Essay #48 for Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar


	The Essay
Show #48 Terror in Studio Z
	David Gunn

Regular listeners to this program will recall numerous discussions of feng-shui, the ancient Chinese art of using placement, design and background music to maximize good fortune, though exactly how is beyond me, since it was never mentioned during my shift. The Chinese believe that where we live and what we hear peripherally affects us more than we realize, and that energy flowing through the earth -- and tangentially in and out of background music -- can affect one's health, prosperity, and one's tolerance of Yanni music. In quantum physics, this phenomenon is known as the Floopner Effect, after its tenured inventor, Hans Effect. While the Floopner Effect -- distinguished by a silent blue sheen -- is best left alone in a dark room until December, when it can be safely annuled,feng-shui is much more sociable, and is often discussed at turbulent academic reunions where one must strain to hear any background music at all. A 1987 analysis by the Miami Miasma Institute refuted a squirrely relationship of the Floopner Effect to the Fibonacci Sequence and instead placed blame squarely on the metaphysical shoulders of existential extremism, a concept roundly mocked by the Chinese as "the worst plucked parts of the crow." The Fibonacci Sequence was subsequently awarded medals for good sportsmanship and the "sequence most likely to secede."

Nonetheless, we here at the Sesquihour are willing to accept the notion of the earth's hidden energy flow, and will henceforth play only music which can circulate freely in the broadcast realm in which we purport to exist in harmony with vast continuums. No more sharp-cornered tunes for us. If we can't hum it, we won't waste a stylus on it. We seek the path to radiophonic enlightenment and an end to analogous constraint, as only non- commercial broadcast media, like this one, can convey.

But what does all of this mean to you listeners of today's program -- which, not coincidentally is episode 48? Simply this: the means by which you have spun the volume dial on your stereophonic contrivance is commensurate to the effort it takes us to wiggle knobs in sequence here at the radio depot and breathe euphonious reminders into the expectant microphones, the feng-shui antecedent of le flambeau oriange.

One month ago today, your obsequious sesquihosts were seated at table in Boulangerie Cadavre Pourri in the less fashionable wing of western Europe poring over incomprehensible foreign language menus and sampling steamy piles of bleak unidentifiable fodder, when two things happened at once. But more on that later.

This portion of Kalvos & Damian's New Music Sesquihour, having been brought to you for 47 previous Saturdays -- except for episodes 43 and 44 which should have been broadcast during last month's sesqui-absence but weren't -- is again being brought to you by forces which no one, outside of a small circle of influential people with unlisted phone numbers, can readily explain. But more on that later, too, bon radio.

Also more and later, is a live broadcast from Studio Z of two musicians for which the Sesquihour has no comparable word, although hackmatack comes close. Coming even closer, closer, still closer ... is Kalvos.