Weather (NTS Radio, July 2019)

One of the best gifts I gave myself in 2019 was immersing in the NTS Radio archives for a solid month. The London community station, which truly lives online and has spun off outposts in Manchester and Los Angeles, offers an insanely wide array of programming, and I made notes well beyond the thirteen sets I selected for a Mixmag column. But the NTS set I’ve come back to the most, by far, aired a few months after I filed.

Selected by the BLSA’s Cheryl Tipp (here’s the track listing), this hour of field recordings of rainstorms, windstorms (accompanied by a deeply creaking tree, twisting in the wind but not breaking), hailstorms, and walking through snow has all the drama you could crave — it’s suggestive, stirring, engrossing, full of color and movement. I am always surprised just how quickly it goes. Mixcloud’s restrictions mean that only three plays are allowed per two-week period. If I had my druthers, it would soundtrack every bedtime.