Ongoing History of New Music

By Curiouscast

History Music

What's Ongoing History of New Music about?

Ongoing History of New Music looks at things from the alt-rock universe to hip hop, from artist profiles to various thematic explorations. It is Canada’s most well known music documentary hosted by the legendary Alan Cross. Whatever the episode, you’re definitely going to learn something that you might not find anywhere else. Trust us on this.

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Connections

02.01.2023

Back in the late 70s, the BBC debuted a science education show called “Connections”...the host was James Burke, an affable, professorish guy, usually dressed in a beige polyester leisure suit who gave the term “interdisciplinary” a whole new meaning... His ...

Ongoing History of New Music episodes:

02.01.2023 Connections Back in the late 70s, the BBC debuted a science education show called “Connections”...the host was James Burke, an affable, professorish guy, usually dressed in a beige polyester leisure suit who gave the term “interdisciplinary” a whole new meaning... His ...
01.25.2023 The History of Remixes When humans first started making audio recordings of music, they were limited as to how long those recordings could be... An original Edison cylinder could maybe hold two minutes of music, therefore any songs committed to the format had to ...
01.18.2023 Couples in Music Have you ever had to work together with your significant other?...and I don’t mean anything like housework or parenting or anything like that...I’m talking about a job—your primary source of income—where the two of you have to work on the ...
01.11.2023 In Memoriam of Those Lost in 2022 Sometime around 2016, I got the sense that we were entering into a new era of rock history: a period when the musicians we loved and admired began to die... Listen, there had been many deaths before then, but they ...
01.04.2023 Rhythm Sections In most rock bands, we hear most about the singer and the guitarist...you know...those two up front tend to get the most attention, and the most adoration. That leaves the bass player and the drummer to do the best that ...
12.28.2022 Outsider Music When it comes to what you are about to hear, there is nothing wrong with your equipment or how it was produced...this music is exactly as it was intended to be. It is exactly as it was record, and exactly ...
12.21.2022 The Roots of New Wave through Techno-Pop A few years ago, there was a revival. A rediscovery of a sound that we used to call Techno-Pop. Some people loved it...some people hated it. But whatever the opinion, it was a very important part of Alt-Rock history. So ...
12.14.2022 60 Mind-Blowing Facts About Music 2022 Edition Well, it’s that time again...another year is almost at an end—and once again, we have been subjected to the whims of the universe and human stupidity through 2022... It got better with covid but then we have the war in ...
12.08.2022 Introducing "Everything 80's" It was a classic battle between good and evil and it gave us one of the greatest toys of all time. Today, we journey back to revisit the history of the iconic Transformers. From their early days in Japan to ...
12.07.2022 20 Short Stories About Joe Strummer When Joe Strummer died on December 22, 2002, no one could believe it...first of all, the guy was only 50...second, this was a guy who ran marathons...third, he’d been strict vegetarian since 1971... And fourth, it was Joe Strummer, one ...
11.30.2022 Piano Heroes Rock’n’roll is built on the electric guitar...well, mostly...and not really in the beginning...in fact, the electric guitar as we know it, didn’t have much to do with the birth of rock at all... The earliest rock evolved out of rhythm ...
11.24.2022 Introducing "Canadian History Ehx" From 1964 to 1966, The Beatles played only a handful of shows in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal. Each show was pandemonium but the story of the Beatles in Canada goes far beyond that. From their first visit to Canada in ...
11.23.2022 Michael Hutchence: 25 Years Later Being a music fan was much different in the era before the internet...news traveled slowly often passed through many filters—so many filters, in fact, that a tremendous amount of information was either stripped out or drastically altered by the time ...
11.16.2022 Musicians Battling Disease Part 2 In the old days before the internet, musicians had an aura of mystique about them...we only knew what they wanted us to know or what music writers could ferret out...it was an era of secrets and information that was kept ...
11.09.2022 Musicians Battling Disease Part 1 The human body is a wonderful thing, a marvel of evolution, biology, chemistry, and more than a few bits—like consciousness—we don’t understand...and for the most part, this meat bag of water and chemicals works pretty well... But it’s not perfect...we ...
