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Recorded programmes and themed mixes from New Zealand Net Radio.

  1. 1d ago

    In the Mix: Prog Rock Friday - In the Moog

    The Moog synthesiser could only play one note at a time, and it went out of tune if somebody opened a window. For about ten years it was the most exciting instrument in music. This week In The Mix gives the whole hour over to it, starting with the accident that started everything: Emerson, Lake & Palmer‘s “Lucky Man”, where Keith Emerson — who had gone to the pub because he wasn’t feeling the session — came back, found a Moog that had just been delivered, and began working out what the glide knob did. Greg Lake kept the take. Emerson called it “the solo I’ve had to live with”, and years later had forgotten how to play it and had to ask a magazine for a transcription of his own work. Then Rick Wakeman, the only artist on tonight’s show who has ever played New Zealand — Western Springs, 1975, with the Auckland Symphonia — on an album he dreamed up after buying a book about Henry VIII at an airport in Virginia. And The Alan Parsons Project, jumping to 1979 and an album that went to number four here. The second half goes looking for the machine and keeps not finding it. Billy Cobham has Jan Hammer bending a Moog until it sounds like a guitar while Tommy Bolin runs a guitar through an Echoplex until it sounds like a machine — people genuinely couldn’t tell them apart. Then two of the most electronic-sounding records ever made, NEU!‘s “Hallogallo” and Ash Ra Tempel‘s “Light: Look At Your Sun”, neither of which has a synthesiser anywhere near it: guitars, drums, an organ, and a producer doing unspeakable things to a tape machine. And we finish on the big one — Tangerine Dream‘s “Phaedra”, seventeen and a half minutes recorded at a farmhouse studio in Oxfordshire in November 1973, on a Moog that had reportedly belonged to the Rolling Stones and arrived with a pile of cables and no manual. Edgar Froese said the tape machine broke, the desk failed and they blew the studio speakers with the low end. Then the room warmed up, the oscillators drifted, and the sequencer slid out of tune while they were recording. You can hear it happen. They left it in. Broadcast 21 August 2026

    In the Mix: Prog Rock Friday - In the Moog

  2. 5d ago

    Ten From Then - The Liner Notes

    Join Jim Bricker and I to discuss the mission of our new show Ten From Then and the story behind it. Broadcast 17 August 2026

    Ten From Then - The Liner Notes

  3. Aug 12

    Musical Musings: Five of the Best - Depeche Mode

    Today on Musical Musings: Five of the Best, I’m joined by the endlessly knowledgeable Leon from Adelaide (South Australia) to take on one of the most influential bands Britain has ever produced: Depeche Mode. Their story begins in Basildon, Essex, at the turn of the 1980s, where a group of school friends — Vince Clarke, Martin Gore and Andrew “Fletch” Fletcher — started making music, before a young Dave Gahan, overheard singing Bowie’s “Heroes,” completed the line-up. Named after a French fashion magazine (Dépêche mode — roughly “fashion dispatch”), they began as bright synth-pop upstarts and grew, album by album, into the dark, sensual, stadium-filling pioneers of electronic music we know today — a band who took the humble synthesizer and made it sound like sin and salvation at once. Because Leon wanted the full sweep, this episode carries a little extra history — right back to how a single OMD B-side first set Vince Clarke on the path to synthesizers. His five picks are really five different Depeche Modes: “Photographic,” from the 1981 Vince Clarke-penned debut Speak & Spell (and the band’s very first recording); “My Secret Garden” from 1982’s A Broken Frame, the moment Martin Gore took over the songwriting and Leon’s favourite Depeche Mode song of all; the imperial “Behind the Wheel” from 1987’s Music for the Masses, the album version with that irresistible bassline; “Precious” from 2005’s Playing the Angel, a tender letter Martin wrote to his children during his divorce; and “People Are Good” from 2023’s Memento Mori, the band’s first record as a duo after the loss of Fletch. From synth-pop debut to elegiac farewell — forty-plus years in five songs. Tune in and let Leon be your guide. 12 August 2026

