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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Studio Stories with David B...

09.15.2021

Long before I started doing this for a living, I had the notion that I was going to be a record producer…after all, I loved music and the idea of being able to help record it would be a great ...

Ongoing History of New Music episodes:

09.15.2021 Studio Stories with David Botrill Long before I started doing this for a living, I had the notion that I was going to be a record producer…after all, I loved music and the idea of being able to help record it would be a great ...
09.08.2021 The Amazing Year That Was 1991 When it comes to music, not all years are created equal…listen, every year features some great new songs from great new bands…but over the long term, this music isn’t equally distributed…sometimes—maybe once a decade, but usually less—we run into what ...
09.01.2021 U2 and The Joshua Tree at 30 with Daniel Lanois Part 2 Whenever an artist goes into the studio, they hope for the best but expect the worst…you want it the album to sell and turn you into a global superstar with all the rights and privileges thereto…but there is no way ...
09.01.2021 U2 and The Joshua Tree at 30 with Daniel Lanois Part 1 On March 9, 1987—a little more than ten years after a bunch of kids met up in a Dublin kitchen—U2 released their fifth album…expectations were running pretty high…after establishing themselves with their first two albums, there was a leap ahead ...
08.25.2021 The Tragically Hip's Fully Completely Reissue With Rob Baker “Even though it was the middle of summer, it was cold and wet,” Rob Baker remembers, “and after a full day in the studio, there was nothing to do but go back to where we were staying and watch the ...
08.18.2021 Oasis At War: Part 2 How well do you get along with your siblings?—assuming you have any, of course…brothers and sisters can be a pain, especially when you’re always in close quarters…and when you have to work with them, too—gawd, that can be ugly… We’ve ...
08.11.2021 Oasis at War: Part 1 Siblings can be a pain in the butt…just because you’re related to someone doesn’t mean you’re going to get along…not everyone can be Venus and Serena Williams…here: lemme give you some examples… Ann Landers and Dear Abbey were real people—and ...
08.04.2021 Christian Rock There's been a lot of talk and the Christian Rock scene....especially in new rock. And many feel the bands don't get their due. They are looked at preachy do-gooders. But that's not always the case. And many bands are crossing ...
07.28.2021 The Rock Snob This is a course in Rock Snobery. To help you understand why some terms exist in music and what they actually mean. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
07.21.2021 Alt-Rocks Great Bass Players This week we look at one of the most under appreciated and underrated members of any rock band...the bass player. These are the most influential bass players in the history of alt-rock. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
07.14.2021 The Kings of Quirk Beauty is in the eye of the beholder—or in the case of music, the ear…what’s pleasant to one person is nothing but noise to someone else… This is where it’s good to have some patience…there are some forms of art ...
07.07.2021 The Queens of Quirk For a very long time—too long—women were locked in very defined roles when it came to rock’n’roll…girls were expected to look pretty and do little more than sing…okay, maybe shake a tambourine or something…but that was about it… And when ...
06.30.2021 The Tribes of Alt-Rock One of the most useful things about music is that it can be used to tell the world who you are…we’ve all done it…it is a symbol of our individuality and belief in personal freedom…it proclaims our identity to the ...
06.23.2021 9 Amazing Things About Your Brain and Music There is absolutely no need for music—speaking in terms of evolution, anyway… As far as scientists can tell, there’s no compelling reason for humans to make and enjoy music…neurologically, we could get along quite well without it…sure, our world would ...
06.16.2021 Music Questions People Almost Never Ask I think one of the greatest gifts humans have is a sense of curiosity…the ability to question things around to learn why things are the way they are pushes us forward… Here are my three favourite questions that i think ...
06.09.2021 The Beginners Guide to Vinyl So you’ve decided to go all retro and dive into vinyl…no more digital for you…you are going back to the future…it’s all about analogue, baby… Buh-bye, mp3s and digital downloads—except maybe for the songs you want to load on your ...
