Basically the Difficult Listening Hour serves several purposes. In addition to entertaining and challenging you, my loyal listeners, one thing it also serves to do is re-connect me to a hazy past life of musical fads, scouting missions, and artistic cul-de-sacs, explored long ago and that I now have an excuse to pleasantly dip my audio cortex back into for a swim down sonic memory lane.

This week's show is what I will call "Extreme Hard Drive Scrapings" - not so much a theme as a tactic for quickly putting together a program of odd things to confound your ears.

Usually I begin planning a show by picking a theme (like, as you know, Money, Education, Sex, etc), and then searching through my 17,000+ track music library for songs that are relevant to that subject matter. I then augment these by adding sound effects, interviews, and other found audio dredged from my archives and from the internet (audio blogs, news reports, etc).

This time I decided to start by scraping together several files on the dark recesses of various hard drives where I store strange audio tinkerings and documentation from a variety of live experimental performances by good friends. All of these performances are themselves "sample-based", music made from fragments of other music, often improvised using a variety of computers and other signal-processing equipment. With one of these files, I then processed even further, slightly.

I no longer remember exactly how I combined these together, but the files are roughly these:

- a performance by Steev Hise in March 2003 at a club called Nocturnal in Portland, Oregon.
- A weird stretched out granulated file of sonic mishmash which I think orginated from a strange musical theater piece somewhere in Portland, August 2003.
- A performance by Steev Hise of a piece called "What's the Difference Between a Laptop Performer and a Lapdance Performer?" in November 2000
- A backwards track fragment from last week's show
- A performance by Meta at the Luggage Store in San Francisco in the fall of 2000.
- A performance by Steev Hise in Newcastle, Australia in September 2001, which I remember includes toward the end fragments of an interview with John Oswald (the famous Plunderphonic composer).

I hope this lengthy explanatory prose serves to at least partially illuminate the curious noises that you have or will hear when you listen to this week's show, as well as fill you in on my working methods for creating all of these weekly efforts.

Yours, as always, sincerely,

Esteban Caliente