Idyllic Music

This week, we'll look at tall tales. Stories and fables of exaggeration and entertainment some fantastic and others with morals. They often contain a morsal of truth spun out to the absurd across every culture but reaching a zenith in 19th century American folktales like Paul Bunyan, Brer Rabbit, Little Babaji and John Henry. Ixtlan, Erosops, Refrag. Sounda, Botany Bay and Capt. Beefheart.

This week, we'll look at migrations and aspirations. For millennia, people have moved from one place to another seeking better lives. Whether it was for better hunting, soil or jobs the migration was like rivers to the ocean, constant and inevitable. The sorrow of leaving behind the old and struggles to establish the new have marked every one of us. Immigrant and resident alike.

This week, we'll look at at the sweet and lowdown. It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing. Ellington knew it and Irving Mills codified it but many of today's singer-songwriters from Jack Johnson, John Mayer, Nora Jones and notably Amos Lee's "Sweet Pea" have taken it to heart. From it's pre-war origins, swing music's rhythmic style based on a triplet subdivision of the beat was what moved hips out on the dance floor.

This week we'll scan the skies of high altitude air travel. Nothing strikes the imagination like following contrails left behind a jet aircraft in the late afternoon sky. Who is on board? Where are they going? Are they beginning an adventure or heading home? Looking up can bring a touch of envy. Providing the lift for us this week are The Twombley Spiders, The Atomica Project, Ray Garrido, Metastaz, Boneshaman and Innereyefull.

This week, we'll examine the drought. At any one time a goodly part of the world experiences Meteorological Drought with consequences measured in tens of thousands or even millions of lives. The images of drought, the cracked and barren soil, the dust clouds and snapshots of fishing boats stranded in a dry lake bed speak to the loneliness of emotional drought. So too do the 6 songs on this edition of Idyllic Music.

This week we'll look at chapters. Readers know how an author uses them to pace a story, setting up cliffhangers, jumping storylines and setting natural breaks at the end of a sitting so you can go to bed but chapters are even more apparent in our life stories. The titles of the 7 songs we'll hear on this episode of Idyllic Music simply sound like chapters and, perhaps, they are.

This week we'll look at life along the world's great rivers. Despite the fact that nearly every major inland city is located along side a major waterway, life down on the banks is often rough, hard scrabbled and often dangerous. McCarthy's Cornelius Suttree personifies the descent from sophisticated urban living to the hand to mouth life along the river. He's not alone.

This week, we'll celebrate Idyllic Music's 150th episode by looking forward. Fifty shows ago we offered up two CD ready mixes of the best vocal and instrumental tracks of the previous 100 programs. This time around we enter the new decade having kicked over the last and not looking back.

This week we'll look at beauty and terror as seen in the mythology of women. Stories though out history mostly told by men of power and tragedy, love and treachery featuring the likes of Aphrodite, Xi Shi, the Gorgon Medusa and Goddess Kali. These tales are endlessly fascinating yet rarely illuminating of the lives of actual women.

This week, we'll look at five artists making deeply layered dense and hypnotic electronica. In the early part of the decade Minimalism, glitch and even chiptunes were a reaction to what became a pretty predictable set of recordings featuring 4 chord progressions and pedestrian beats. Now finding a new mix of drama and subtlety are Ed Drury, Melorman, Northcape, Bitbasic and Wordless Poem.

This week we'll look at known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns. For several weeks, half a dozen great songs have lingered on the desktop as I've looked for ways to include them on the show. They are by unknown, unsigned artists, well known indie bands and arena popular stars. All podsafe. This week I'll string them together and let you guess who they are. Film at 11.

This week, we'll look at the downcast and sorrowful. Baruch Spinoza defined sadness as the transfer of a person from a large perfection to a smaller one. All the songs on the show this week have an underlying sadness. They are small vignettes of personal loss and helplessness and yet they are not uncomfortable or painful. There is a soul cleansing purging quality that makes you feel raw and renewing.

This week, we'll look at the final day. It's something we all have in common. The fact that everyone of us will die. To some it's simply a transition from one world to another. While others see it as the moment our atoms are dispersed back into the universe. How we choose to approach the final day defines almost everything we do in all the days that precede it.

This week, we'll look at enormity and scale. Whether it's astrophysical or personal, size and distance is often difficult to gauge. Everyone has seen artist renderings of the solar system depicting the sun and planets but the scale of those drawing can't begin to reflect the actual distance between those satellites. The same is true with opinions and feelings. Often we feel so distant when in fact we share much more in common with each other than not. Other times not so much.

This week, we marvel at the July 20th 1969 landing on the moon. Although this achievement took place 40 years ago and great strides have been made is subsequent years on furthering our reach into the stars, It continues to awe and inspire. Celebrating with us this week are Canola Tenderfoot, the silk demise, Makaras Pen, Anonymous Horses and Gabriel.

This week, we'll examine the Phoenix. The Firebird, Feng-Huang, Ho-oo, Benu, or Yel. The myth of this self- rejuvenating bird cuts across almost every ancient culture often symbolizing death and rebirth. The Phoenix is said to consumed by fire every 500 years only to be reborn from its own ashes. Aphone, Eigenheimer, The Orientalist, Phour Trakk, Hands upon Black Earth and Ecovillage

This week, we'll look at Angels and derivations, warnings and votaries. These nine artists are unafraid the bare the unvarnished, emblazon their influences and balance the devilish with the angelic. Some of the tracks are complete others remain ideas to be fleshed out but all compel. We'll hear from J.S. Marti, Idyllic, Will Kriski, Tronic Koi, Scarlet Hideout, Half Past Sun, The Flavor Foundation, One Blue Nine and Jardin Solar.

This week, we'll look at the increasingly antiquated idea of old world versus new world especially in music and art. Cultures measured by millennia rather than centuries are borrowing and incorporating sounds and instruments in ways unthinkable in the past

This week, we'll look at the human tendency to put off until later what we could do today. It is the period of time between when we can exercise influence over events and that moment when they are decided for us. That fine line between free will and fate.

This week, it's world studies as we look at education and educators from around the world from ancient Greece to the local school down the street. The syllabus is wide open as we hear from Bangguru, Nobara Hayakawa, Artemis, Jikjax, Elam, PiliPili and Bruce McCosar.