♪ Rare Charm 003 & 004
♪ Rare Charm 003 & 004
🍒🧨 Cartoon Chaos + Blue Valentine Special 💙
Hey, everyone. I’m introducing a new section of Angel Pen dedicated to my radio show Rare Charm on Particle FM! I’ve been meaning to do this for quite some time now, but… time is so slippery and I’ve got other things to worry about!! But here it is at last.
In the coming weeks I’ll be sending out reflections on past broadcasts along with track IDs until I catch up to present broadcasts in which case I’ll be updating shortly after they air and are made available for streaming. This week consider listening back to January and February’s broadcasts.
I mostly wanted to give archived broadcasts a neat and tidy space to honor them and to let them breathe outside the confines of Instagram and the streaming sites on which they’re hosted, and possibly invite conversation on this platform.
I probably won’t migrate the first two broadcasts—along with a recording of an all-vinyl set at M-Theory to help promote the station—under this new subheading because I’ve already written about them here.
Without further ado…
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January 26, 2022 - Cartoon Chaos
An hour of high-fructose, red dye no. 3-injected electronica, Shibuya-kei, indie pop and IDM fed straight through the taffy puller. Inspired by all things plastic, elastic, spastic, and fantastic.
The idea for this one had been germinating for a while due in part to the track “Frosty” by Dim Dim, a madcap assemblage of sounds equivalent to that of a cartoon fight cloud. Then I scoured Discogs and dug into my external hard drive to build the whole mix around that track.
This mix can also be viewed as a showcase of the influence cartoons and kids’ shows had on 90s and early 2000s electronica. I’m sure it has something to do with artists remixing aspects of their own childhoods along with access to sampling technology and dollar bin records. In any case, it’s very postmodern and I think it’s laid the groundwork for a lot of what current artists are doing in hyperpop, cloud rap, and experimental pop—you’ll probably catch me saying this a lot, but hopefully with increasingly more insight beyond “this probably begat that”.
One of my favorite tracks in this mix is Tomoe Shinohara’s rendition of the theme from Kure Kure Takora, a Japanese children’s comedy show. Shinohara’s piercing squeals along with wiry plucking sfx reminiscent of the sounds from WarioWare hair tweezing minigames herald the spiraling descent into a funky, swirling fever dream dance track characterized by a hodgepodge of instrumentation from cuícas, bongos, oscillators, and trumpet blasts. If you can keep up with the chaos, you’ll be bouncing off the walls.
I haven’t really captured this spirit in recent shows—well, maybe the Air Travel show in April— so if you’re in the market for some springy, zippy cartoon energy, this is the one you should listen back to!
February 23, 2022 - Blue Valentine Special
After doing 8 shows, February’s broadcast is probably the one I am most proud of, maybe cos it’s the closest I’ll get to feeling like Joe Frank without having to say anything myself on air. Additionally, I don’t think it’d be inaccurate for me to say that this is a listener favorite—and quite possibly where I’ve peaked with Rare Charm lol.
The Blue Valentine broadcast is a special two-hour presentation combining listener-submitted voicemail confessions of love & heartbreak mixed in with songs that skitter, distort, or otherwise sound like they’re deteriorating, about to detonate, or struggling to reconstitute amidst a storm of data.
A few weeks before the broadcast I put up a prompt encouraging listeners to call a Google Voice number and leave anonymous voice messages they wish they could relay to a crush, someone who’d broken their heart, to someone whose heart they broke, etc.
I wove in phone sfx and stitched listeners’ voice messages into glitchy IDM and electronic music to evoke broken lines of communication and the disorienting feeling of your romantic past colliding with the present. I truly felt a bit like a mad surgeon wiggling my fingers over my operating tools when it came to choosing tracks and stitching in messages.
It was also a fun experience reading listeners’ reactions in the Particle FM chat; lots of commiseration with the brokenhearted and a few “oh shit!” moments.
Like many of the concepts for these broadcasts, I had long been interested in the notion of glitch and IDM representing this idea of decay, memory loss, and the scrabble to recover while in a state of deconstruction. It’s melancholic but beautiful. The main catalysts were a few projects off of the Mille Plateaux label along with Nobukazu Takemura’s “Icefall” (which is featured closer to the end of the mix) and I had subsequently been mentally cataloguing other tracks for years. It felt good to finally have had a project to place some of those tracks into this context.
Without a doubt, the show would not have had any emotional impact in capturing that notion of distortion and decay without the messages I received. I am grateful to the listeners who left messages and also want to express gratitude to those who shared the prompt with friends. There’s so much power in collaboration, even on the microlevel of sending an anonymous message to your crush on an online radio show, and it’s my hope that those who participated and heard their messages in the broadcast felt emotional validation or something like solace from having their experiences universalized and archived in a sonic quilt.
Also, I appreciate the variety of responses that provided more nuance beyond pure devastation and heartbreak.
I’d love to be able to facilitate and assemble another call-in show like this in the future. Maybe next Valentine’s Day! 👀👀👀
Well, thanks for listening!
Enjoy. ❤️💜🧡
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Rare Charm airs every last Wednesday of the month at 8pm PT on particle.fm ♪
If you like what you hear, consider donating to the station’s fundraising campaign to help the station acquire a physical location from which to broadcast and access the tools and equipment necessary to support aspiring musicians and DJs. Learn more here.