06.02.2021 RocknRoll Rehab Sometimes, the pressures of life become a little too much and the methods of escape you choose to cope with them aren’t exactly the best ones…over-indulgence with and reliance upon drugs and/or alcohol is never, ever a good thing…and once ...
05.26.2021 The Tragically Hip's "Saskadelphia" On Saturday, August 20, 2016, tens of millions of Canadians watched and listened to the final Tragically Hip concert from Kingston…given Gord Downie’s illness, we knew that was the last time we’d see the band perform together live… That was ...
05.19.2021 A Requiem for Daft Punk It takes a special kind of band to obscure their appearance…but if you can do it right, then it moves from being a silly gimmick to an important piece of your identity, image, and brand.… When Kiss came along in ...
05.12.2021 The History of the Record Store Before we begin, I am very aware that there are people listening to this program who have never, ever set foot in a record store…they came of age musical after the Internet changed everything about how we hear about, acquire, ...
05.05.2021 Hobbies of Musicians What do you for fun?...hobbies, pastimes—things that you do just for you, away from your job and all your other responsibilities?... I’ve got my dogs…my wife and I like to travel…and I’ve always had this thing about the JFK assassination…I’ve ...
04.28.2021 Big Bands from Small Towns Let me say from the outset that I have nothing against small towns…I grew up in one myself…population: 2000…it was in the middle of the Canadian prairies…the nearest big city was Winnipeg…after that, you had to go at least 500 ...
04.21.2021 The Post-Punk Explosion Part 7: All the rest The original punk rock explosion of the 1970s was two things…first, it was a major reset for rock’n’roll…think of it as a great musical decluttering… Punk of the 70s wasn’t revolutionary…it was reactionary…the music was stripped back, and everyone went ...
04.14.2021 The Post-Punk Explosion Part 6: Ska Every once in a while, music enters a state of flux where the direction of everything is, shall we say, undefined…we see and hear change but we’re not quite sure what it all means just yet…something is coming—but what?... All ...
04.07.2021 The Post-Punk Explosion Part 5: Goth On April 10, 1815, a volcano erupted in the central part of the Indonesian archipelago…Mount Tambora blew up, ejecting nearly 200 cubic kilometres of debris into the atmosphere…all that dust circled the earth, blocking out a significant amount of sunlight… ...
03.31.2021 The Post-Punk Explosion Part 4: Alt-Dance Dancing is as old as the human race…not long after we started walking on two legs, we found a groove and have been moving to the music ever since… Fast-forward several million years and we find that wherever there’s music, ...
03.24.2021 The Post-Punk Explosion Part 3: Industrial By the time we got to the mid-70s, rock had organized itself so that were rules…you did things this way and not that way…then came punk… One of the great gifts of punk rock was a reminder that you didn’t ...
03.17.2021 The Post-Punk Explosion Part 2: Techno-Pop For the longest time, the sounds of rock were made with voice, guitars, bass, drums, and keyboards like piano and organ…there were plenty of ways to manipulate the sounds of those instruments: effects pedals, studio tricks, happy accidents that happened ...
03.10.2021 The Post-Punk Explosion Part 1: New Wave If you’ve been around enough, you may remember those special times when you know that you’re in a middle of music history being made… You might be old enough to remember the early 90s…so much new and cool music—led by ...
03.03.2021 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 ...
02.24.2021 50 Years of CanCon Fifty years ago, there was no such thing as a Canadian music industry…well, at least not compared to the U.S. or the UK…we had bands that played gigs and recorded singles and albums…but there wasn’t much of an infrastructure to ...
02.17.2021 The Diversity Show 2021 Here is a truth that some people find very uncomfortable: rock, alt-rock and indie rock are predominantly white…why is that?...the answers—and there is more than one—are complicated…there has actually been a quite a lot of study on this question… Perhaps ...
02.10.2021 Digital Debris Part 3: Liner Notes When you listen to music through a streaming music service, how aware are you of what you’re listening to?...sure, you can look at the screen, but what does that tell you?...the name of the artist, the name of the song, ...
02.03.2021 Digital Debris Part 2: Album Artwork A little while ago, I carved out some time to finally file some records and CD’s…I’d been procrastinating, but I finally summoned up the discipline to get it done…and honestly, it was a task that should have taken all of ...
