Project Studio Tea Break

Amidst the chocolate-brown upholstery of the PSTB studio, Jon has been using his tennis racquet to bake pizza, while Mike does his best zebra-finch impressions -- albeit with occasional distractions from Monkey Nuts & Wizzo and the *other* Montero. Via pioneering brain-controlled resynthesis, we also bring you R2-D2's internal monologue, aka the musical thought crimes of an early-2000s scratch DJ. But if you're bored of modelling Hans Zimmer's pedal creak, then it's time to welcome some hair-raising Bulgarian women into your life. Or, after a brief star-wipe transition, you could follow Rick Wakeman somersaulting his piano through some flapping saloon doors with both oomph and control. Abandon hope all ye who enter here!

To listen to this month's Jam, check out Mike's special Spotify playlist:

For details of Jon's pop-up shows with Little Bulb Theatre in Covent Garden on 9th, 10th, and 11th September, keep an eye on their website here:

Fancy more of our nonsense? Then please support the podcast at https://www.patreon.com/projectstudioteabreak and check out the merch store at https://www.projectstudioteabreak.com/merch

Welcome to the Murder Booth! From his shallow grave, a fully organic Jon has been braving slugs and worms to bring you his best mycelium impression, with a penitential side-order of Kentucky-fried Huapango. Meanwhile, Mike's gone full Karate Kid in a world of Don LaFontaine's chewy syllables, while slapping himself with his own gauntlet and pinch-zooming a perspex shield. They're not alone either: MIT's finest have been playing 'Mary Had A Little Lamb' on an off-piste DX7 and expressing amino acids through the medium of uncooked spaghetti. Even the colour-balance-proof spiders have been scuba-diving, paragliding, and jamming along.

And in case you wanted to experience those quotes from Professor Buehler in their original context, here are links to those interviews:

Fancy more of our nonsense? Then please support the podcast at https://www.patreon.com/projectstudioteabreak and check out the merch store at https://www.projectstudioteabreak.com/merch

This month's episode sees your effervescent hosts comprehensively outmanoeuvred by the mastery of Rotcod Zzaj. Having lost any claim to irony, Jon uncrumples his cummerbund and dons a rubber suit to discuss X-rated puppet escapades, the world's second-richest musician, and the Broadway-Disney Silk Road. Mike, on the other hand, has been stitching himself up like a kipper with four Harry Potters, while investigating the lobotomised Trapp family and persisting in romantic notions of vile retirement consorts. Also, in the ultimate hipster flex, we throw faux-Italian solfeggio to the wolves, seeing as it's so poorly suited for verbal communication next to loud drums.

Humans are weird.

(And if you want to check out The Mix Review's 10th Anniversary Retrospective, head over to https://www.cambridge-mt.com/tmr10 )

Fancy more of our nonsense? Then please support the podcast at https://www.patreon.com/projectstudioteabreak and check out the merch store at https://www.projectstudioteabreak.com/merch

Once again, your visibly more radiant hosts are abusing their enormous media power by pandering to viola players and financially exploiting ever younger artists. Jon's lost his child-like innocence amidst an apathetic Eyes Half Shut orgy, playing Skelecaster solos over a bed of foetal synths. Mike's been riding The Circle Of Death to deter any proto-Eilish from starting a podcast while ruining his QWERTY keyboard with superhumanly amateur toast Foley. There's celebrity coverage too, featuring Kanye West's bingo card, Jacob Collier's toothbrush, and Renee Zellweger. (Really?!) And in the imaginary world of THX Zelda, 'tis but a small step from barely audible drones to New Age. But where does Vangelis get all the pregnant women from?

(If you'd like to check out Mike's new online course, Mix Magician's Toolkit, head over to https://www.cambridge-mt.com/magic )

Fancy more of our nonsense? Then please support the podcast at https://www.patreon.com/projectstudioteabreak and check out the merch store at https://www.projectstudioteabreak.com/merch

Your offensively second-talented hosts have been rejoicing in an Energy Quotient rating of 4.97 this month, while clearing the very lowest bar of brass-necked press relations with a dizzyingly sanitised Tower Of Power and some mysterious guitar noodlimen. Returning from his busman's holiday aboard the Bisto awards gravy-train, Mike's been a fresh whirlwind of self-destructive thought-crimes, performing his artisanal lead-time lament to the accompaniment of sweaty, loincloth-clad Taiko drummers and the world's slowest kick line. Jon's also been breaking the ice with fully sustainable Foley alternatives, while delivering one-finger churn via pre-boxed ghost-note pot pourri and audio umami. Plus, they've both been competing with The Alien Guitar Womb Hive Mind to smoosh the world's biggest bubble, slam-dunk multiple tubas, and translate 'croissant' into English. As voids go, it's 100% presentation and 0% noise, give or take an extended nautical metaphor.

