Mark your cal­en­dars and join us for our fas­ci­nat­ing new series Tarot @ Teatime, where hosts Wil­low Moon­fire and Hon­ey Heart explore the his­to­ry and mean­ing of the cards, and the dif­fer­ent ways they can be read.

Tune in on Thurs­days, repeat­ed Sun­days, at 12 noon and 4pm Pacif­ic (20:00 and 00:00 UTC). Episodes will run for two weeks and will there­after be avi­l­able on our Mix­cloud chan­nel.

Today’s Fea­tured Music is “Mod­ern Clas­si­cal Music” — but what does that mean, exactly?

Well, in the con­text of today’s pro­gramme, we’re talk­ing about pieces of music writ­ten between around the mid-20th Cen­tu­ry until the present day, that aren’t exact­ly “pop music”.

This is a tricky def­i­n­i­tion, how­ev­er. Mike Batt has remarked that there is no such dis­tinc­tion as “pop­u­lar music” and “seri­ous music” — there’s sim­ply “pop­u­lar” and “unpop­u­lar”, so the def­i­n­i­tion rather falls at the first fence.

Wednes­days and Sat­ur­days at 12 Noon and 4pm Pacif­ic / 20:00 and 00:00 UTC is the time to tune in to our reg­u­lar show, Where’ve You Been, where Cale­do­nia Sky­tow­er and Elrik Mer­lin dis­cuss places and events of inter­est around the Sec­ond Life grid.

The lat­est episode airs for the first time on Weds Feb­ru­ary 17 and will be repeat­ed on Sat­ur­days and Wednes­days at the same time for the next cou­ple of weeks.

In this episode, we dis­cuss the new exhi­bi­tion by Cybele Moon, Waifs And Wan­der­ers, and the Carmel Art Com­mu­ni­ty where it’s being exhib­it­ed, with a spe­cial focus on the Robert McFar­ren Gallery and the Carmel Art Gallery.

Today we’re tak­ing a trip back to the hey­day of the big bands in the first half of the 20th cen­tu­ry, fea­tur­ing a wide range of Big Band jazz and swing.

The pro­gramme includes a mix­ture of orig­i­nal peri­od record­ings and more recent material.

You can also hear episodes of Engines of Our Inge­nu­ity from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Hous­ton every four hours from 12:00 UTC

And tune in today at 12 noon or 4pm Pacif­ic (20:00 or 00:00 UTC) for a new episode of Where’ve You Been?, where we look at places and events across the Sec­ond Life grid (see sep­a­rate entry).

Join us today — Sat­ur­day 13 Feb­ru­ary at 22:00 GMT / 2pm Pacif­ic Time — for the first in an occa­sion­al series fea­tur­ing 90 min­utes of New Age music, pre­sent­ed from The Grove, a beau­ti­ful spe­cial­ly-cre­at­ed envi­ron­ment in the vir­tu­al world of Sec­ond Life — http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Chestnut%20Hills/127/78/3805  - or sim­ply tune in at http://main.vcradio.org

The Grove harks back to the musi­cal expe­ri­ence of tun­ing in to the ear­ly “New Age” radio sta­tions on the West Coast of the USA in their hey­day in the late 1980s: sta­tions like KTWV, “The Wave” in Los Ange­les and KLRS (“Col­ors”) in  San­ta Cruz. You’ll hear a wealth of music of the peri­od, pri­mar­i­ly but not exclu­sive­ly instru­men­tal, fea­tur­ing both syn­the­sis­ers and nat­ur­al instru­ments. A lit­tle more live­ly than “space music” in most cas­es, the music is by and large tune­ful, melod­ic and relaxing.

These radio sta­tions and their com­pa­tri­ots in oth­er mar­kets grad­u­al­ly shift­ed towards “smooth jazz”, “New Adult Con­tem­po­rary” and beyond, and thus lost some of the atmos­phere that the sta­tions orig­i­nal­ly cre­at­ed. We hope the show will bring back some mem­o­ries if you were there at the time, and present some har­mo­nious musi­cal vis­tas if the music is new to you.