With a nod to Gabriel Garcia Marquez – I want to talk about listening to music without which, I for one would find the world a grey place indeed! I do not lightly recommend Apps but as we sojourn in Crete, we are only able to enjoy BBC Radio 4 without which my beloved Barbara cannot get to sleep, by virtue of Radio Garden! This clever facility allows you to rotate a globe and zoom in to any internet radio station anywhere in the world and tune in to their offerings. This includes BBC stations despite the corporation’s determination that nobody, anywhere in the world shall listen to them because they do not pay a licence fee!!!
So in this time of renewed lockdowns – take a trip, tune in drop-out, take a slow boat to China, or see what they listen to in the Aleutian Isles or see what everybody does in Hawaii. Local news and international music – it can be enlightening as to the nature of our global village. For sure, the pandemic has made us – if we were not already – more aware of the fact that we are living in a global village with all the consequences as such. My partner and I have escaped lockdown (and the weather) in England and there may have been very few cases of Covid 19 here in Crete, but the cases in Greece are on the rise as they are everywhere… all the more reason to lose yourself in music.
Of course, not all musical discoveries have been via Radio Garden, my sister-in-law, our new neighbour, recommended an Athens based station which we now also tune into all day on our televisions – KOSMOS. (Our television is rather alarmingly named F&U). KOSMOS is an extraordinarily eclectic mix of music blues, pop, rap, world music, Italian, Spanish, Brazilian, North African – it’s all there and if we can’t understand the DJs – it matters not as they don’t talk too much. Another app which I like to use quite frequently is Shazam, in a quest to either identify music I recognize but cannot always remember who it is by or to add new artists to my Spotify lists. KOSMOS has offered lots of new tracks or interesting covers yet the usually infallible and fast to identify, Shazam, has frequently drawn blanks. I can only assume that these (mainly European covers are too obscure to have been added to Shazam’s database. Anyway, eclecticism is always the sign of a good radio station for me – I understand that in America, stations are totally specialized which I absolutely hate…
In other matters, today is the day of the US Presidential Election – the result of which we await with bated breath. If Trump falls, perhaps other right-wing abominations around the world may follow…