    Musical Musings: Five of the Best - Depeche Mode

  4. Aug 10

    Musical Musings: #USAtoZ Picks

    Today on Musical Musings we do something gloriously different. Rather than one band and five songs, my guest Jarrett McCall arrives with an alphabet. Jarrett recently took on a challenge organized by @metaphoralaura on X — the hashtag was #USAtoZ — to run through American bands letter by letter, A to Z, and this episode is his pick of the ones he chose, every one of them, by his own happy insistence, drawn from the 1970s. He’s titled it USA A-Z (Missing Some!), and the “missing some” is the whole charm of it: we get C, D, F, H, J, L, P, R, S, V and W, and cheerfully skip the other fifteen letters. What that leaves is less a greatest-hits run than an accidental map of a whole decade — in the space of an hour Jarrett’s alphabet sweeps up power-pop, Akron art-rock, Miami Latin disco, arena rock, P-Funk, Detroit folk, New York synth-punk, California hard rock, Alabama soul-rock and lush LA vocal-group pop. We travel in order down his list, and it’s a wonderful whiplash of a journey: Cheap Trick’s teen anthem “Surrender” gives way to DEVO’s Brian Eno-produced “Gut Feeling,” then Foxy’s Miami groove “Hot Number,” Jefferson Starship’s “Jane,” Parliament’s “Ride On” from their love letter to Washington D.C., and the astonishing “Sugar Man” by Rodriguez — the Detroit songwriter who was a superstar in South Africa and Australia without ever knowing it, as the film Searching for Sugar Man later told the world. From there it’s the confrontational electronics of Suicide’s “Keep Your Dreams,” Van Halen’s “Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love” (a song Eddie wrote as a punk parody), and Wet Willie’s loose Southern strut “Weekend.” Then comes Jarrett’s cheeky twist for the final two, filed not by band name but by album title: the Beach Boys land under H for Holland, the record they famously flew to the Netherlands to make, and the 5th Dimension close us out under L for Living Together, Growing Together. Eleven letters, one decade, and just about every sound America made in the seventies. Tune in and let Jarrett take you through the alphabet — gaps and all. Hopefully in a few weeks we’ll be back with Volume 2 – the missing letters! Broadcast 10 August 2026

    Musical Musings: #USAtoZ Picks

  5. Aug 5

    Musical Musings: Five of the Best - Toad the Wet Sprocket

    For this edition, Ken Cheshire champions a band whose ridiculous name (lifted from a Monty Python sketch Eric Idle designed to be “so silly nobody would ever use it”) has always undersold the quiet brilliance underneath. High-school friends from Santa Barbara — Glen Phillips, Todd Nichols, Dean Dinning and Randy Guss — they made warm, jangly, thoughtful alt-rock that could land a knockout blow by playing softly, with two platinum albums in Fear and Dulcinea. What makes Ken’s five so satisfying is that they quietly tell the band’s whole story: the gorgeous hit “Walk on the Ocean,” the platinum peak of “Crowing,” a genuine rarity in “Are We Afraid,” the pre-hiatus “Whatever I Fear,” and the fan-funded 2013 comeback “Is There Anyone Out There.” Breakthrough, peak, rarity, farewell and return — a fan’s love letter in five songs. Broadcast 5 August 2026

