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS2wESw5ZEvSZBQXa7y1dvD2VOiegiFjsQqVgVajUkzSFnHoOcjI1jlcRIL4fXyWud-xVHNRQb4nY8MQCS1bJmu6ETtCH_35OarP0-Oj7v64OCCNZjSLyj7A1tdBai77cp8TH7h0fw924/w400-h400/Hello+Love+COVER+ART+Ali+Wick.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p><br /><a href="https://www.instagram.com/joseslovesyou/">Joses Martin</a> (aka <b>Joses</b>) has been tearing it up with a string of releases and remixes in 2021, all the while running Grindstone Theatre and SweatYEG events during a pandemic. How he does it all is still a mystery to me. Working with renowned house music singer Kathy Brown, and UK MC TAZ, Joses released <b>Don't Turn Off The Lights</b> on <a href="https://www.instagram.com/kikorecordscanada" target="_blank">Kiko Haus</a> this year, a fun track ready to kick off any party with sage advice we can all use in 2022: don't give up now, the best is yet to come!</p><p><br />
<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/KrsDPVWyXmA" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe></p>Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12652253269145932683noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6867418877212258113.post-61656160695824454832021-12-02T20:42:00.000-07:002021-12-02T20:42:17.008-07:00Now on CKXU in Lethbridge<p>Exciting news to start off December! Sunshine After Dark will now be heard on <a href="https://ckxu.com/" target="_blank">CKXU 88.3 FM</a> in Lethbridge on Tuesday evenings at 6 o'clock. Welcome aboard! </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjpJzwTHZ-rn_6VPL6OpBSA9l9rErqx2zFuFY7MPPcSaCMhgNhpBlcfQGSCIXkPTazbQKtTeT0oXTDIFRaTI_NkTmVm6rtHjZlPG_UX03_1lv0d5sL7heRWhsCAHOrgrKK4aCepjW_yLOrDRYxf1vPeXsTGvVTkX8NVo_Z0VvVVCK7xh8NauksXsV7T=s371" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="180" data-original-width="371" height="194" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjpJzwTHZ-rn_6VPL6OpBSA9l9rErqx2zFuFY7MPPcSaCMhgNhpBlcfQGSCIXkPTazbQKtTeT0oXTDIFRaTI_NkTmVm6rtHjZlPG_UX03_1lv0d5sL7heRWhsCAHOrgrKK4aCepjW_yLOrDRYxf1vPeXsTGvVTkX8NVo_Z0VvVVCK7xh8NauksXsV7T=w400-h194" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p>Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12652253269145932683noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6867418877212258113.post-47219673156034689882021-11-25T19:33:00.005-07:002021-11-25T19:56:16.699-07:00Wayne St. John<p>On <a href="https://www.mixcloud.com/wijit/sunshine-after-dark-097/" target="_blank">episode 97</a> I played <a href="https://www.discogs.com/master/101194-THP-Orchestra-Featuring-Wayne-St-John-Fightin-On-The-Side-Of-Love" target="_blank">Fightin' On The Side of Love</a> by THP Orchestra, featuring vocalist Wayne St. John, on my time capsule special for the month of November 1976. Vince Aletti tipped the song in his November 20th Disco File column, writing that it</p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;"><i>is a solid message song (could have been done by the Trammps) with a full, driving production that sounds especially hot on the instrumental side. Both sides are very strong and the lead vocals have a Boz Scaggs edge. Worth searching for.<br /></i></p><p>You can check out the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ju1BFAqg0M" target="_blank">short</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PLXd-cUxh8" target="_blank">long,</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVgtLnpkoCU" target="_blank">instrumental</a> versions on YouTube. <br /></p><p>Of course, THP Orchestra was one of the major Canadian disco acts, lead by producers Willi Morrison and Ian Guenther. Curiously, this song never made it onto one of their albums, maybe because it included a featured vocalist, but the single sold 90,000 units, according to Wayne St. John's website.