Music in various flavors

There was music played on the radio and there was the music I listened to in my room. There was music I shared with my friends and there was music I mainly listened on my very own next to a lit candle.

I just watched a concert on TV (www.3sat.de - Themenabend) by Roger Hodgson playing music from his solo career as well as from the time as leadsinger and songwriter of Supertramp.

Our daughter, aged 13 months, played on the floor next to me and looked at me singing along these songs, which I remembered well. It touched me to see her jolting her head slightly to the rhythm of the music also applauding when the audience did. It seemed if she also liked the falsetto voice of Hodgson and the rhythmic and groovin' sound of songs like "School", "Dreamer", "Logical Song", "Sister Moonshine" and others....

I remembered Supertramp's open-air concert in the stadium in Basel in the 80's at a very hot summer day - one of the best open-air gig I ever seen & heard.

Genesis also belonged to the band's whose records I mainly listened to on my own. I thinks I even got the first one from my sister's collection but have bought others my them and also by Mike Rutherford, Steve Hackett and Peter Gabriel.

I was a big fan of Mike Oldfield. His long instrumentals composed and played by himself got to my attention in the 80s with his albums Platinum, QE2 and Five Miles Out. ELP was another of my early favorites.

Black music and Latin music played, in early days, a minor role to me. Of course, I listened & liked groups like Kool & The Gang, Earth, Wind & Fire and artists like Stevie Wonder, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, The Commodores, Lionel Richie. But I maily got to know most of them during the 80s, past the time, when their biggest hits had been released.

Latin music meant Ray Barretto, Ruben Blades, Santana, Tito Puente, Gloria Estefan to me. It also meant Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Jimmy Cliff & UB40.

Some big (legendary) groups I had never liked, listened or bought records from were "The Who", "Abba", "The Beatles", "The Doors", "Bob Dylon", "Jimmy Hendrix", "Led Zeppelin", "The Rolling Stones", "U2", "Aerosmith", "The Bee Gees", "Miles Davis", "Elvis Presley", "Sex Pistols", "Janis Joplin" or "Johnny Cash".

In the 90s, I bought, among some others, records from these artists:

Tori Amos, Paula Cole, Sarah McLachlan, George Michael, Wilson Phillips, En Vogue, Janet Jackson, CeCe Peniston, Seal, Vanessa Williams, Anita Baker, Eric Clapton, Cranberries, Sheryl Crown, Crash Test Dummies, Gin Blossoms, Hootie & Blowfish, INXS, The The, Lenny Kravitz, K.D. Lang, John Mellencamp, Alanis Morisette, Pearl Jam, REM, Sting, Toad The Wet Sprocket, Robert Palmer, Amanda Marshall, Chantal Krevaziuk, Jewel, Everything But The Girl, Shania Twain, Bryan Adams, Joe Cocker.

Again, this collection of music doesn't show any signature. It was pretty mainstream mix of music with few exceptions. But the exceptions kept growing while the mainstream stuff got less and less.

Somewhere around 2000 I turned my attention to smaller labels and sounds of different flavours. I listened to Electronica, Chillout (Lounge/Downtempo), Smooth Jazz and Nu Jazz.

It was only a logical step that I turned away from terrestrial radio and paid attention to what happened to the radio and musical aspect on the Internet, especially when Broadband got introduced, since it was on the Internet where I gradually began to discover (and rediscover) new sounds, artists and genres.

And it was also a matter of time that I put my own radio project online so that more people could actually listen to music that had hardly been played elsewhere.

GrooveFM.fi vs. SwissGroove.ch

I caught the first tunes of GrooveFM Finland in a taxi driving me from the place I lived to the airport. First I thought that the taxi driver was listening to a music-tape or CD he recorded himself from various artists. It was a mix of acoustic & vocal jazz, smokey blues, dirty funk & the mellow sounds of soul. Every now and then they threw in a bit of Latin and Rhythm & Blues.

Only when I heard an announcer's voice was I able to identify it as a FM station not known to me. There was mostly music played and the announcements were scarce and done casually, if not to say non-challantly. None of the loud & exciting voices you heard on other stations telling you how great the song was you just heard and how marvellous the day and how exciting their own radio is.

I noticed some days later that their playlist was full of artists and songs you could hardly hear on any other terrestrial radio station. They didn't have Jingles played but rather dry cuts of sweepers and station Ids just mentioning "GrooveFM" or "You're listening to GrooveFM". Pretty unusual for a radio at that time.

