Playlists
Music from Beyond the Lakes
Produced by Jerry Nelms and Namdar Mogharreban
Sundays, 8-10 pm Central Time, USA
WDBX, 91.1 FM, Carbondale, Illinois (www.wdbx.org)

Streamed LIVE at wdbx.scientistsuperstar.com
Listen by going to www.wdbx.org and click on "Listen"

Profile of the show:
Music from Beyond the Lakes was first aired on Easter Sunday evening, 1996.
Jerry Nelms began as the show's sole producer and host. Namdar Mogharreban
joined as co-host that summer and began producing his first programs in the
fall. Beyond the Lakes airs eclectic new age and contemtemplative world
music, both ambient and rhythmic; electronic and acoustic; instrumental and
vocal. Beyond the Lakes is thematically programmed each week. Jerry's
understanding of "new age" music: it provides a space for the imagination,
and, so, can take many different forms but always functions in that way of
allowing the listener space for the play of the imagination.

Send all promotional materials to the following:

Jerry Nelms
Beyond the Lakes
114 Magnolia Lane
Carbondale, Illinois 62903

Thanks to all musical artists for enriching our world!

This show featured music by Marconi Union, Dan Siegel, Lisa Hilton, Mortal
Loom, Sensitive Chaos, Harold Budd, Larry Kucharz, Surface 10, Ohn, Mark
Isham, and Margaret Slovak.

November 12, 2006
“Abandoned Cities” (produced by Jerry Nelms)

From Plato to Walt Whitman, philosophers and poets have told us, cities are
only as good as the people who live in them. They’re places where people
congregate so that economies can flourish, and thus, they tend to be filled
with diversity, diverse peoples with diverse purposes and goals. As English
zoologist and ethologist Desmond Morris once said, “[T]he city is not a
concrete jungle, it is a human zoo.”

Yet, it’s a natural zoo. Were our cities all taken from us today, we would
invariably reconstitute them. We could not avoid it. As 20th-Century
English poet and critic Herbert Read once pointed out, “The earliest records
of our species point to group organizations—the primitive horde, nomadic
tribes, settlements, communities, cities, nations.” We’re a social species,
unavoidably, perpetually drawn to each other.

And yet, over the past half-century, we’ve seen many of our cities devolve
into places of loneliness, violence, and chaos. As the late former senator
and US Vice President Hubert Humphrey once noted, “We are in danger of
making our cities places where business goes on but where life, in its real
sense, is lost.”

A few years ago, I flew into San Francisco at night and needed to make
photocopies for a conference the next day. The closest all-night copy shop
was 10 or so blocks from my hotel, and those were dark, deserted blocks.
Mile-high skyscrapers, emptied of humanity, and a dark ghostly fog
surrounding me. This is what’s become of the modern city.

Is it any wonder, then, that the city in science fiction tends to be a place
of loneliness amidst the crowd, darkness amidst the light, either
exaggerations of the hurried modern metropolis or deserted ghost towns,
haunted by zombies, roving gangs, vampires, or some other form of evil.

Some even believe the city has become obsolete. In his book America, Jean
Baudrillard writes:

In years to come cities will stretch out horizontally and will be non-urban
. . . . After that, they will bury themselves in the ground and will no
longer have names. Everything will become infrastructure bathed in
artificial light and energy. The brilliant superstructure, the crazy
verticality will have disappeared. New York is the final fling of this
baroque verticality, this centrifugal eccentricity, before the horizontal
dismantling arrives, and the subterranean implosion that will follow.

Abandoned cities, of course, are not unknown: The Arabian city of Ubar,
abandoned because of changes in trade routes and its location forgotten
until rediscovered in 1992 through the use of satellite photography; the
ancient Roman city of Pompeii buried beneath volcanic flow during the
eruption of Vesuvius; Atlantis, lost to the sea, as described by the ancient
Greek philosopher Plato; the ancient cities of Troy and Carthage, lost to
war. But the idea that the city as a construct will be lost is something
wholly new, born of new attitudes toward the city that have developed over
the last half-century or so. Suburban flight, the first stage in
Baudrillard’s vision of the disappearance of the city, has been fueled by a
vision of the city as crime-ridden and dangerous and morally bankrupt.

What’s interesting to me is how what follows the abandonment of the city
tends to function—and often even look—a lot like the city. Suburbs reach a
point of saturation where malls and shopping centers take on a size and
centrality of attention and purpose once reserved for downtowns. What makes
a city cannot be avoided. We cannot deny our drive for connection, for
society in its most basic definition, not just as fellowship but as
community, the social unit that exists to address the deliberations of
humankind, to solve its problems, to learn about itself, to create art and
culture, to do the things that humans seem intended to do. As American
historian and critic Lewis Mumford has said:
The city is a fact in nature, like a cave, a run of mackerel or an ant-heap.
But it is also a conscious work of art, and it holds within its communal
framework many simpler and more personal forms of art. Mind takes form in
the city; and in turn, urban forms condition mind.

Cities may be abandoned—they have been in the past; they will be in the
future—but the city is never lost. It resides in the heart of humanity,
riven with darkness, perhaps, at times, but always haloed with a potential
for light. When we leave the physical city, we take it with us. When we
arrive in the city, we carry with us that drive for community and that
potential for light, packed tightly in the luggage of our dreams and
ambitions. And that is frequently the theme of abandoned city stories—not
so much the loss of conveniences but the loss of hope, the loss of
community.

