BBC Radio 3 - Late Junction Session March 2012

[Duggeh]

So...

I subscribe to several BBC podcasts, most are from the output of BBC Radio 4 such as Thinking Allowed, Material World and In Our Time. I downsized the number to which I subscribed at the start of the year after I realised that I had no hope whatsoever of managing to get through an unheard backlog of over 4000 podcasts with an average running time of between 30 and 45 minutes. Some of them I'd never even listened to once and it was just the hoarder archivist in me which kept them. I now have a couple hundred unheard, but the number is decreasing steadily.

Fast forward to yesterday when I decided to expand my subscription list with something new and, it would seem at random, chose a Radio 3 podcast called Late Junction Sessions. I'd never even heard of the programme and rarely listen to Radio 3 because the bulk of it's output is elitist, obscure and usually utterly utterly dull classical and opera. It also has some jazz programming but I get my dose of Jazz from BBC Radio Scotland.

Anyhoo, I started this thing playing just through the wee speakers in my computer monitor (horror) while I was pottering about and I was not immediately but pretty quickly interested. The music initially put me in mind of Woob, although do not take too much from that comparison. If you want me to specifically nail it down, it's a gently progressive series progressions of ambient slash slight calm post-rockish electronic and acoustic musics. I really love this sort of thing. The podcast is a truncated version of the FM broadcast for licensing reasons but what is on here is an album I would buy. I may do a real time recording of the iPlayer stream to get the full 90 minute programme. The session is with two people I'd never heard of and still haven't looked into called Rory Simmons and Fyfe Dangerfield.

I ran the podcast through Audacity and chopped it into how I'd have it on a CD. I split the music into 6 tracks and cut the two mid-programme interviews out and put them on the end. Some track names are mentioned in the interviews but I didn't use them for tags. The original MP3 quality was 128kbps and thanks to the BBC employing good people (at Radio 3 and 4 anyway) was not compressed to hell. Here's what it looked like in Audacity:

I really really enjoyed what I heard here (I've now listened a couple of times and am listening again right now) and as the podcast is only available if you live in the UK I've uploaded my cut of the podcast in ALAC for anyone who might be interested in hearing it. It's in lossless despite coming from an MP3 because I didn't want to run it through an MP3 encode a second time. It's only about 150 megabytes though.

Hopefully someone will like it. If not, meh.

Download Link.