PGM 1354 'WILD SANCTUARY' : sept.1-8

09/02/23 • -1 min

Trick question: Before recordings, before electronics, even before history, what was the original form of ambient music? Here’s a hint: it’s not what we normally call music, but it has a lot in common with music.

The answer is the natural soundscape: a combination of the geophony—non-biological natural sounds like wind, waves, water, and weather, and the biophony—the sounds produced by all the non-human organisms in a given habitat.

Documenting the natural soundscape has been the life work of “soundscape ecologist” BERNIE KRAUSE, who’s been recording and archiving natural soundscapes from around the world since 1979. Our 3-D sound localization ability is based on the evolutionary advantage of being able to identify the location, direction, and distance of ambient sounds—and it’s this sensibility we use when we listen to ambient music.

On this transmission of HEARTS of SPACE, the magical combination of ambient nature sounds and ambient music...on a program called WILD SANCTUARY.

[ view playlist ] [ view Flickr image gallery ] [ play 30 second MP3 promo ]

On this transmission of HEARTS of SPACE, the magical combination of ambient nature sounds and ambient music...on a program called WILD SANCTUARY.

[ view playlist ] [ view Flickr image gallery ] [ play 30 second MP3 promo ]

Previous Episode

PGM 879R2 'CLOUDSCAPES' : aug.25-sept.1

SUMMER brings us one of the greatest free shows on earth. In fair weather, rising water vapor freezes into microcrystals of ice, and we see a vast, constantly changing panorama of clouds, floating and flying overhead. When summer storms arrive, the sky grows dark with the drama of thunder and lightning — nature's original multimedia show.

Clouds come in four families: high, middle, low, and vertical — with official Latin names like cirrus, cumulus and stratus. Satellites now give us the big picture of cloud patterns around the planet and how they affect the weather; there are even clouds on other planets, and interstellar clouds in outer space. It's no wonder that ambient musicians find clouds a major inspiration.

On this transmission of Hearts of Space, a high altitude summer electronic journey called CLOUDSCAPES. Music is by DIGITONAL, RUBEN GARCIA, FORREST FANG, ROBERT RICH, TERRA AMBIENT, BRUNO SANFILIPPO, and DARSHAN AMBIENT.

[ view playlist ] [ view Flickr image gallery ] [ play 30 second MP3 promo ]

Next Episode

PGM 501R 'ALTIPLANO' : sept.8-15

The music of the high Andes plateau—the "altiplano"—comes from the western edge of South America, an area that extends a thousand miles from southern Ecuador through Peru and Bolivia, to northern Chile.
In the brilliant mountain air, the sounds of simple flutes like the quena, the signature panpipe called the siku, skin drums like the bombo, and stringed instruments like the guitar and charango—take on an uncanny appeal. It is famously a land of great beauty and hard contrasts, and the music may as easily be joyful as solemn, mystic, and sad.
On this edition of Hearts of Space, a program devoted to the popular "pan-Andean" music of the region, called ALTIPLANO.

[ view playlist ] [ view Flickr image gallery ] [ play 30 second MP3 promo ]