RE-VISION RADIO’s TOWER OF SONG, hosted by the Gypsy Scholar & Bohemian Essayist, is a Musical & Philosophical-Literary program dedicated to the “Life of the Mind” and broadcast “in the middle of the night” (12 am, Mondays). It’s an eclectic, free-form radio program (looking back to Sixties “underground radio”) that falls between the cracks of traditional radio formats, with either “information” or “music” programs. Combing the two formats, the program seeks to both educate and entertain. (“That’s why I’m telling you in song.” ~Van Morrison)
The Tower of Song music program deals in Ideas—the ideas in music and the music in ideas. Thus, because of the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, it’s an experimental “music” program that doesn’t just play songs randomly—it showcases songs thematically; con-text-ualizes them so that listeners will hear familiar songs in a new way. The Gypsy Scholar, practicing “scholarship as performance art,” presents his Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack which, in mixing the spoken word with music (“Argument & Song;” high argument with deep song, high academic culture with low popular culture), allows him to “rave on words on printed page” (V.M.). In mixing and remixing “Argument & Song” (highbrow academic culture with lowbrow pop-culture), the program comes to listeners not from the Ivory Tower but from “that tower down the track” (L.C.)—the Tower of Song (located in “Squidrow”). The Tower of Song website in cyberspace is an integral part of the broadcast, with thematic images that are synergistic with the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, making Re-Vision Radio the alternative radio concept that lets you see what it means. The goal of this experimental music program is to transport its listeners, “in the middle of the night,” into that great architectural “acoustic space” of song—the TOWER OF SONG.