    Musical Musings: Five of the Best - Toad the Wet Sprocket

  6. Aug 3

    Musical Musings: Five of the Best - The Tea Party

    Today on Musical Musings: Five of the Best, I'm joined by the erudite Armando Venditti to dig into one of Canada's most distinctive and criminally under-celebrated rock bands: The Tea Party. Formed in Windsor, Ontario around 1990, the trio of Jeff Martin, Stuart Chatwood and Jeff Burrows built a sound they cheekily christened "Moroccan roll" — hard rock and blues shot through with sitars, ouds, hurdy-gurdies and Middle Eastern textures, all wrapped around Jeff Martin's brooding, Jim Morrison-esque baritone. They were huge in Canada and Australia, drew constant comparisons to The Doors and Led Zeppelin, and made records that felt like they'd been dug out of some candlelit alchemist's library. Armando's five trace nearly three decades of that journey. We start with the bluesy early single "The River" from 1993's major-label debut Splendor Solis (named, fittingly, after a famous 16th-century alchemical manuscript), then move into the band's world-music masterpiece with "Sister Awake" from The Edges of Twilight — a song so intricate it reportedly used 58 recording tracks synched across three tape machines. From there we take in a deep cut, "The Badger," the electronic reinvention of 1997's Transmission with "Emerald," and a leap all the way to 2021 for "The Beautiful." It's a smart, generous introduction to a band that always aimed higher than the radio ever asked them to. Tune in and let Armando make the case. Originally broadcast 3 August 2026

    Musical Musings: Five of the Best - The Tea Party

  7. Jul 31

    In the Mix: Power Pop Perfection Vol 2

    Power pop is the genre that never quite got its moment — and somehow that’s the whole point. It’s a sound built on the Beatles’ Revolver-era jangle and the Who’s coiled aggression, then handed down through a lineage of bands who wrote perfect three-minute songs and watched them sail straight past the charts. This week’s show traces that line from the source: “And Your Bird Can Sing” and “Pictures Of Lily” set the template in the mid-60s, and the Flamin’ Groovies’ “Shake Some Action” and Big Star’s “In The Street” carried it into the 70s, where commercial indifference became something close to a badge of honour. What’s remarkable is how the vindication keeps arriving late. Big Star sold almost nothing in 1972 and ended up soundtracking a hit sitcom two decades on. The Speedies were Brooklyn schoolkids whose “You Need Pop” found a second life in a printer commercial. Teenage Fanclub’s Bandwagonesque was voted album of the year over Nevermind, a decision that looked eccentric at the time and looks rather braver now. And the thread runs unbroken to the present — the Lemon Twigs and Weezer are working the same seam as Todd Rundgren, Dwight Twilley and the Raspberries did fifty years ago, with a similar disregard for whether anyone’s paying attention. Broadcast 31 July 2026

    In the Mix: Power Pop Perfection Vol 2

  8. Jul 29

    In the Mix: How Awesome Was 1971?

    Blame friend-of-the-station Jim Bricker. He got in touch the other day, asked “how awesome was 1971?”, and wouldn’t let it go — and the more we dug, the more the question answered itself. So we’ve built a special around it: two hours (all right, a little more) making the case that 1971 might just be the greatest year popular music ever had. Jim chose the tracks – and I added a few bonus tracks at the end. The idea isn’t ours alone. Music writer David Hepworth wrote a whole book on it, 1971 — Never a Dull Moment, arguing this was the year the album grew up and everyone seemed to make the record of their lives all at once. Then there was the excellent Apple TV series. We’ll put his argument to you — and, because we’re fair-minded, we’ll also hand you the case against, from the folks who reckon he’s simply picked the year he happened to turn twenty-one. Mostly, though, we’ll just play you the evidence, because it’s overwhelming. One year gave us Tapestry and Blue and What’s Going On; the Beatles scattering into brilliant, bickering solo careers; Marvin Gaye and Sly Stone holding a mirror up to the times; prog stretching its legs, glam pulling on its feathers, and Led Zeppelin recording drums in a stairwell. There’s Bowie reinventing himself, Joni Mitchell breaking your heart in a folk song, and a closing run that lands, inevitably, on Imagine. Pour something, settle in, and decide for yourself. Was it really the best of them all? Tune in — and tell us we’re wrong. Broadcast 29 July 2026

    In the Mix: How Awesome Was 1971?
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About

Recorded programmes and themed mixes from New Zealand Net Radio.

Information

  • Creator
    New Zealand Net Radio
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    28
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 NZNetRadio
  • Show Website
    New Zealand Net Radio