(If you like the audio snippets in this month's episode, check out Dorothea Wessel's latest tracks at https://dorotheawessel.com/)

Fancy more of our nonsense? Then please support the podcast at https://www.patreon.com/projectstudioteabreak and check out the merch store at https://www.projectstudioteabreak.com/merch

It's been a long lockdown. A hatless Jon has been frightening timid voles while baking up Chekhov-grade disaster on his Fisher Price Singalong Radio. Mike has, amongst other lightly qualified successes, been fixing the cat with his soldering iron, as well as tumbling the walls of Jericho with pastoral platitudes and the sharpest of punctuation marks. So, in an emergency violation of quarantine rules, several members of the broad Church of Be-Bop Botherers join us to help liven up proceedings. A moderately Klingon Anderson Paak plays us both the dynamics of his shawm. Geoffrey Apple and Mark Google duet in Swedish accents about the romance of polyphonic pitch-shifting. A synthetic Tom Waits goes bonkers with dubstep rectangles. And Coco Chanel weighs in on The Great Tissue Controversy. Plus there are tough questions to be answered. How do you not solve a problem like Mitski? Is it possible to repair a glass countertenor? And, most importantly of all: you can do that?!

Following a suitably down-home Christmas, your intrepid hosts battle Spotify fatigue to huddle round the PSTB dartboard for a Grammy nominations special! Mike has officially melted, and is now tearfully hoovering around the wet-ass elephant in the room. Jon, with his usual grammatical pedantry, has been chewing on pulled pork in the tidy mess of Haim's two-car garage and wishing that Chris Martin were swearing at Jacob Collier. Neither of them can deny the cultural impact of 'Moo', however, or the healing power of kittens, even while Shawn Everett and Gary Paczosa slug it out in a Best Engineering death-match. And if you get peckish, why not tuck into our festive facepalm buffet? There's some surprisingly toothsome mobile-phone multimiking, our infamous Icelandic toast, and all the vocal-recording mistakes you can eat!

If you'd like to hear our free bonus Grammy segment (discussing Best Melodic Rap Performance, Best Improvised Jazz Solo, Best Arrangement -- Instrumental or A Capella, and Best Bluegrass Album), you can find it in our public Patreon feed here:

Many thanks to Ellie McDowall for letting us use some snippets of her excellent Field Recordings podcast (https://fieldrecordings.xyz) in this episode. Thanks also to the engineers responsible for the wonderful recordings: Jon Tjhia, Hana Walker-Brown, Philip Revell, Vladimir Kryuchev, Sami El-Enany, Tom Rosenthal, Daria Corrias, Hannah Dean, and especially Andrea Rangecroft!

Fancy more of our nonsense? Then please support the podcast at https://www.patreon.com/projectstudioteabreak and check out the merch store at https://www.projectstudioteabreak.com/merch

Finally available in hardback, this month's festive episode promises gingerbread Foley and a Warlock's drinking anthem. Due to lack of demand for their eulogy-writing services, your intrepid Master Breakers have decamped to a Scottish space ghetto to investigate Saint Dolly, a duckfaced Norah Jones, and Percy Jackson's epicly burnt Scotch egg. And why Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, and Johnny Cash have all evolved just like hummingbird moths. Jon's been impersonating Rocky Balboa with hipster faireez in the merchtabulous PSTB kitchen, working hard to put fresh puns in the oven and incredibly consistent pans on the hob. Meanwhile, Mike's been distracted from Cirque Du Soleil by Whitney Houston's 'I's, Dermot Kennedy's 'R's, various gendered diphthongs, and the Elvis schwa. Can they all stay on the white notes and avoid going toe to toe with spandex-clad Super Moderators? (Oh ye of little faith in the inexplicable success of minor talent...)

Fancy more of this nonsense? Then please support the podcast at https://www.patreon.com/projectstudioteabreak and check out the merch store at https://www.projectstudioteabreak.com/merch

Welcome to your favourite ever PSTB episode! Jon, the accidental clothes horse, is emerging in a blizzard of metaphors from his hectic program of theatrical wrestling, all-night business drinking, and making bagpipes even more hellish. His intern Mike, broadcasting from the Millennium Falcon, has been juicing his own apples, irradiating problematically heteronormative alligators, and hammering himself in the face with a pair of HD650s. Top of the agenda this month is the sound of electric cars, with Hans Zimmer's whizzy space cowbell, Batman's audio Barberpole, and French art-house archetypes all straining attention spans in the BMW boardroom. Also up for discussion are Palestrina parties, the future of rock soundscaping, formantless anurans, cheek shrubbery, and the Zoom H4N (the professional's choice for capturing lo-res heliox-huffing). Who needs biting political commentary, when you've got a swing in your kerchunk?

Fancy more of this nonsense? Then please support the podcast at https://www.patreon.com/projectstudioteabreak

Who better to lead you through today's post-truth apocalypse than two renowned purveyors of nonsense? Mike, that blessed innocent, has been blithely investigating the Philuminati at Milton Keynes Henge, and their shadowy links with the Cadbury gorilla's magic break. Tracing the sinister web to the balmy tropics of Walter Mitty's secret Iceland, he's been stubbing his toe and screaming at waterfalls Pansori-style while marvelling at The Biebster's ecological trail of destruction. In the meantime, Jon's been learning some blindingly obvious archeoacoustics from Ozzy's anechoic bat-trap, as well as doing ASMR cheese-grating with the anti-Kenny-G. After a hard day's international punditry, however, it's time to relax with a secret nostril-based gig for our new band, Fluffy Gauze Of Noise, in the never-ending quest for cult-like status.

(No AutoTune was used in the making of this podcast. Just orange juice with the bits left in.)

Fancy more of this nonsense? Then please support the podcast at https://www.patreon.com/projectstudioteabreak