Idyllic Music

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. I'm Jim Nye.

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. So we'll hear from six songs offering a modern twist to these myths. They come from Jen Gloeckner, First Rebirth, Zoe Leela, Swoon, A Beautiful Curse and Ruxpin. I'm Jim Nye.

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 distent when in fact we share much more in common with each other than not. Other times not so much. Offering a guide this week are Blisaed, Bersarin Quartett, God Is An Astronaut, Kesakoo and Messian Dread.

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- rejuvanating bird cuts across almost every ancient culture often symbolizing death and rebirth; for the Phoenix is said to consumed by fire very 500 years only to be reborn among 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.

This week, we'll look at memories and the way we twist them inside out sometimes to serve our own purposes. Looking back on this episode of Idyllic Music are 46 Bliss, Pierre the Moon, MoVox, Screenatorium, Classic SciFi and Catsauce. I'm Jim Nye

This week, we'll look at the great American art form as it finds its way into the 21st century. Jazz continues to evolve in ways that are both striking and familiar. Just as Charlie Parker and Charlie Christian took popular music and stripped it to its core before radically making it their own, today's musicians are taking the cut and paste technology of hip hop and using it to disassemble, rearrange and rethink the process of improvistion. As Frank Zappa famously said "Jazz is not dead...it just smells funny"