CIA Radio Show Jan 15th, 2017

This week, the CIA radio show covered music that the hosts composed themselves, as we dove deep into different composition techniques, as well as discussing some history of mixing and mastering within electronic music. One of the James’ wasn’t able to make it yesterday, so we had our back up host, Dirty Hil join us in the studio for a bit. The show featured three of her eleven piece album titled Influences. We talked about the tracks titled Hotline Miami, A Certain Romance, and 13. Hilary is an electronic composer who wrote an album based off of her inspirations. Hotline Miami is influenced by, well, Hotline Miami; a video game that takes place in the 80s, and is awesome. Here we discuss how the 80s is making a comeback in many different ways; fashion, music, and movies are all going through an 80s faze. The other two tracks are inspired by tracks from the Arctic Monkeys, which I’m sure most of you have heard of already. At this point we discuss the use of “sidechaining”, an effect that is used quite often in music nowadays. We talk about how it was originally used for mixing/mastering purposes, and now it is used an effect in nearly every edm song.

The second half of the show featured three pieces by one of the James’, under his alias of Danger Dave. These three tracks were from his 80’s styled EP that he released over the summer that was sold for charity. These tracks are all 80’s inspired, and fall under the genre of Retrowave. James and Hilary discuss mixing/mastering, and how so much has changed over the decades. The average loudness of tracks has gone up a significant amount lately, and there is loss of musical detail in doing so. The question is, are modern day hits being mastered poorly? Or is the definition of mastering changing over time? I guess we’ll find out in the next upcoming years.

Stay tuned for next week’s show that’ll take place at Sunday at 3pm. In the meantime, check out these useful links:

Hilary’s Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/hilary-whiskin

James aka Danger Dave’s Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/danger_dave

Like the CIA on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/laurier.cia