<br /></p><p>Wayne St. John has enjoyed a long career as a working musician in Canada (<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20120415162257/http://wsaintj.com/bio_wayne.html" target="_blank">detailed bio on his archived website</a>) right up to today (<a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjf3a3t-7T0AhWSoFsKHXYkD9MQFnoECAIQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thestar.com%2Fnews%2Fgta%2F2016%2F06%2F05%2Ftorontos-jingle-king-still-crooning.html&usg=AOvVaw11FpY4S-A1ei8yqgZKuOKO" target="_blank">Toronto's Jingle King still crooning | Toronto Star 2016</a>). Among the highlights in the early part of career are playing the leads in the Toronto production of the musical Hair between 1969 and 1971 (Toronto Star <a href="https://digitalarchive.tpl.ca/objects/223702" target="_blank">photo 1</a> and <a href="https://digitalarchive.tpl.ca/objects/223908/theatre-scenes-named--hair-2-of-2" target="_blank">photo 2</a>) and singing in the ensemble of Keith Hampshire's Music Machine on CBC. You can see him take some solos in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dRv7BVIQYc" target="_blank">this video at 9:36</a>. Giving you a sense of his artistic orientation, I love this quote from the 2016 Toronto Star article:<br /></p><p class="text-block-container" style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;"><i>“I’m wide open,” he says, pointing to a Chinese gong hanging in the corner of his apartment. It’s from the set of Hair.</i><i> “If you get a chance to hit a gong, I say take it. It helps you soak things up. Like a jingle.”</i></p>Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12652253269145932683noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6867418877212258113.post-61857695341941970942021-11-02T10:45:00.008-06:002021-11-02T10:45:51.863-06:00CJSR FunDrive 2021: Audio Obscura<p>CJSR's annual FunDrive is in full swing this week and I have a special 2-hour show prepared for Sunshine After Dark, featuring guest co-host Renée Stewart.</p><p>Renée is a disco aficionado with impeccable taste and she has selected all the music for the show this week. Expect a lot of classic vocal disco that will get you up out of your seat and groovin' all the way to the telephone or internet device to make your donation to the mighty CJSR.</p><p>Check out all the details about this year's FunDrive over at <a href="https://www.cjsr.com/">CJSR.com</a>. The theme is Audio Obscura and the swag is truly slick this year with retro-audio graphics by Parker Thiessen.</p><p>You can donate online or by phoning (780) 492-2577 ext.0. FunDrive runs from October 30 to November 6 (Saturday to Saturday). The goal this year is $100,000 and I'd like to challenge my listeners to help my show pitch in $1,000. All donations welcome, large and small.<br /></p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh4_ZS28eHJctcvXAzt82Qn6D9J_ecAhsB0o1FYJ9uwGo4kx4WXant_2z5_oxbK-viCugVP0O_fmAQIEXrAupnOWAmsn-GFXgkrkDm4APXsMwJv3RtqkwP_bSK_YPCnx3SooDM1wiTjBaByWpi7DrIQgmreJjFyQJWTYMhylAlg1VqkCaN8WG4gV6tm=s2048" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="2048" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh4_ZS28eHJctcvXAzt82Qn6D9J_ecAhsB0o1FYJ9uwGo4kx4WXant_2z5_oxbK-viCugVP0O_fmAQIEXrAupnOWAmsn-GFXgkrkDm4APXsMwJv3RtqkwP_bSK_YPCnx3SooDM1wiTjBaByWpi7DrIQgmreJjFyQJWTYMhylAlg1VqkCaN8WG4gV6tm=w400-h400" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p>Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12652253269145932683noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6867418877212258113.post-27204915429515736682021-08-26T13:41:00.000-06:002021-08-26T13:41:30.552-06:00Disco Patrick Interview<p>Back in May, I sat down with collector extraordinaire Disco Patrick to talk about disco acetates and other fun stuff. Our conversation will run on episodes 84 and 85 of the show. You can catch them live on CJSR on August 26st and September 2nd, and on CHMA on September 1st and 8th. Patrick has created two books about disco records, as shown below. Be sure to check <a href="https://discopatrick.com/" target="_blank">Patrick's website</a> and sign up to get his zine, Hot Stuff!