They also operated their radio without the typical sparkling & highly compressed FM sound. It was more listening to an own record at home than having tuned in to an FM station.

The makers were musicians and/or music-lovers and few music-journalists, having good connections to international artists of various genres and labels. They played not only sounds from CDs but also music recorded from their personal collections of their vinyl-records.

I had my radio station back that offered me an even better selection than any other radio I've heard before.

I mean, check out their playlist anytime you want and you'll find something exciting or interesting stuff not heard on any other station (like tonite 23/12):

Edellisiä:	Marvin Gaye - Got To Give It Up	osta
	Martha & The Vandellas - (Love Is Like A) Heatwave	osta
	Bee Gees - Night Fever	osta
Tulossa:	Chaka Khan & Rufus - Ain't Nobody	osta
	Commodores - Easy	osta
	Booker T. & The MG's - Green Onions	osta

Which radio-station out there plays Booker T, Marvin Gaye or Martha & The Vandellas within a couple of minutes apart? None for sure.

Their jazzy tracks can mainly be found during daytime, the evenings and nights belong more to Soul, Funk/Disco & Blues.

I left Finland in 2001 and settled down in Switzerland again. The first thing I did back in Switzerland was trying to track down if GrooveFM.fi was offering their programme over the internet. At that time their page suggested nothing like that but when I e-mailed them they answered shortly indicating a link to a fantastic 128 kbps OGG-Vorbis stream of their music. They also indicated that they had to pay big money to offer such a stream and that I shouldn't spread the information as listening to their stream abroad was not covered within their webcasting-licence.

That didn't bother me and I didn't want to give these infos to anybody else as I was happy and wouldn't want anything else.

About 4 months later, they had to shut down their stream for whatever reasons and only offered their programme to listeners in the South of Finland via cable and FM.

Broadband Internet was still very expensive around that time in Switzerland but I was paying for top-notch service so I could surf the web at high speed. I scanned the net for other online radio stations but what I found didn't really satisfy my needs and interests.

I got myself informed about the system requirements of running a webradio and soon came across shoutcast. I had already fiddled around with a software for djs and budget-radio stations called OTS DJ/JUKE which I found perfect for mixing tracks. I installed an encoder and set up a shoutcast-server locally using my 512 kbps ADSL line. With that I was able to stream at 96 kbps with about 5 people connected simultaneously. I hit the auto-dj button on my OTS and streamed music at random. It was only a test but it all seemed to work well and the sound reproduction was quite remarkable.

I was at a point where I ask myself, well, if I am about to play music for other people to tune in, what would it be? Of course, it had to be something like GrooveFM.fi but shouldn't really sound exactly like it. And in addition, there were still tracks I loved to hear without GrooveFM.fi playing them.

So I decided to set up a playlist of songs of Blues, Soul, Funk, Rock, RnB, Latin, Reggae, Smooth Jazz, NuJazz, Lounge & Electronica.

I streamed this content between 4 - 8 pm CET for the first week to find out if anybody at all would tune in. At that time shoutcast.com listed about 1'500 stations, growing quickly day by day.

As soon as the station got listed on the yp it wouldn't take long until the first listener found it and tuned in, then a second, then a third and on day 2, after one hour of continous streaming, all the 5 listening-slots were taken.

The stream was titled Radio Atlanta or Atlantis for the first days, but, after brain-storming with my wife, we changed it to SwissGroove, a name/brand we both fancied.

In March 2003, I registered the domain www.swissgroove.ch and set up a mini-website with a tune-in section and a few infos about the what's and the why's. At the same time I bought 20 listening slots at a shoutcast provider in the USA and in May I started streaming 24 hours nonstop.

SwissGroove was finally born!

My next blog "" soon to follow after Christmas. Merry Christmas to all of you out there & happy New Year!

PS: Just found out that GrooveFM.fi is actually streaming over the Net again. It's an 70 kbps OGG-Vorbis stream at:

http://217.30.180.242:8000/gvfm.ogg.m3u

Get Into The Groove

When I was about 14 I earned my first own money and started to buy records as much as I could afford them. We write the year 1980: Disco is dead and Rock is back again.

On the radio they played a lot of tracks by Journey, Van Halen, Queen, Tom Petty, & Eagles.

I was more into Bob Seger, Christopher Cross, Dan Fogleberg, Billy Joel, Donald Fagen, kind of stuff. I prefered mostly soft & easy-listening tracks. My favorite tracks were "I'm Born Again" by Preston & Syreeta, "Against The Wind" Bob Seger and "Sailing" by Chris Cross - wasn't I damn romantic?

