Tom Robinson|09:43 UK time, Wednesday, 28 March 2012
BBC Introducing: Fresh On The Net has been broadcast on BBC Radio 6 Music every week since 28 October 2008 and will end this Sunday night - well technically at 3am on Monday morning 1st April 2012.
Fresh On The Net started out as a single 120 minute show broadcast at midnight every Saturday night - but in June 2008 it was expanded to two shows a week at 1am on Sunday and Monday mornings.
Our mission was to connect listeners with new music – and musicians with new listeners. Central to this was our Recommend Music web page where the public could suggest favourite tunes directly to the team, bypassing record company pluggers and promo CDs completely. All music considered by the show had to be streaming in full on the web – the aim being to provide a guide to new tunes that could be heard legally and for free online. (The only exceptions were session tracks and tips from BBC colleagues).
Unlike most BBC shows, our tracklists have always featured live links direct to the artists’ own websites. Those tracklists have now been compiled into one big searchable webpage(click to open in new window). Once it’s loaded you can scroll, browse or search through the entire four and a half years the show has been on air.
So what's next?
Well from Easter I begin a new Saturday evening show (9pm – midnight) which will feature vintage gems from my record collection alongside new tunes plus guests and occasional sessions. BBC Introducing will still be featured on my album-length download - which will continue to offer an hoursworth of new music every week. That download will now be broadcast on 6 Music as a standalone programme in its own right every Sunday morning from 2am.
As you'll see from recent tracklists, in the last few weeks BBC Introducing: Fresh On The Net has been revisiting some of the most interesting artists we discovered over our four years on air. This weekend we wind things up by packing in 60-70 more of them into two music-heavy shows, It's our final salute to the huge variety of fascinating talent to be found on the wilder fringes of cyberspace.
Even though the radio show is almost at an end, Fresh On The Net will live on as a not-for-profit music blog run by volunteers. Our mission remains the same - to connect listeners with new music and musicians with new listeners - and you're warmly invited to join us there.
This is an exclusive first view of the new video from Track One in tonight's show. Highlights: the beefy Genesis Elijah getting attacked by a scrawny middleaged woman in the street, and Deeflux getting bombarded with chips by girls in the park. I've loved this song since day one... For more expert slacker wordsmithery do check out the full five minute album version on Bandcamp...
Our studio guest was Simon Deacon, senior Lecturer on the Popular Music degree course at Goldsmiths, University Of London. In recent years a phenomenal number of our favourite artists coming out of South East London have turned out to be Goldsmiths graduates - including Beaty Heart, James Blake, Alt Track, Buffalo Ink, Ifan Dafydd, Gilbert Linley, Lisbee Stainton, Tom Morley, Fabiana Palladino, Katy B and La Shark among others. Simon talked us through the kind of creative coaching that has produced such spectacularly innovative musicmaking... Excellent graduate degree courses in Popular Music are of course also available from other Universities.
Our guest today was Dave Haynes - the UK director of Soundcloud - who brought us his favourite seven free resources to help online musicmakers make the most of the web's expanding possibilities. 1) Email Unlock lets you give fans exclusive downloads in exchange for their addresses. 2) Onesheet lets you build a maintenance-free website in 2 minutes without writing code. 3) Webdoc creates instant pages combining video, audio, text & photos from across the web 4) Instagram: a smartphone photo app with its own unique filters, format & social network 5) Storywheel: record an audio story around your Instragram pictures, share it as a slideshow. 6) Soundcloud mobile app: record & share music on the fly, wherever you are. 7) If This Then That: lets users create automated tasks on the Internet. Soundcloud is one of many online audio services available to musicians including Bandcamp, Reverbnation, Last.fm and MySpace among others.
Tonight's guests were Hollowmoon - whose founding members have known each other for over a decade - during which one of them worked in a Sudanese refugee camp for 5 years while the other got on with placing his music on TV shows back home in the UK. Now with a full four piece lineup based in Brighton they recently released a debut album on Bad Nurse Records and are already busy working on a followup. They turned up mobhanded to meet us - in the picture above from L to R they are Jake Fern, Steve Barber, Gar Rock and Steve Rochford.
The drummer from tonight's guest band was among many enterprising artists who pressed a CD into my hand at the BBC Introducing Masterclass earlier this year. I was blown away by his group's energy, attitude and freshness and by the fact that they were making an EP called Budget Cuts in a shed just outside London. Officially they spell their name as #TAGS but when Oli Stanton, Mike Smith and Patr McManus from the band dropped by the studio for a chat we simply called them Hashtags.
Tonight's guest band Binko Swink was born in London at the start of last year and nurtured on a diet of Mazzy Star, Pavement, The Velvet Underground, Tthe National and St Vincent - which, I think you'll agree, is pretty nourishing fare for the raising of any infant musical venture.
Writing and producing whatthey describe as their "heartbreak-fuelled pop" from home they released their debut single Patient last September through Adventure Club Records. In today's how they joined us in the studio mob-handed to explain how they came to subequently record their album in a tumbledown cottage near Glastonbury.
From L to R above: Lyla Foy, Andy Goodall and Dan Bell, with yrs trly lurking behind them doing my best Wallace impression ("CHEEEESE, Gromit!")...
Well, the news was finaly released on Friday that my Fresh On The Net radio shows will end on 6 Music this Easter after four and a half years. I'll blog about what it all means on another occasion, but in its time the show has picked up a good many friends in the independent music community. Having first played them in 2008 we've had a longer relationship with tonight's guests The Scholars than most.
Earlier this year they pulled off the tricky but vital trick of turning a classic much-loved demo into a single that actually trumps the original. Originally from Banbury, three fifths of them went to Uni in Birmingham, but they're perhaps best known on the Oxford scene.
Their entire current lineup came in to visit us in the studio. L to R: vocalist and bassist Adrian Banks, drummer Leigh Taylor, lead guitarist Chris Gillett, keyboard player Josh Herring and their second guitarist, digital spokesman and all-round interactive specialist Tim Mobbs...
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|09:43 UK time, Wednesday, 28 March 2012