<br /></p><p>On these shows I'll also be featuring some music from Toronto DJ <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CSjwnfks6pW/" target="_blank">Jeff Chang's collection</a>, which was acquired by <a href="https://www.recordcollectorsparadise.ca/" target="_blank">Record Collector's Paradise</a> in Edmonton.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfJ66Rup5kHjJ04ktYt5-H6ZvJoK3BiYKBRpvXaBaLr7wYAb6sj5Be1rwhjg9Pg8LjYbvJjYnsi9nAWWnppxHGCZiDgZ4LlX0me0L1V2xZTssadTOyJUhbs88bvu2qZf-9r9DMZxieXkE/s2048/AC5C7CFD-E6AA-4D68-8119-1942E2CA018B.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="2048" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfJ66Rup5kHjJ04ktYt5-H6ZvJoK3BiYKBRpvXaBaLr7wYAb6sj5Be1rwhjg9Pg8LjYbvJjYnsi9nAWWnppxHGCZiDgZ4LlX0me0L1V2xZTssadTOyJUhbs88bvu2qZf-9r9DMZxieXkE/w640-h640/AC5C7CFD-E6AA-4D68-8119-1942E2CA018B.JPG" width="640" /> </a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEkEkl1DeYx_QtfahZuaRaIIgCWEm5OKO6QnfnlOw69bVDB02zJCK7pNmHn_kyPhAzfzaZpTR0SW5CzCWe0BOZt6vhlrwKXbkhly9J-9F1EuWZMX3mqyFVCcGUc_DkR93tdV-E-eUGdNk/s2048/IMG_8495.heic" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="2048" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEkEkl1DeYx_QtfahZuaRaIIgCWEm5OKO6QnfnlOw69bVDB02zJCK7pNmHn_kyPhAzfzaZpTR0SW5CzCWe0BOZt6vhlrwKXbkhly9J-9F1EuWZMX3mqyFVCcGUc_DkR93tdV-E-eUGdNk/w640-h640/IMG_8495.heic" width="640" /></a></div><br /> </div><br /><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12652253269145932683noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6867418877212258113.post-17898580593736181462021-08-14T00:11:00.000-06:002021-08-14T00:11:17.064-06:00CJSR Listener Survey 2021
<p>Vote for your favourite CJSR shows and give your valuable listener feedback in the <a href="https://www.cjsr.com/2021/08/listener-survey-and-volunteer-appreciation-party-2021/" target="_blank">2020 CJSR Listener Survey</a>, which is open until August 20th.</p><p>If you're looking for ideas (ahem!), here's the latest episode of my show, featuring Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band, Double Exposure, The Bee Gees AND MORE!!!<br /></p> <iframe frameborder="0" height="120" src="https://www.mixcloud.com/widget/iframe/?hide_cover=1&light=1&feed=%2Fwijit%2Fsunshine-after-dark-082%2F" width="100%"></iframe>Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12652253269145932683noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6867418877212258113.post-57757925925198955262021-07-22T12:00:00.002-06:002021-07-22T12:00:52.469-06:00Joses' Peanut Butter<p>Here's the video for Joses' hot track Peanut Butter, which I play on episode 079. You may never look at toast the same way again.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="334" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/QWjF4GDRoOg" width="627" youtube-src-id="QWjF4GDRoOg"></iframe></div><br /><p><br /></p>Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12652253269145932683noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6867418877212258113.post-87469621095364842522021-07-06T17:56:00.005-06:002021-07-14T23:46:56.630-06:00Disco In The Park<p></p><p></p><p> <br /></p><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkUhESIm7IsdmpPClTUKaJXb9GG52avlUyM8q3iZfCKT7Smk5nJOrrDVmTM1iodjjO9026s8SclMNH_dwSa5mfBHo3tYj0NTCfbh_-AIMiW2qpiwmSx2D8lp5gsVQ5TgBCDYAFzfj68gI/s900/206578593_605620447030348_2892891965221649049_n+copy.jpg"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="900" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkUhESIm7IsdmpPClTUKaJXb9GG52avlUyM8q3iZfCKT7Smk5nJOrrDVmTM1iodjjO9026s8SclMNH_dwSa5mfBHo3tYj0NTCfbh_-AIMiW2qpiwmSx2D8lp5gsVQ5TgBCDYAFzfj68gI/w640-h640/206578593_605620447030348_2892891965221649049_n+copy.