With friends the same age, we started listening and sharing the music we bought. When we met, we were like: "Hey listen to this great track, listen to that one...great beat, oh...I got a brand new one here, you gotta check it out..." and so on.

And I started to either dance to the music or put on records at parties to friends/people who wanted to get down. That was mainly during the years 82 - 87. We danced to the hits of the J. Geils Band, Dexy's Midnight Runners, Billy Ocean, Eddie Grant, Ray Parker Jr., Madonna, Talking Heads, Cyndi Lauper and many others.

It was the 80's pop music that ruled & dictated the rhythm of my life at that time and I wasn't looking or needing anything else.

But it was only in the 90's that I really started to feel the groove of music by listening to Acid-Jazz artists like Brand New Heavies, Working Week, Incognito and the Jazz-Funk band James Taylor Quartet. Here, it was not only my legs that wanted to move but also my soul.

By feeling the groove in music I became again more open and interested in Jazz, Soul, Funk & World music.

There are many descriptions about "the groove" of music. To me it means, that a song moves me deeply on a physical and mental level, a song that makes me shake, shiver, smile or almost cry. It can at times even put me into a light state of trance.

Here are a few examples of songs that are full of groove to me:

"I Can't Stand It" by the James Taylor Quartet (shake)
"Our Roots" by Pharoah Sanders (shake)
"Rising To The Top" by Blacknuss Allstars (shake)
"Good Love" by Incognito (shiver)
"Someone Will Take The Place Of You" by Isaac Hayes (shiver)
"Agua De Coco" by Marcos Valle (smile)
"IGY" by Donald Fagen (smile)
"Summer" by Booster (smile)
"Both Sides Now" by Joni Mitchell (cry)
"Language" by Suzanne Vega (cry)

Read my next blog..."GrooveFM.fi vs. SwissGroove.ch"

Why music...and why radio?

There are a lot of things one can do with his sparetime or as a job.

My parents never pushed me into anything so I could practically choose to do the things I wanted to. Of course, my mom preferred to have us outside the house as kids most of the time and that was okay. Perhaps I read a book while staying in my room but apart from that, I don't recall doing much else. I don't have much memory at all how I spent my days at home as a kid. However, I remember well what I did outside.

I do remember though that I sometimes spend the afternoons at a friend's house. There, we listened to some old 45s that belonged to his sister. That was in the mid 70's and only one band's name resided inside my memory: ABBA. At that time, we didn't have a record-player at home, so, only at my friend's homes was I able to hear music played from singles or LPs.

When we moved to another village, I got a radio-/tape-recorder which enabled me to listen to radio and some old tapes that were given to me by my parents or other friends. I also went to another friend's house to listen to his "collection" of music which mainly consisted of records by Nazareth, Suzie Quattro, Sweet and Deep Purple. We listened to "This Flight Tonight", "Can The Can", "Fox On The Run" and "Black Night" at full volume, lying on the floor looking at the posters on the wall of these bands feeling kind of checked out from reality.

It wasn't actually a good friend of mine. He was about 4 years older than me and only when he was in a good mood, was I able to go to his place. When he was in a bad mood he chased after me, when it was me feeling moody I called him names.

It was then that I started following the Top20 of the national charts in Switzerland on channel 1 broadcast Saturdays or Sundays on the Swiss Radio network. I fancied the Les Humphries Singers, Hot Chocolate, BTO, Rod Stewart, Bay City Rollers, Michael Holm, Harpo, Donna Summer, Elton John, Ten CC, Boney M & Carl Douglas.

And then, in 1976, I fell in love. Deep love. I was so happy that I could cry. I'm not talking about falling in love with a person, no, I fell in love with a particular song. I listened to it time and again, maybe 1000 times or more: The track was called "Music" by John Miles.

To me, it was just the perfect song, combining the best of classical elements with rock, an exciting rockopera of almost 6 minutes produced by soundengineer and composer Alan Parson.

That song was also a typical example of my musical taste: I couldn't really put a finger on my favorite kind of music. I mean, take a look at the list above! It's like eating cabbage, icecream and French Fries at the same time and to top it, a Milk Shake.

The bands/music above mainly represented the music that was played on the radio at the time but there were records I only listened to inside my room on my own next to a lit candle.

