Hello again, and welcome back to another month of listening to things, hearing things, etc.

My apologies for the lack of an update last month, there was an NTS show, but I never finished writing up the newsletter. So this month you get two shows. It’s a full four hours of music and more.

August’s NTS show was another music-only affair. It’s partially because I ran out of time to add a scanner layer, but also because I found some really interesting music that month and I really wanted to give it center stage in the mix.

36’s Hardcore, Static: Pirate Transmissions From The North Of England, 1990-1994 is an amazing record, which itself includes snippets of pirate radio DJs, radio interference & distortion, and other vibey ephemera that add up to something really special. One of the Bandcamp reviews for it was “Like Chill Out by the KLF, but with more rave” and while that does set an incredibly high bar, I don’t think it’s wrong!

Another soundscape that stands alone in the mix is from Slot Machine Music, Vol. 1 & 2 by Adrian Rew. It’s a nineteen-minute field recording from a casino floor in Cleveland, Ohio, and it also provides the subject line for this newsletter. (The “Machine Zone” describes the quasi-mystical experience that can be had amidst the dings and bleeps and bloops of a thousand slot machines all singing their songs together.)

And finally, while I usually end the show with a short non-ambient song to gradually exit the zone, I think August’s “Hungry Heart” from Nicholas Krgovich’s “Boss Tape” of Springsteen covers is an especially nice one. Should Bruce add a bass clarinetist to the E Street Band? Maybe!

Moving on to September’s show, we’ve got some scanner audio back in the mix! It’s marine radio from the IJmuiden sea lock just outside Amsterdam. Some really enormous vessels pass through here, but the scanner audio is calm and professional as usual. And it’s mostly in Dutch, so unless you speak that language it will probably fade even further into the waves as you listen.

There’s more great music in the September mix too, including some from Taylor Deupree, anthéne, Loneward, and an early demo of a Lindstøm track from the expanded version of Smallhans that came out last year.

You can listen back to all the shows on the NTS site, and premium subscribers also get links to download the latest shows as high-quality MP3s. I recently added some more shows from the archives to the audio player on the youarelistening.to site as well, including an interesting one built around BBC Shipping Forecast recordings, and other marine radio.

Here’s the playlist for August’s show:

Hirotaka Shirotsubaki - Loss
36 - 99.9 Dream FM
Grandbruit - Liège
Glimlicht - Catching Jimmy Scott On A Low Level Battery Powered Radio
Bitchin Bajas - Isle Peaks
Adrian Rew - 3-31-2013 - Horseshoe Casino, Cleveland, OH
Moss Covered Technology - Memory Service -Reel to Reel Version-
maps and diagrams - returning, across the fields
Frédéric Soulard - La Ballade de Toni Kurz
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma - Procession
NICHOLAS KRGOVICH - Hungry Heart

And the one for September’s show:

anthéne - surrounding walls
James Murray - Clearings (Unmasked)
Logic Moon - The North
the volume settings folder - Morel
Loneward - Woven Immensity
builtin_ - Abatido
The Winterhouse - It Is Not Too Late
Hirotaka Shirotsubaki - December Snow
Pietro Zollo + d york - stargazing
Andrew Lahiff - Frozen Bloom
James Bernard - Horizontal Journey
Jogging House - Sway
Taylor Deupree - Mir
Lindstrøm - stakka_02

And don’t forget to check out the archive of (almost) all the music from the show in my Bandcamp collection.