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><b> </b><p></p><p>DISCO IN THE PARK. The party you've been waiting for!</p><p>Featuring HATIRAS (Spacedisco, Toronto) and NEIGHBOUR (Homebreakin, Vancouver) plus unreal DJ sets and live performances from many more local talents, including me.<span class="d2edcug0 hpfvmrgz qv66sw1b c1et5uql oi732d6d ik7dh3pa ht8s03o8 a8c37x1j keod5gw0 nxhoafnm aigsh9s9 d3f4x2em fe6kdd0r mau55g9w c8b282yb iv3no6db jq4qci2q a3bd9o3v knj5qynh oo9gr5id" dir="auto"> Fully
licensed, food available, with stunning river valley views in Louise McKinney Park. Spend your long weekend with
us for unforgettable vibes.</span></p><p><span class="d2edcug0 hpfvmrgz qv66sw1b c1et5uql oi732d6d ik7dh3pa ht8s03o8 a8c37x1j keod5gw0 nxhoafnm aigsh9s9 d3f4x2em fe6kdd0r mau55g9w c8b282yb iv3no6db jq4qci2q a3bd9o3v knj5qynh oo9gr5id" dir="auto">Tickets on sale now at <a href="https://www.grindstonetheatre.ca/shows/discointhepark/">Grindstonetheatre.ca</a> or via <a href="http://www.showpass.com/discointhepark">Showpass</a>. Check it out on <a href="https://fb.me/e/BLEH0jaX">Facebook</a>.</span></p><p><span class="d2edcug0 hpfvmrgz qv66sw1b c1et5uql oi732d6d ik7dh3pa ht8s03o8 a8c37x1j keod5gw0 nxhoafnm aigsh9s9 d3f4x2em fe6kdd0r mau55g9w c8b282yb iv3no6db jq4qci2q a3bd9o3v knj5qynh oo9gr5id" dir="auto"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVMvAkcJCs8gwnaPyz9upeGi-L9eTdBMryVuRrUrHbdk7IUelU4dbYut-4j8vJoyLVZr_O_TPw8j6bxIKFejiiCGrbVqBgZuzSlYb5Zhdpc5OKkFsgMeR28S2LkhW2mopjcXpyRZhuzgM/s2048/217635718_2844804729116370_8208114385216714340_n.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="2048" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVMvAkcJCs8gwnaPyz9upeGi-L9eTdBMryVuRrUrHbdk7IUelU4dbYut-4j8vJoyLVZr_O_TPw8j6bxIKFejiiCGrbVqBgZuzSlYb5Zhdpc5OKkFsgMeR28S2LkhW2mopjcXpyRZhuzgM/w640-h640/217635718_2844804729116370_8208114385216714340_n.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><p></p><p><span class="d2edcug0 hpfvmrgz qv66sw1b c1et5uql oi732d6d ik7dh3pa ht8s03o8 a8c37x1j keod5gw0 nxhoafnm aigsh9s9 d3f4x2em fe6kdd0r mau55g9w c8b282yb iv3no6db jq4qci2q a3bd9o3v knj5qynh oo9gr5id" dir="auto"> </span> <br /></p><p></p>Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12652253269145932683noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6867418877212258113.post-56919588061357500172021-06-02T17:30:00.000-06:002021-06-02T17:30:02.992-06:00Real Talk on PSE in Alberta<p>While Post Secondary Education (PSE) and academic research in Alberta are evidently not the focus of this blog, they are topics of personal interest and significance for me: I work as a librarian at the University of Alberta; CJSR is funded in part by U of A students, and is part of the campus fabric; and Alberta is my home.</p><p>PSE in Alberta, and the U of A specifically, are facing serious and troubling times, because of the ideologically driven plans of the United Conservative Party (UCP) government to dramatically remake the entire sector and turn it into the servant of private industry. The ambition behind these plans is staggering, and the impacts are already being felt: massive cuts, changes to student loans, tuition hikes, academic restructuring... With social engineering on this scale, it's a wonder the UCP can call itself conservative with a straight face.<br /></p><p>This narrow vision for a command economy, which will only limit the horizons of the younger generations of the province and curtail their ability to discover and follow their own paths, goes against the spirit in which previous generations built the colleges and universities in the first place. Think of the Banff Centre, to name just one example.