Monthly Archives: January 2024

Hits In Hi-Fi

January 31, 2024   Programming

Today we’ll take a nos­tal­gic jour­ney back to the 1960s and beyond, when music was on vinyl and home stereo was new and excit­ing­ly futur­is­tic… with Hits In Hi-Fi.

In the ear­ly days of stereo, a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of albums were released that were designed espe­cial­ly to show off the won­ders of this new way of pre­sent­ing musi­cal enter­tain­ment. Sounds “ping-ponged” across the stereo sound­stage; instru­ments appeared hard on one side and then hard on the oth­er… and there were a lot of space ref­er­ences, bloops and bleeps start­ing and end­ing the pieces — and once the Moog Syn­the­sis­er became avail­able, that was includ­ed in the mix too.

A selec­tion of these albums forms the core of our music today. Often the tracks con­sist of instru­men­tal arrange­ments of pop­u­lar songs, but there are also plen­ty of orig­i­nal tunes too.

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Saturday At The Movies

January 27, 2024   Programming

Today, join us for a pro­gramme of music from movie and TV sound­tracks — and now we’re includ­ing some gam­ing sound­tracks, which have become as sophis­ti­cat­ed as movie scores in recent years and include some of the same composers.

Movies are where most peo­ple hear orches­tral music these days, and there will be plen­ty of that in this pro­gramme. But movie music is a much broad­er field than that, and today you’ll hear music from the movies of many dif­fer­ent kinds, from the very start of the genre (with Camille Saint-Saens) to the lat­est block­busters; from orches­tral music to rock, to Fifties songs. There is a slight bias towards fan­ta­sy and SF movies, but nev­er mind, we all need a bit of an escape these days.…

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Jack Flanders in Steam Dreamers of Inverness — Series 2

January 25, 2024   Programming

Tune in on Fri­day for the next episode of anoth­er excit­ing radio ser­i­al from our friends at ZBS Foun­da­tion: “Steam Dream­ers of Inver­ness — Series Two” - in which Jack Flan­ders and his friends con­tin­ue their excit­ing Steam­punk adventure!

The com­plete adven­ture con­sists of twelve half-hour episodes, in four series of four episodes each, broad­cast at noon and 4pm Pacific/SLT on Fri­days.

Cur­rent­ly we are broad­cast­ing the four episodes of the sec­ond series.

Now read on…

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Celtic Moods

January 24, 2024   Programming

Today’s pro­gramme takes a look at the expan­sion of Celtic music and themes into sev­er­al dif­fer­ent gen­res of music.

Here we are fea­tur­ing musi­cians and music that start from the Celtic tra­di­tion and take it for­ward into oth­er realms, from Joanie Mad­den to Mendelssohn to Ger­al­do and his Orches­tra; from thun­der­ous­ly spec­tac­u­lar orches­tral arrange­ments (you’ll hear sev­er­al of those today) in the wake of River­dance, to inspir­ing music for a small Celtic ensem­ble and organ, played in the largest Goth­ic space in the world.

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A Musical Bestiary

January 17, 2024   Programming

Today we are fea­tur­ing pieces of music that relate to the ani­mal king­dom: a “Musi­cal Bes­tiary” after the idea of medi­ae­val man­u­scripts describ­ing var­i­ous wild beasts, both real and imag­i­nary. The result is an excep­tion­al­ly broad col­lec­tion of musi­cal styles and gen­res, from Flan­ders & Swann to The Great Ani­mal Orches­tra. Tune in at main.vcradio.org or “Play Vir­tu­al Com­mu­ni­ty Radio” on your smart speaker.

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The Last Dance at The Dickens Project

January 6, 2024   Programming

On Sun­day Jan­u­ary 7th, Vir­tu­al Com­mu­ni­ty Radio’s DJs Elrik Mer­lin & Cale­do­nia Sky­tow­er host the “last dance” at the 2023 Edi­tion of The Dick­ens Project live on-the-air and at the Dick­ens Skat­ing Pond.

“We’ve got a new year, now what do we do with it?” — Rik and Cale spin no doubt very dif­fer­ent music inspired by the theme “opti­mistic inten­tions” for 2024.

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Where Have You Been? — The Magical Mystery Tour

January 2, 2024   Programming

As lis­ten­ers may well know, “Where Have You Been?” is our pop­u­lar orig­i­nal series where your hosts, Cale­do­nia Sky­tow­er and Elrik Mer­lin, dis­cuss things to do and places to vis­it around the Sec­ond Life Grid.

The series is now on hia­tus, but while we busy our­selves find­ing new expe­ri­ences to high­light in Series Four, we’re going to broad­cast ran­dom shows from our third sea­son in the peri­od before we start a new sea­son lat­er in the year, as a kind of “Mag­i­cal Mys­tery Tour”.

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