Music

It's been a while since I blogged about music but with the Miami Winter Music Festival coming up it seemed like a good time to mention my two favourite trance podcasts. They come from no less than two of the biggest names in trance music and their weekly updates are well worth listening to:

Tiesto's Club Life

Armin Van Buuren A State of Trance Podcast

Both can be found within iTunes or from the sites above.

"Source Radio has been the starting point for many rising stars but one show has stood out this year for its creative content and unique features. The Monday Night Show with Pete White, Ben Powell and Chris White has been on air since October every Monday night between 6pm and 8pm. The almost famous tag line “Power Pumping Passion” is one the defining points of the show."

We started the show simply out of curiosity for Source Radio and it was an instant hit because of the humour and entertainment we brought to the station. From early on we made an effort to discuss student issues on air where appropriate. In November we debuted our version of on air dating, people would send in profiles and we would read them out on air making the occasional joke. It worked really well and people found it really entertaining and we even matched some people up!

By December we had edited out our best bits and put them on the Internet for others to listen. The feedback we had was great, allowing people who hadn’t been able to listen to the show experience it as well giving our regulars some of the funniest moments again. The editing wasn’t easy and took hours to shift through our previous shows but it was well worth it just for the exposure it gave us.

January came and we wanted to promote the show even more as well as cover more student issues. This is when I came up with the idea to invite the Vice Chancellor Madeline Atkins on the show for an interview. She accepted our invitation and we started to plan questions and features. When we told the rest of the stations members about the VC interview we had planned there was almost a sense of shock but they realised a great opportunity for the station. This VC interview was not the only planned content for the show we also had an exciting new game show. Being a student station we thought we could push the boundaries slightly more than other stations, which is why we thought of “Feed Chris”, each week we would ask Chris three questions and a bonus question, for each question he got right he got a meal on Tuesday. If he got none of the questions right he didn’t get to eat! While of course he never went through with it and the questions were rigged against him it provided a lot of spontaneous entertainment.

Our first Interview that we mocked up was with Kiefer Sutherland (Jack Bauer from 24), being heavy 24 fans and the new series about to start we made a very funny interview with some sound clips from 24, the interview is still available online. We were also fortunate with the help of Bill Bennett to get an interview with Tim Westwood for the show when he was DJing in the SU. Bill got Westwood to “pimp” a toy car as well as asking him about Coventry and the Students, the Westwood interview is also available online. In February our Vice Chancellor interview came round, we spoke for about an hour covering a range of topics including the new student centre, crime on campus and the future of the University. We had some great feedback about the interview from students and staff as well as over 600 downloads for listen again of the show. The show still continues on a Monday Night and has recently played sets from this year’s Trance Energy Festival in Holland. You can listen in between 6-8 on www.sourceradio.co.uk, if you want to listen again to any of the interviews or best bit segments visit www.imafish.co.uk.

*This article was featured in Coventry University's Source Newspaper in the March Issue.

Its days like this where I am glad I joined the University Radio Station – Source Radio. Each year around this time, Coventry University and Warwick University take part in "Varsity Day"? where they play each other in a range of sports including Football, Rugby, Cricket, Badminton, Hockey and Swimming. The radio station has never covered such an event so we thought it would be a great idea to get involved.

The idea was to have some people in the studio (Myself and Ben) then various reporters at different sporting events phoning and texting in results as they came available. As I stated something like this hadn’t been tried before and our experience handling people phoning into the station was limited.

Fortunately we pulled it off with great results and the 6 hours we spent on air coordinating the show went great. We had loads of guests in the studio including people from the cricket team, football team, hockey team, badminton team and some cheerleaders. All were mixed into constant phone updates from people covering basketball, swimming and badminton to name a few.

It’s a shame about the weather as a number of events including the Football and Rugby were called off because of bad rain; luckily we still had plenty to talk about on air. For a show that was hardly planned, lacked and sort of structure and was constantly changing it went really well. Mostly thanks to the people helping in the studio and myself and Ben’s constant humour and jokes.

It ended up with Coventry winning in a few sports (causing uproar in the studio) and some very satisfied station members. Hopefully with all the extra exposure we caused today Source Radio will get a few more listeners and the profile of the station will be raised once more.

The 6 hours we spent on air was the longest Ben, Chris and myself had done a show for but it went really quickly. We were especially hyper thanks to energy drinks but I wouldn’t recommend drinking too many.

Photos from the day can be found at:

http://flickr.com/photos/pwhite/archives/date-posted/2006/03/08/

Last night we had the Vice Chancellor, Professor Madeleine Atkins on the Monday Night show, we spent about 30mins talking to her about student issues in and around Coventry University.

Our discussion included the new student centre, crime on campus, scholarships, online services and her 2010 vision for the Uni.

You can listen again to the edited interview below.

www.imafish.co.uk/pwhite/MondayNightVCSpecialImAFish.mp3 (18mb) 23min MP3

Hosted thanks to www.switchweb.co.uk - webhosting from £13/year with a .co.uk domain name.

