22 is an auspicious number, and August is hot, especially this one. Anyway, we’re all mad here. Welcome to the Bubble Wrap radio show write-up, back after a long chaotic hiatus. (The chaos isn’t over — we’re just taking a break from it.) Life spills over into everything so this show was a bit chaotic […]
This week, it became apparent that one of our top sources for new music – Insomnia Radio – had gone dark. According to their page, they are on permanent hiatus from song posting, which is a shame because it’s like, there goes Europe! So we explored Africa instead. We also touched down in Korea briefly […]
Bubble Wrap continues with the letter H and introduces more new music from around the country including a few songs we really like. Cutting to the chase, the hands down favorite of the evening was “Gold Purple Orange” by Jean Grae and Quelle Chris, which has one of the more compelling lyrics we’ve heard lately […]
Sometimes you realize that it’s just you against the world, struggling for air, for breathing room, for peace of mind, and for a fighting chance to have a “nice” day. But then you remember that it’s always been like that and move on. This week on Bubble Wrap we played music to soothe and distract, with here and there a nod to the sad fact the struggle is universal.
Every once in a while you take a look around and ask “what’s it all about, anyway?” and the answer that comes back is – nothing. And that’s the thing. It’s about nothing and everything all at the same time. Music this week revealed itself to be about the usual things – love, the Internet, […]
Around and around and around we go, and where stop: the letter F, for one. This week on Bubble Wrap, we continued down the list of songs from the old laptop whose names begin with F. And of course, newer music from around the indie world. Probably the hit of the show was Ferde Grofe’s […]
The clear winner of this week’s Bubble Wrap round-up was “I’m Not A Loser” by Amyl and the Sniffers. I’m not sure what to say about that except that punk rock rules and girls who talk back even more so. Otherwise, it was late 2017 all over again, because that’s what you get in January. […]
With 2017 safely behind us, Bubble Wrap Radio moved on with the first crop of 2018 releases (and a bunch of late 2017 as well). It is way too early to have any idea what 2018 is going to be about, and a selection of tunes is always selected by a biased someone, so I’ll go ahead and say that darkness and dread will continue, but leavened with a bit of gallows humor and the occasional burst of inspirational optimism.
It’s impossible to think about 2017 without some trepidation — there were so many low points. Would we be nuked? outlawed? or just poked with pointy sticks? These were trying times. Musically, however, the trend was largely positive. Musicians seemed to be waking up out of their Taxi-induced malaise (“shiny happy marketing music”) into a […]
It was a week of tragedy and violence, on the heels of earlier tragedy and violence, not to mention the destruction of various natural disasters. In between, there was Hallowe’en, and to get in the spirit, so to speak, we’ve been watching cheery Netflix shows like Stranger Things and House of Cards… We don’t know what to think anymore, so we play music, trying to make sense of it all, one song at a time…. And then, in the midst of our happy escapist dream set, what should pop into our consciousness but — Poppy.
On the show before Hallowe’en, we always like to play some seasonal music, which in our case consists mostly of songs with scary words in their titles or band names. But even on that flimsy basis, I was able to ascertain a theme to this year’s selection, which was, in a word, fear, and its permutations, bravery and paranoia. So before I go on, I want to say, boldly and with all good cheer, “Don’t be frightened, boys and girls!” The future may look sucky but we won’t know until we get there, so why waste time worrying now? That is our Hallowe’en message to you…
In the context of a two hour radio show with two programmers competing for time, it becomes hard to allow for the expansive requirements of a song over 5 minutes. This is too bad because longer tracks are every bit as valid as radio-friendly 3:00 ditties. Artists have railed about this for years, although not so much lately now that radio is (for the most part) relatively free of new music, and certainly of new music that takes any chances. It was with this in mind — not to mention a swelling backlog of songs over 5 minutes — that caused the show of long songs to happen.
It was our first episode of Bubble Wrap since The Great Refurbishing of the WVEW station equipment over the weekend, giving us our first “clean” broadcast since…ever? Thank you, Refurbishers! It’s nice to have cables that don’t cut out at random intervals or if you breath… To celebrate, we played a lot of new music plus a bunch of older tracks from the likes of Zapp, Cameo, and the Bar Kays.