Volume 17 – January 7, 2005

Coming from the Top – Thievery Corporation [4:53]
Spectral Mornings (feat. Noel Gallagher) – Cornershop [14:24]
M. Dupont – Dining Rooms [6:00]
The Truth (feat. Roisin & J-Live) – Handsome Boy Modeling School [5:37]
Blow It All Away – Sia [4:40]
I’ve Been Thinking (feat. Cat Power) – Handsome Boy Modeling School [5:24]
Lovely Head – Goldfrapp [3:46]
Class System – Handsome Boy Modeling School [4:30]

Liner Notes:

I’m not entirely sure how this set became the Handsome Boy Modeling School set. Prince Paul and Dan the Automator definitely put together something special with that project, and their second album, White People, would have only been out about two months by the time this set aired, but it’s unusual for me to load so many tracks from a single artist in one afternoon. One of the great things about community radio is that you can play stuff that wouldn’t normally get airtime, which is how “Spectral Mornings” got on this set list. Tjinder Singh really knows how to put a pop song together, but fourteen and a half minutes is really stretching an audience’s patience, you know? Anyway, it doesn’t matter, because it’s a toe-tapper the whole time. The Dining Rooms are from Milan, and would have been at home in Volume 16, but I think the track makes for a nice transition. Everyone knows Sia now, but in 2005 she would have been primarily recognized in North America as one of the singers who sometimes collaborated with Zero 7. (In 2006 or 2007 I saw her perform with Zero 7 at a music festival in Toronto; they kept blowing out the breakers midway through their first song, so while they sorted that out Sia and Argentinian-Swedish folk singer José González, who had played on the same stage earlier, performed a short acoustic set to keep the crowd entertained. It was quite lovely.)

The photo used for this cover is of my old pocket watch sitting on the vice bolted to my stepfather’s garage work table. I did a lot of photography-based art project in high school, and this photo would eventually be cut up to make a collage clock face.