11.03.2022 Driven By Her: Women of the 21st Century There’s no way to sugarcoat it: the music industry has a reputation of being unkind to women...it has been a struggle from the beginning...and even after decades of work, things have evolved to the point where less than a quarter ...
11.02.2022 The History of Distortion and Feedback Once upon a time not that long ago, all music was expected to sound clean and clear. Pure, accurate, right in tune. And lo, it was…fine. But with the introduction of the electric guitar and the amplifiers that went with ...
10.26.2022 Rock Explainer 2 There’s the La Tomatina festival that happens on the last Wednesday in August in Spain...this is the largest public tomato fight in the world...first of all, why would you do this on a Wednesday?...and second, this seems like an awful ...
10.19.2022 Rock's Greatest Disasters Humanity has always been set by disasters, whether they’ve been acts of god or something we somehow brought on ourselves...war, disease, earthquakes, famine, floods, volcanic eruptions, fire, plane crashes, industrial accidents, sinking ships, extreme weather... The worst disaster of all ...
10.12.2022 Hidden Tracks and Other Sundry This is a program about the hidden audio that lurks in your music collection. You don’t know about it…you didn’t ask for it…you maybe didn’t even want it…but it’s there…and it needs to be exposed… And it’s more than just ...
10.06.2022 Driven By Her: Guitar Heroes Once upon a time, musical instruments were divided into two groups: those appropriate for women to play and everything else... That first group was very small...playing the piano was considered feminine...the violin?...yes, providing it was done gently and with ladylike ...
10.05.2022 The Roots of the 90s CanRock Explosion There was a time in this country when Canadians didn’t really care about Canadian music...no, wait...let’s start over... There was a time in this country when Canadians didn’t like Canadian music and did whatever they could to ignore it and ...
09.28.2022 The Long Strange Trip of John Frusciante Part 2 If there’s one thing I’ve learned in all my years dealing with musicians, there are artists and then there are artistes...here’s how I tell them apart...Artists make art, but they also have other interests, pursuits and abilities...Bono is an example ...
09.21.2022 The Long Strange Trip of John Frusciante Part 1 And if I’m sitting with my taxonomy flowchart, this is where I write the name “John Frusciante,” the occasional guitarist of the Red Hot Chili Peppers... And I use the word “occasional” deliberately because he’s been in and out of ...
09.14.2022 Mind-blowing Facts about Music, the Brain, and the Body The most powerful and strangest lump of organic material in the known universe is sitting inside your skull...the human brain weighs about three pounds—call it about 1400 grams if you’re feeling metric—and contains about 10 billion neurons...a piece the size ...
09.08.2022 Driven By Her: Unsung Heroines Have you ever heard of a woman named Rosalind Franklin?...probably not, but you can draw a line from today’s covid vaccines all the way back to her in the 1950s...she conducted some serious research into the makeup of rna molecules... ...
09.04.2022 The History of Alt Rock Chapter: 15 If the doomsayers are correct, something monumental–something transformative–is going to happen on December 21, 2012...this is the day the b’ak’tun cycle ends... The Mayan long count calendar runs out...after 5,125 years, it comes to an end date...what will happen next ...
08.31.2022 The History of Alt Rock Chapter: 14 To fans of any kind of rock, may 18, 1999, seemed like the end of the world...the Backstreet Boys released their new cd called Millennium...on that first day, it sold more than 500,000 copies...by the end of the week, it ...
08.28.2022 The History of Alt Rock Chapter: 13 If you were around in the early 90s, you probably remember it as a time of awesome new music...it seemed that every single day, there was a cool new band, a great new sound, a scene you didn’t know about... ...
08.24.2022 Remembering The Beastie Boys: Part 2 It is almost impossible for anyone from a lightweight boy band to transition to serious, respected artist…it can be done—we can look at Justin Timberlake and, um…well, we can look at Justin Timberlake…. And as tough as that is, it’s ...
08.21.2022 The History of Alt Rock: Chapter 12 The British music scene has always operated at warp speed...songs and bands and sounds have always come and gone very quickly, even before the age of the internet... This is what happens when you have a lot of people crammed ...
08.17.2022 Remembering The Beastie Boys: Part 1 For an entire generation of music fans—two generations, really—The Beastie Boys were always there…and now that they’re no longer with us, there are a lot of people who feel like there’s a void in music… But we’ll always remember their ...
08.14.2022 The History of Alt-Rock: Chapter 11 One of the great indirect heroes of modern rock’n’roll was born on March 21, 1865...his name was brigadier general George Owen Squier....he was an Army officer with a PhD in electrical science and a thing for music....he invented a technology ...