<br /></p><p>A recent <a href="https://artssquared.wordpress.com/2021/05/28/alberta-2030-a-yoke-for-the-university-guest-post-by-marc-schroeder-mount-royal-university-of-calgary/">blog post</a> by Marc Schroeder spells out the grim details better than I could. Please take a read and consider what you can do to help. Thanks!<br /></p>Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12652253269145932683noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6867418877212258113.post-70406041038346813232021-04-25T22:56:00.000-06:002021-04-25T22:56:04.532-06:00New Episodes Will Resume In July<p>Since March of 2020 – when the global pandemic reached Canada and CJSR restricted access to its on-air studio – a new episode of Sunshine After Dark has hit the airwaves just about every week; 57 shows in total.</p><p>Producing the show at home meant I had to figure out a new process with extra steps, but it was worth it to be able to bring folks a little bit of cheer and give regular listeners something to look forward to every week (including my Mom, a dedicated fan).<br /></p><p>Now, in order to recharge my batteries, I will be taking a break for a couple of months.</p><p>During the pause CJSR and CHMA will air past episodes of Sunshine After Dark at the usual time. New episodes will resume on July 1st on CJSR and July 7th on CHMA.<br /></p><p>The last episode before the break will air on April 29th on CJSR and May 5th on CHMA. As a special feature for April 29th on CJSR, I have a super dope guest mix from <a href="https://www.mixcloud.com/voteshortee/" target="_blank">DJ $hortee</a>, which will run in the second hour at 8 pm.</p><p>I want to give a big Thank You to all my listeners for your ongoing support! I really appreciate it. I hope you enjoy the chance to check out some of my shows a second time and will see you again in the not so distant future. -- John<br /></p>Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12652253269145932683noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6867418877212258113.post-54024858649205403672021-02-11T19:44:00.004-07:002021-02-15T13:55:47.774-07:00Patrick Adams | Joses Martin<p>February is Black History Month, and to mark the occasion I decided to put together a special tribute to extraordinary music producer Patrick Adams. You can check out the <a href="https://www.mixcloud.com/wijit/sunshine-after-dark-feb-11-2021/">recording</a> to get a whistle-stop tour of just some of the many highlights of his storied career. I also sprinkled in some choice bits from the Red Bull Music Academic masterclass that Adams gave a few years ago, which I encourage you to check out in full.</p>
Also on the show for Feburary 11th is a special DJ mix from Joses Martin, entitled "Life in Slow Motion." If you want to give it a second listen, you can head over to <a href="https://soundcloud.com/stemandcap/grow-with-the-flow-vol-2-mixed-by-joses" target="_blank">Soundcloud</a> where it's posted as part of Calgary's Stem & Cap mix series. <p><br /></p>
<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/NSTlSlR4GR0" width="560"></iframe>Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12652253269145932683noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6867418877212258113.post-19146531726920444882021-01-28T18:29:00.001-07:002021-01-28T18:40:14.621-07:00Disco File Essentials 1975<p>On January 28th and February 4th, I'm running a 2-part special looking at some of the songs on the Disco File <i>Essential Disco Singles of 1975</i> list. <br /></p><p>Besides being the year of the viral apocalypse, 2020 was the first full year of my show, Sunshine After Dark. Throughout the year, as a special, occasional feature, I tracked Vince Aletti's famous weekly column (Disco File) through 1975 in 'real time.' The columns have been collected together in a book, which makes it easy to do.