Rob Chapman

LINKS

Things I'm involved with (tangentially or otherwise)

THINGS I LIKE

These are a few of my favourite things. (the John Coltrane version obviously).

  • Other Glaxo Babies related stuff can be found at
    www.myspace.com/glaxobabies
  • www.wfmu.org
    The greatest radio station in the world basically.  Staffed entirely by people who know about and love music. Hey, it’ll never catch on.  Joe McGasko. Mary Wing. Mister Fine Wine. Irwin Chusid. And everyone else. I salute you.
  • www.peoplelikeus.org aka conceptual artist Vicki Bennett. Vicki has a show on wfmu called do or d-i-y. I only discovered do or d-i-y recently. Up until then my benchmark for mixing genius was the Future Sound Of London’s A Monstrous Psychedelic Bubble Exploding In Your Mind, which was everything a mix should be  - 'a poem about everything.' *
    Vicki’s plunderings are out of the same genius mould. Vicki Bennett is a god in my house.
    * One of the comedian Stephen Wright’s great one liners is the one that goes ‘the first book I ever read was the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything’.  That’s what mixing should be. Anyone can genre mix and you can train a monkey to synchronise beats. Even juxtaposition is just a clever word for ‘putting interesting things next to each other’.  People Like Us and FSOL - and that kind of thinking - give me reason to live.

The Pure Evoke Flow.

The reason I only discovered Vicki Bennett's radio show recently is that I haven’t had an internet portable radio very long. It has changed my life and enabled me to reconnect with the criteria I had for radio listening when I was 12 years old during the heyday of offshore pirate radio. ie listen to a great radio station till they finally play a bad track or a dodgy advert and then tune to another great radio station. Radio in England had got so bad that it had all but destroyed my love of radio, but having an internet radio means you will never again have to listen to someone saying 'time to squeeze in a couple more before the top of the hour' or 'we'll be right back after these messages with some more of your dedications'.

Here are some more great radio stations to listen to:

USA college radio

USA National Public radio

Some people I like

Ardavan Kamkar

Ardavan Kamkar is a Kurdish musician from Iran. He plays the Santur in a completely unique way and his music is breathtakingly beautiful. If you don't believe me just type his name into You Tube. After Ravi Shankar I think he is the worlds greatest living musician.

Cyril Scott.
The only significant omission I could find in Rob Young's wonderful Electric Eden is Cyril Scott. (1879-1970) Cyril Scott was a pianist, poet, Theosophist, Occultist, and massively underrated Composer. In the same way that it is now generally recognized that Joe Harriott’s innovations in harmolodics mirrored Ornette Coleman’s own experimentation without either man being familiar with the others existence Cyril Scott trod a similar, and similarly unacknowledged, path to Debussy, Scriabin, and Stravinsky. His composition Early One Morning, for piano and orchestra, deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as The Lark Ascending and In A Summer Garden

The website www.cyrilscott.net is run by his son Desmond.  

Chandos and Dutton Laboratories are both doing a splendid retrieval job in bringing Cyril Scott's music to a wider audience.