08.10.2022 Mysterious Lost Albums We're digging back into the original Ongoing History vault and have found this requested show on lost albums. Sometimes an artist will work on, and almost finish an album. But for whatever reason...creative concerns, fear it is too "out there", ...
08.06.2022 The History of Alt-Rock: Chapter 10 Once upon a time, all music was made mechanically...something had to be hit with a hand or a stick...or strummed or plucked...or air had to be forced over a reed or through a valve... Then along came electricity...it took a ...
08.04.2022 Driven By Her: Women Who Rocked The 90's Women helped changed the face of ROCK as hair metal from the 80’s gave way to brand new sounds and VERY different attitudes in the 90's. On this episode of "Driven by Her" presented by our friends at Porsche Canada ...
08.03.2022 Listener Email Okay, stay with us as this could get a bit confusing. Since the Ongoing History takes the summer months off to write and research new shows, we dig into the vault to post older episodes that first aired on radio ...
08.01.2022 The History of Alt-Rock: Chapter 9 It had taken a few years, but by the middle 1980s, the underground music scene in north America had reached some kind of a tipping point...enough people had discovered punk, new wave and all the sub-genres associated with both so ...
07.27.2022 Songs of Protest Sometimes people get so pissed off or so inspired by something that they just have to sing about it…this is the protest song and it’s been with us for centuries… It’s music that encourages political and social change… and if ...
07.24.2022 The History of Alt-Rock: Chapter 8 When punk rock first appeared in the middle 1970s, the major record companies in north America really didn’t care...they were happily making millions and millions of dollars from big rock bands like Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac and The ...
07.20.2022 10 Unusual Things About Pearl Jam Pearl Jam is one of the most-documented bands of the last 30 years…even before the internet came along, fans were obsessive about cataloguing everything the band did…tour schedules, setlists, bootleg recordings, news stories… Pearl Jam encouraged this, too…a big part ...
07.18.2022 The History of Alt-Rock: Chapter 7 Before we go any further with our history of alt-rock, a lesson in cosmology is in order...sometime around 16 billion years ago, there was this infinitely dense and infinitely tiny thing called a “singularity”...don’t ask where it came from or ...
07.13.2022 10 Unusual Things About Nirvana Nirvana is one of those bands where it seems we know everything…when they broke through with the “Nevermind” album in 1991 and 1992, there was a rush to learn everything we could about them…and then we Kurt died—which happened roughly ...
07.11.2022 The History of Alt-Rock: Chapter 6 In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a group of young French film makers decided to mess things up...they insisted on more artistic control and less meddling by the studios......this free-form attitude, they said, was necessary to advance the art ...
07.07.2022 Driven By Her: History of Female Drummers In this episode of "Driven By Her," presented by our friends at Porsche Canada, Alan Cross and Ongoing History of New Music explore a subject that has fascinated Alan since he saw Karen Carpenter play a drum solo in the ...
07.07.2022 The Ongoing History Book of Firsts I started thinking about “firsts” the other day, so I started looking things up…the first McDonald’s was in san Bernardino, California…the first guy to literally walk around the world on foot was Dave Kunist…it took him four years to walk ...
07.03.2022 The History of Alt-Rock: Chapter 5 Every once in a while, humankind has one of those pivotal years where everything changes... 325 AD and the council of Nicea...1215 and the signing of the Magna Carta...the discoveries of 1492..The revolutions of 1789...1919 and the Treaty of Versailles...the ...
06.29.2022 The History of Nerd Rock Nerd…noun…a foolish or contemptible person who lacks social skills or is boringly studious…definition 2: a single-minded expert in a particular technical field...example: a computer nerd… It’s an old word, too…the, er, nerds at google have a thing called “the ngram ...
06.26.2022 The History of Alt-Rock: Chapter 4 In the middle 1970s, Britain was a mess...like the rest of the west, the country was blindsided by the Arab oil embargo...it was a recession that just wouldn’t end... And to make matters worse, everyone seemed to be going on ...
06.22.2022 Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before A few years back, the Ongoing History took a "break". It's a long and somewhat complicated story, but we eventually picked up where we left off. This episode is the start of OGH v2.0 and a catch up from Alan's ...

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