01.27.2021 Digital Debris Part 1: B-Sides and Bonus Tracks We are very, very deep into the digital world when it comes to music…virtually every song we could ever want is available to us instantly no matter where we are…all we need is an internet connection and we’re good to ...
01.20.2021 Unfortunate Sonic Coincidences: The Lawsuits Okay…let’s go over this one more time…there are just twelve notes in the western scale…the ways they can be combined to form pleasing sounds are finite in number…it’s a big number, but it’s still finite… If we look at chords—which ...
01.13.2021 Theories, Thoughts, and Half-Baked Ideas One of the byproducts of doing a show like this for as long as I’ve been doing it is that it’s really hard to shut off your brain… I’m always thinking about topic ideas, ways to link facts and trivia ...
01.06.2021 Sid Vicious Every once in a while we come across someone who is famous and iconic for being...well let's be honest...nothing more than a monumental eff-up. There is nothing about them we should admire...but for some reason we find them intriguing...fascinating...compelling. This ...
12.30.2020 Indigenous Alternative Over the last decade, there has been some very, very long overdue attempts at reconciliation with the First Nations and Indigenous Peoples of North America…there’s still a long, long way to go, but at least the process as begun… The ...
12.23.2020 The 2020 Xmas Show This the 23rd annual ongoing Christmas show…and yeah, I know that 2020 has been a challenging year, but let’s look at some of the good things that happened… Many of us learned to bake bread…drive-in theatres made a comeback for ...
12.16.2020 60 Facts in 30 Minutes: 2020 Edition Okay…let’s start the annual office cleanup…this is the time of year when I go through all the scraps of paper, all the scribbles on various notepads and all the post-it notes hanging everywhere…then there are the computer and phone notes ...
12.09.2020 The Story of Stereo: Part 2 We are always pouring sound into our heads, whether we’re using some kinds of speakers or wearing headphones… I’m going to make a guess here, but I’m going to assume that most people demand a certain level of audio quality ...
12.04.2020 Introducing: Whatever Happened To...? You’ve heard the stories. You’ve felt for the people involved. But what happens after the cameras shut off and the reporters walk away? Just because a story disappears from the news doesn’t mean it’s gone. So whatever happened to the ...
12.02.2020 The Story of Stereo: Part 1 Our ears are amazing things…evolution has created an ability that allows us to tell the direction of a sound…left and right, up and down, front and back…we can tell how close something might be, whether it’s stationary or moving, and ...
11.25.2020 Even More Rock Conspiracies The universe is a weird, random place that has little regard for what us puny humans think…this is something we find very, very hard to accept…we’re always looking for explanations for the weird, random, and sometimes evil things that befall ...
11.18.2020 Hidden Figures I’ve always been something of a nut when it comes to the space program…but even though I’ve read all the books, seen all the documentaries, and watched all the movies, I was still surprised to learn something new with the ...
11.16.2020 The Return of ACDC - Power Up Premiere 2020 has been a miserable year…the pandemic…economic ruin…the crazy U.S. election, which featured an impeached President…Kobe Bryant’s helicopter crash…the death of George Floyd…murder hornets arrived in North America…swarms of locusts descended on Africa… There were so many hurricanes that they ...
11.11.2020 Great Alt-Rock One-Hit Wonders of the 90s: Part 2 Creating art is hard…if it wasn’t, everyone would do it—and everyone would be successful at doing it…even those who can create art—the people with the right stuff—have a finite supply of good stuff within them… Take Margaret Mitchell, for example…she ...
11.09.2020 Introducing... 13 Hours: Inside the Nova Scotia Massacre The deadliest shooting spree in Canada’s modern history left us with far more questions than answers. Join Sarah Ritchie, a reporter for Global News in Halifax, as she tries to unravel how something like this could happen there. Sarah will ...
11.04.2020 Great Alt-Rock One-Hit Wonders of the 90s: Part 1 Artists who manage to have only one hit are often the butt of jokes…getting tagged as a one-hit-wonder can kill your career…but let’s turn this around: how many hits do you have?... There is so much music out there, so ...

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