And so, this evening, let’s reflect on the state of our modern city and its
humanity through a program of sometimes jazzy, sometimes more electronic and
even ambient music entitled “Abandoned Cities,” a title borrowed from
ambient artist Harold Budd. We begin with this cool, dark urban soundscape
by the reclusive English ambient duo who go by the name Marconi Union. We’
ll continue, after this, with more upbeat, streetwise smooth jazz by Dan
Siegel; and four steamy, nocturnal jazz pieces by pianist Lisa Hilton,
including renditions of Curtis Mayfield’s “Hit the Road Jack” and Miles
Davis’s “So What?” In our next half-hour, we’ll hear two tracks of
sensuous, hip electronica from a CD by the group Mortal Loom; richly
nuanced, urban-sounding music by Jim Combs (a.k.a. Sensitive Chaos); a more
nocturnal, pensive solo piano piece by Lisa Hilton again; two haunting,
autumnal tracks from a re-released classic collection from the early 1980s
by Harold Budd; and finally, lovely digital music by New York keyboardist
Larry Kucharz.

We’re contemplating the state of the modern city on our program tonight, its
abandonment to darkness in many cases yet its potential for continuing
community and light, “Abandoned Cities” yet cities whose distant lights are
still visible in the night sky from Beyond the Lakes.

8:00-8:30pm
Marconi Union – Distance – All Saints Records – 2005
“These European Cities”
Dan Siegel – Departure – Native Language Music – 2006
“Street Talk”
Lisa Hilton – Midnight in Manhatten – Ruby Slippers Productions – 2006
“Hit the Road Jack”
“City Streets”
“Midnight in Manhatten
“So What”

8:30-9:00pm
Mortal Loom – Alchemy Through Dreams – Delvian Records – 2000
“Trip Hop Thing”
“Masses”
Sensitive Chaos – Leak – Subsequent Records – 2006
“Leak” (excerpt)
Lisa Hilton – Midnight in Manhatten – Ruby Slippers Productions – 2006
“Late Night . . .”
Harold Budd – The Serpent (In Quicksilver)/Abandoned Cities – All Saints
Records – 2005
“Children On The Hill”
“Widows Charm”
Larry Kucharz – Electro Engravings – International Audiochrome – 2006
“Engraving no. 06”

American author Henry Miller once called New York City “an enormous
citadel.” And, as urban historian Lewis Mumford once noted, the origins
and ongoing development of the city is spiritual. Cities grew up around
religious meeting-places, destinations of ancient—and modern—pilgrimages.
As famous architect Hugh Newell Jacobsen has said, “When you look at a city,
it’s like reading the hopes, aspirations, and pride of everyone who built
it.” The spirituality of the city resides in its humanity and community,
essences that come through in its architecture, its services—the buildings
and their purposes.

That’s why the contemporary abandonment of the city is so ironic—abandonment
physically in the form of urban flight to the suburbs but also abandonment
emotionally and spiritually, in the way we have come to stereotype the city
as a place of danger, darkness, and sin. Despite this stereotype, the
essence of the city lies not in its abandoned buildings but in our own
darkened hearts, for each city is no better than the people who live there,
the people who used to live there, and the people who built it and extended
it.

That’s our theme for this evening’s program of music: the abandonment of the
city. We begin our second hour with this excerpt from the shadowy title
track from the classic work from which we took the title of our show this
evening, “Abandoned Cities” by Harold Budd. Later, we’ll hear damp,
unsettling, urban electronica by Dean De Benedictus, going under the name
Surface 10; two hypnotic, neon-lit dance tracks by the Austin, Texas-based
guitar and electronic music group Ohn, spelled O-h-n; and shadowy ambience
once again by Marconi Union. Marconi Union returns to begin our final
half-hour, and we’ll also hear two tracks of urban jazz by trumpeter and
keyboardist Mark Isham; poignant piano piece by Dan Siegel again; and a
quiet, wistful guitar composition by Margaret Slovak.

“Abandoned Cities,” tonight on Music from Beyond the Lakes.

9:00-9:30pm
Harold Budd – The Serpent (In Quicksilver)/Abandoned Cities – All Saints
Records – 2005
“Abandoned Cities” (excerpt)
Surface 10 – Surface Tensions – DiN – 2006
“B2 Gigacosm”
Ohn – Let’s Get It . . . – Ill-Dough Productions – 2003
“Crawlspace”
“Regret”
Marconi Union – Distance – All Saints Records – 2005
“Suburbs”

9:30-10:00pm
Marconi Union – Distance – All Saints Records – 2005
“A Temporary Life”
Mark Isham – Blue Sun – Columbia/Sony – 1995
“That Beautiful Sadness”
“Blue Sun”
Dan Siegel – Departure – Native Language Music – 2006
“Alone”
Margaret Slovak – New Wings – Slovak Music – 2005
“New Wings”


Music from Beyond the Lakes
Sundays, 8:00-10:00 pm, Central Time, USA
WDBX, 91.1 FM
www.wdbx.org
wdbx.scientistsuperstar.com

Send all promotional material to:
Jerry Nelms
Beyond the Lakes
114 Magnolia Lane
Carbondale, Illinois 62903