Like that? Check out:

Tim Westwood Interview
Monday Night Show Best Bits Part 2

Sheep Documentary

My Comments

We set out three main objectives for the show:


1. Meet the VC and discuss student issues sent in on air.

2. Promote awareness of the show to a wider audience.

3. Convert these people into listeners.

While I was very pleased with how the interview went and the issues that we discussed as for gaining listeners I was a bit disappointed. We did have an increased audience listening however not as many as I would have hoped. The awareness for the show was definitely there with the link on WebCT (The University’s online learning system) and with the posters we put up however this awareness didn’t turn into listeners.

After thinking about it for the past 24 hours I can only assume its because of one of the following reasons:

Accessibility to the station; the radio is only available online and a lot of people are still alien to the idea of streaming audio. It could just be that people don’t know how to listen to Source Radio and that the website doesn’t do enough (usability wise) to inform people.

Awareness of the station; people still don’t know about the University station and the shows it has to offer. This is mainly a promotion problem and could be solved by better integration of the station into other student affairs (similar to how the newspaper works).

Show content; perhaps discussing student issues on air was not something people wanted to hear? I’m not sure if that because of the type of students that come to Coventry or if there were more problems within the University people would have more to talk about hence attract more listeners. The Tim Westwood Interview Bill and myself did is breaking 400 downloads now which is great.

Show Time: Equally could be argued the time of the show, is Monday night not a good time for people in general to listen to a show like this? Would a daytime slot be better? It will be interesting to see the figures we get for listen again and the feedback we get.

Overall I’m pleased with the work we did and I would like to thank everyone who came along for the event and helped out, showed nicely how the station can work together to produce a great interview.

Listen live from 6-8 at:

http://www.sourceradio.co.uk/site/listen.php

We will be asking the VC questions sent in from students as well as all our normal entertaining chatter and hilarious games.

Here are the best bits from January 2006 on the monday night show. Got two great interviews, one from Kiefer Sutherland and one from Tim Westwood as well as dating and our new gameshow "Feed Chris".

http://imafish.co.uk/pwhite/Best_Of_Monday_Night_Show_Part2.mp3

(25mb) 37mins.

The Universities Vice Chancellor, Professor Madeleine Atkins will be appearing on Source Radios Monday Night Show (With Pete, Ben and Chris) on Monday 6th Feb 2006 between 6-8.

It will be the perfect opportunity to have your views expressed directly to the University VC and to find out more about her roles and views at the University.

Please send your questions to:

mondaynightshow@sourceradio.co.uk

Comments on this summers music including a feature on French Dance artists and my current playlist.

Its getting to the end of the summer season for music now and there have been some really good songs this summer.

In particular there has been some good French music coming through. I really like Martin Solveig and his songs Everybody and Jealousy have been especially good, his essential mix for Radio 1 at the end of July was one of the best of the year in my opinion.

Les Rythmes Digitales – Jacques Your Body which was featured on the Citroen advert is another good dance song. Finally Sebastien Tellier – La Ritournelle has been a very chilled song for me recently, it was featured as Jo Whiley’s record of the week last week. I would recommend all three artists.

My current playlist looks as followed:

X-Press 2 – Give It
Royksopp – 49 Percent
Braund Reynolds – Rocket
Armin Van Buuren – Shivers
Armin Van Buuren – Zocalo
Tiesto – UR (Junkie XL Remix)
Coldplay – Talk (Unknown Remix)
Above & Beyond – Above Tonight
Matt Darey – Eternity
Pendulum – Slam
Les Rythmes Digitales – Jacques Your Body
Sebastien Tellier – La Ritournelle

Wow, what a weekend, Creamfields was awesome! Got in about 6 Saturday afternoon and after a walk round the site we settled on Eddie Halliwell who started the evening in a banging style.

Around 8 and after a dodgy pizza we watched Paul Van Dyk and Faithless. PVD was one of the main reasons I went for the day, as I just love his music and sets. Faithless were equally as good putting on a wicked live performance. They started with Insomnia and ended on We Come One, the whole set just went too quickly.

We ended the night with Paul Van Dyk (again) then Ferry Corsten who for me was the highlight of the night. We saw too many DJ’s to mention here but Fatboy Slim and Armin Van Buuren were also really good.

The most entertaining DJ of the night has to go to Erick Morillo who was really going for it when singing along and the live drums by his guest were really good.

I would have loved to have seen Above & Beyond, Pete Tong and Paul Oakenfold but there was just too much going on at the same time to fit it all in – maybe next year, will definitely be going.

Have the photos and a video from what I think was Eddie Halliwell’s set.

Photo Gallery - http://www.imafish.co.uk/gallery/viewer.php?albid=69&stage=2

Video - http://www.imafish.co.uk/gallery/viewer.php?albid=69&stage=2&imgid=702 (Quicktime).

I would have liked to take more pictures and videos but I needed a bigger memory card and maybe a new camera ;).

This weekend I’m off to one of the hottest music events of the year – Creamfields. The event staged at Liverpool has a great line up of DJ’s and I cant wait to go!

I especially want to see:

Paul Van Dyk
Ferry Corsten
Armin Van Buuren
Above & Beyond
Fatboy Slim
Judgejules
Faithless
Basement Jaxx
Pete Tong
Paul Oakenfold
and Erick Morillo

Will try to get a load of photos from the event and will give a full review sometime next week.

Been some really good new music recently and I’m loving the track by Braund Reynolds – Rocket, which I’m predicting to be a big hit. Jo Whileys pet sound this week is X-Press 2 – Give it, which I said a couple of months back was going to be big.