</p><p>For example, if it was March, I looked at the columns for February and March of 1975 and then searched in my collection to see what I had that was cited, and then pulled together a show from that repertoire. Later on, I decided to double down and play anything I could find on Spotify too, because the experience of hearing the really obscure stuff was just too fun.<br /></p><p>I wanted to simulate the experience of listening to the radio in 1975, hearing the new songs for the first time as they came out, first in the spring, then the summer, the autumn and winter. I must say, it was a personal revelation for me, both in terms of discovering new songs that were hits only for a week or two before they were subsumed by the never ending stream of new releases, and also in terms of encountering music I thought I knew in its original context of songs out at the same time.</p><p>I started to notice stylistic details re-occurring from song to song, even across songs from different places, in different styles: American and European; rock and soul; instrumental and vocal. As time went on, this hodgepodge of original sources for disco would become more blended together, codified, and commercialized, but there was still a consistency across them that I could hear that seemed unplanned, unintentional.</p><p>It seems very plausible to me that there was an idea of disco that existed, collectively, in the minds of DJs, who went about searching for songs that matched that idea. There might be one song on a LP of a European hard rock group like Titanic, but you hear it now and it just jumps out at you. Yep, there it is!<br /></p><p>And so I'm going to carry on this experiment in 2021, rolling over into 1976, which happens to be an auspicious year for entirely personal reasons, but before I do that, I wanted to have one more kick at the can for 1975. Aletti published end of the year charts for 1975, and when I looked at the singles chart, I realized I had played maybe about half of the 75 songs on that list at some point during 2020.</p><p>I thought it would be neat to hear the rest of the songs that I *didn't* play. Again, thanks to Spotify and YouTube, I've been able to find just about every one I didn't play. I decided not to worry about the top albums list or the top disco discs lists, because you could just go on forever, and 1976 awaits! I did have one of the disco discs, which I have programmed on the January 28th show, Ronnie Spector's <i>You'd Be Good For Me</i>.<br /></p><p>If you want to hunt down all the songs that I played (and complete your scorecard), you can see when I played a given song by consulting my "Super Mega" <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1hppIW6698Ox3WymxdY1keuBLYcheUp4NMCmkOQxcdoA/" target="_blank">Playlist Data spreadsheet</a> and doing a "Find" search on the page. Below are the charts so you can see what made the cut in 1975!<br /></p> <br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1LhD7wPglO6Hdg6HQgPPlHeRIDRrvbmGaKjlrOGF4bp0yu9DPiytBFnvtD1t-qOJORnxpyF1QOQvF509-rGom6l5vsBawmMUt07U1-VZUvfT8CKfrNM4oI_7iEstQwy04viyeusXIpq8/s2048/IMG_7254.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1LhD7wPglO6Hdg6HQgPPlHeRIDRrvbmGaKjlrOGF4bp0yu9DPiytBFnvtD1t-qOJORnxpyF1QOQvF509-rGom6l5vsBawmMUt07U1-VZUvfT8CKfrNM4oI_7iEstQwy04viyeusXIpq8/s16000/IMG_7254.JPG" /></a></div><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjctcmnrLIgO_cTSYRmmblPDqt2EdhTPCyoDXXNMeZ2Gf-ZcI26v47Xw5wUmXSuBhwNyjPlVG0XMpzUSBOwYj7sE7JMAZ_wMB0HQGz6Lqlh-acsFhibe2IBpd01C6rZJu2CpFXLXumAEFA/s2048/IMG_7251.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjctcmnrLIgO_cTSYRmmblPDqt2EdhTPCyoDXXNMeZ2Gf-ZcI26v47Xw5wUmXSuBhwNyjPlVG0XMpzUSBOwYj7sE7JMAZ_wMB0HQGz6Lqlh-acsFhibe2IBpd01C6rZJu2CpFXLXumAEFA/s16000/IMG_7251.JPG" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p>Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12652253269145932683noreply@blogger.com