The Dark Mother October 26, 2008

My exploration of Indian culture via YouTube continues to unearth some musical gems. In this post I’m featuring several clips showing fictionalised devotions to the Goddess Kali - a primal Hindu deity of fearsome aspect who is familiar to many non-Hindus as the goddess of death and destruction – a not entirely accurate representation of her function within the pantheon. Kali is [...]

Of Devas and Divas October 10, 2008

In recent months I’ve been exploring a wealth of Indian classical music and dance on YouTube. Here are a few of my favourite discoveries… First up are a couple of clips from a pair of films featuring Padmini (1932-2006), the multi-lingual (Hindi, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam) actress and trained Bharathanatyam dancer who starred in over 250 [...]

A great love June 6, 2008

One of the drawbacks of maintaining a decades-long commitment to the promotion of such a broad and constantly-evolving musical idiom as ambient, is the need to ration one’s listening time; the sheer volume of new ambient that’s being produced in the world today precludes the possibility of any one person ever maintaining encyclopedic, up-to-the-minute knowledge of it all. Consequently, I’ve [...]

Sex Power April 27, 2008

The following video – evidently a clip from the obscure 1970 film Sex Power by French director Henri Chapier - manages to combine female near-nudity, erotic choreography, a group of black men, a gigantic, leering strangely inflexible cobra and a soundtrack by Vangelis into one seriously Freudian extravaganza. Words fail me: …and in the interests of gender equality, here’s a rather catchy little number from Turkey’s [...]

Sacred sounds from north Africa April 6, 2008

Over the past few weeks my YouTube wanderings have led me in some interesting new directions, as well as reacquainting me with some long-forgotten classics. In this post I’m focusing on the music of two ancient, but little-known (to Western audiences) Christian traditions of north Africa. First up is music from the orthodox Christian tradition of Ethiopia. These beautifully [...]

In the beginning… March 7, 2008

As we approach Sunday-week’s 700th broadcast of UT, I thought it might be a good time to answer a question that many people have asked me over the years: how did you first become interested in ambient music? Well… a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away there lived a 16 year-old schoolboy [...]

El Greco and Blade Runner March 3, 2008

Coming up this week on UT 699 is the Australian radio premiere (yes, another one!) of the newly-released extended 3-CD soundtrack to Ridley Scott‘s Blade Runner, by the lord of the symphonic ambient cosmos – Vangelis Papathanassiou - who coincidentally celebrate his 65th birthday this month. Here’s a tiny sample of what’s in store…    …and as if [...]

God is God February 25, 2008

I’ve long been fascinated to hear how different artists interpret the same piece of music, and stumbled across these two examples of a track called God is God in my recent travels around YouTube. This one’s by Laibach, a Slovenian experimental industrial music and performance art group that’s been around since 1980…   …and this is a very different [...]

UT enters the blogosphere February 22, 2008

Welcome to the official Ultima Thule blog. The UT team intend to use this forum to bring our listeners regular updates from across the ambient universe – including new release information, reviews, interviews and lots of other interesting stuff that we can’t, for one reason or other, put to air on the show itself. We hope you [...]