[From www.sfcv.org, 2/24/04 issue]

Other Minds, the new-music movement/festival, which will produce its
10th anniversary gathering/concert series March 4-6, at San Francisco's
Yerba Buena Center, is launching a Web radio station.  It is a pioneering,
exciting venture, building on the archival treasures of 6,000 tapes
recently acquired from Berkeley's KPFA Radio.  (They include John Adams'
first radio interview, from the early '70s, John Cage and Lou Harrison
interviews going back to the '60s, reflections on Carlos Chavez by
Harrison and Copland, and so on.)

Although already functioning, http://www.radiom.org is still in a
startup mode, with big plans by Charles Amirkhanian and a notable group
of new-music advocates, who will act as program hosts.  They include
Sarah Cahill, Henry Kaiser, Richard Friedman, Dan Becker, and Herman
Gray.  Amirkhanian says OM Radio is the answer to the challenge of "new
music recordings increasing exponentially, as the number of US stations
willing to broadcast them diminishes with shocking rapidity." (Perhaps
he didn't check KDFC-FM.  For those not well informed, that's a joke, a
sad one, about the Bay Area's major classical-music station where time
- measured in single movements - stopped around 1930. On the other hand,
the area's finest public radio station, <B>KALW-FM</B>, had a major
program Sunday night about potential "competitor" OM Radio.)

Other Minds, Amirkhanian says, will use OM Radio to broadcast the sounds
of contemporary music to every corner of the globe.  "The web station
will tie in with our web site (http://www.otherminds.org), which was
one of the first launched by any avant-garde music organization in the
country.  We'll gradually build up to 24/7 programming on the Internet...
with the best-niche programming to hungry but selective audiences."

To indicate OM Radio's profile, Amirkhanian lists "the pleasures of
Conlon Nancarrow and Laurie Anderson, Sofia Gubaidulina and Frank Zappa,
Brian Eno and Anthony Braxton, not to mention the entire panoply of
Difficult Music and its antecedents, from Joplin and Ives to Stravinsky
and Spike Jones." Additionally, the station will encourage and commission
the composition of new Internet audio works, and offer visual online
galleries and text documentation on selected subjects.

Janos Gereben/SF
www.sfcv.org
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