Prague News

My show this week was devoted entirely to music issued in 2009. The Notorious bWg has noted that music usually gets better in harder economic times, and 2009 was no excuse. For me, what was surprising how a lot of indie groups embraced house and disco, and how a lot of house and techno DJs turned their sights to rock for inspiration.

This week I was surprised to look out the studio window to see my first snow of the season (there was some snow in October, but I wasn’t here to see that ).

Regular listeners have probably figured out that the tone of show in recent months has moved away from strictly latin and downtempo. This isn’t because of any change in my tastes, but rather because of all the new music that’s coming from all corners of the world that doesn’t exactly fit narrowly-defined boundaries.

Just testing embeds from openstreetmap.org.

View Larger Map

This week’s show was a joy to put together, as there was so much cool new music to play. Plus, I kinda had to put together a themed set in celebration of Rio de Janeiro’s naming as the city hosting the 2016 Olympics. Man, that’s gonna be a _serious_ party. I also loved the video the organizing committee put together. It’s here:

It’s nice to be back in the studio after a few weeks away, first due to vacations, then to business travel. But that has also meant that I’ve been able to compile a lot of new material, and today’s show was heavy on the new stuff: Little Dragon, Bebel Gilberto, Miike Snow, atd. atd.

This week, as usual, there was a lot of new stuff, including new singles from Little Dragon, Nouvelle Vague, and Simian Mobile Disco. The standout tracks for me were Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings’ cover of Prince’s “Take Me With U,” and the utterly unclassifiable Swedish swing-hip-hop formation Movits!, with “Swing För Hyresgästföreningen.” I originally saw Movits! on the Colbert Report, so I guess I’m contributing to the Colbert Bump

This week’s show had a metric buttload of new music, including new singles from Simian Mobile Disco, The Very Best (featuring Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend), and Clara Moreno. But the real star of the show was Jorge Ben, because I played several songs from his long career, ranging from his 1963 original of “Mas Que Nada” all the way up to the sublimely funky “Ponta de Lanca Africano (Umbabarauma).”

Hi. This is part of a training I’m working on for the TOL New Media Essentials workshop. It’s just a test file and I’ll take this down in a few minutes, but I apologize in advance for clogging up your inbox.

Here is a test of embedding a Google Map:

View Prague Cool Stuff in a larger map

For this week’s show, I wanted to play a few rarities related to Michael Jackson, so I reached into the archives for a few very cool things, including one from the “Motown Remixed Vol. 2″ CD, the Miami mix of the Jackson 5’s “Dancing Machine,” which reimagines the Jackson 5 as a satin-shirted salsa band in Miami. Pretty cool stuff, actually. I also played Todd Terje’s remix of “Can’t Help It,” the original of which tends to be overlooked on “Off the Wall.”

This week’s show had some excellent new music from The Whitest Boy Alive, Little Dragon, Boozoo Bajou and Rosalia de Souza, as well as some straight-up classics from Joao Gilberto and Marcos Valle. But the happiness was also mixed with sadness about the passing of Curtis Jones, who died this week.

This week’s show had an awful lot of new material, possibly owing to the summer festival season, or possibly just because people like putting out records in May. Regardless, I’m happy

This week’s show was a lot of fun to put together, but was also marked by multiple technical problems. To make a short story boring, I ended up doing most of the show from my iPod. Nonetheless, it was fun to work on this week’s themed setlist: Brazilian women singers. I got quite a few classic albums this week from Gal Costa and Joyce, and it is always great to play old favorites.

This week I had a lot of new material, and it was really fun to put together this week’s themed set, which was about places and spaces. The great singles this week were Jack Penate’s “Tonight’s Today:”

This week’s show really arranged itself; the first hour more or less was devoted to new stuff, specifically in the electro genre, the second hour was more salsa and latin, and the third hour was marked by a set devoted to the weather, which has suddenly turned rainy and colder. April showers bring May flowers, right?

This week’s setlist was especially in honor of Barack Obama’s visit to Prague, and had quite a few songs about the economy. Among the new stuff this week was the outstanding “Paris,” a remix of the Friendly Fires by the Belgian duo Aeroplane which essentially remade the song and put in vocals from the Berlin-based Au Revoir Simone.

I really enjoyed the challenge on my previous show of having to put together a set around a theme, so I decided to do it again this week. This time the last hour of the show was devoted to songs about spring, because, after all, it’s the first day of spring.

An EUR 24.5bn package is to stimulate lending to cash-starved businesses in central and eastern Europe and reassure investors.

Officials say the undeveloped area around Letňany terminus has "potential for the future".