One of the first record I bought myself was Supertramp's "Crime of The Century" released in 1974. I often put on one of my sister's records by Manfred Mann's Earth Band, who, in 1976, released an awesome record called "Roaring Silence". Alan Parson's Project release "Tales of Mystery and Imagination" was another one of my favorite.

On the radio I tuned in to pirate stations that were mushrooming all over Switzerland or listened to radios I over the AM/FM bandwidth. I think I got really caught by the radio virus when I finally tuned into a station broadcasting for Switzerland from Italy. The station was called Radio24.

Read on...my next blog called "Get into the groove"...

Low-Budget Radio

There's a big variety of radio stations worldwide of various formats. Some are hardly worth being operated at all as their USPs can hardly be recognised. Playing the same music time & again produced by the top100 selling artists isn't a hard thing to do. It must actually be a very poor & dull job chosing and spinning these tracks not being once able to adjust the playlist to one's very own taste. Those music directors might fall into deep shock (or get their ass kicked) by simply putting on a track by someone whose music their listeners have never heard of. Play this nobody and get fired!

I admired the pirate radio stations who dared to play tracks I had never heard before. I looked up to the djs introducing unknown, less radio friendly music, tracks that caused a certain confusion when the first tune hit your ear & brain. What the heck is that???

Got tired of the same voices and phrases heard a thousand times. Could have puked at the senseless overkill the music and radio industry was about to produce by streamlining their sound and playlist in such a way that music with grooves and edges, lengthy or complex compositions, extraordinary intros didn't stand a chance for airplay.

Only a few, mainly low-budget radio stations really got the balls to play music of different roots & genres, music outside "mainstream" and artists yet to be discovered.

Funny though when you think about it. Low-budget radio stations have less money, fewer listeners but dare to play those "risky" less radio friendly tracks". Seems like they don't really have to lose anything, eh? Or the bigger & more popular radio stations were just too scared to be a bit different.

I think Radio Stadi was rather low-budget but their playlist was quite unique mixing Finnish artists with international music not so often heard on FM. They played rock, punk, country, blues, latin, and a little jazz. They always had some technical difficulty as their money was tight and couldn't always fix when something was going a little wrong and someday, around Christmas, their announcers just disappeared and music only was played for hours on end. I called the station to ask what's up and they said that their mic got broken and their mixing console was kind of out of order and that they would fix things soon, after Christmas or New Year. I offered them my time & help but they turned it down saying "thanks, but we'll manage somehow".

Unfortunately they didn't and soon, Radio Stadi went off air without an announcement on their behalf. It all happened in the middle of a song, before some skips & hickups for a couple of hours and then suddenly - dead silence. That was it. I read in the papers a couple of days later that they run out of money to keep going - poor chaps, really.

I was pretty upset and sad now that my radio had gone. Where should I turn to? Should I just grap the remote and select the next station available? There was Radio Nova, KissFM & Energy whose sounds & formats I loathed to put up with.... No, there wasn't really an alternative for me. I left the dial right where it was, switched off the tuner, scanned my LPs, took out Donald Fagen's record "The Nightfly" and listened to "The Goodbye Look".

Read on...my next blog called "why radio?"

SwissGroove: Back then...how it all started

Between 1998 and 2000, I was living in Finland, where the days are short and dark in winter and long and bright during summertime and where the air is as fresh as the skin of a new born and the sky as clear as a starched white shirt (and the taxes as high as the skyscrapers of Big Apple).

As I've been working as a Flight Attendant for almost all my life, I wouldn't really have to worry about commuting between my working place and the city I lived. It could actually be nearly anywhere on this planet. Theoretically. Practically...well, as long as airplanes fly according to schedule (which they usually don't) and as long as you're in love...nothing really matters.

There are many things said and written about the Finns, about Finland and about Santa Claus. And it's not all true. For example, not every Finnish household has its very own/private sauna, not all Finns are mute as a log, not all the Finns dance the tango and Santa Clause isn't a fairy tale.

But, when living there as a foreigner watching the Finns closely & looking at daily life carefully, you'll find so many peculiar features within this nation you'll hardly find anywhere else. And I should know what I'm talking about as I'm Swiss.

There were times when I spent most of the days outside but during wintertime, at -20 degrees celsius, one rather prefers to stay inside, watching YLE, cooking delicious dishes, taking extended naps, visiting the sauna, or just listening to Radio Stadi or, later, GrooveFM.

Read on...my next blog called "Low-budget Radio"...