There are other great strategic-level wargames out there. “It captivates me because-imperfectly, impressionistically, and perhaps a little amorally-it lets me orchestrate the most titanic armed struggles in history, from the fussy economic details to the cut-and-thrust of mechanized warfare. Deuter‘s “Haleakala Mystery,” on the other hand, recalls how deep Deuter could go back in the seventies, something he’s rarely done since.“Hearts of Iron 4 wields complexity like a swift armor division during the blitzkrieg, allowing it to serve the idea of layered, cerebral, strategic warfare instead of letting it needlessly bog down the experience.” While most of the music here ascends to the timeless, Kitaro‘s “Free Flight” from Tunhuang sounds very much of its time and a little sappy, though I still remember how thrilling and exotic his CDs appeared in the late 70s and early 80s when they were only hard-to-find and expensive Japanese imports. While the recordings of the original 1983 broadcast have been remastered from CD, a real find is jazz reed player Charles Lloyd‘s “Pathless Path.” The faint scratches and surface noise from this still vinyl-only 1979 release bring back those days of strange intersections when Lloyd was in an overtly spiritual phase creating his world jazz exotica. David Darling‘s “Cycle Song” from the jazz inclined ECM records is as refreshing in its chamber jazz stylings now as it was in 1982.

But mostly, HOS looked far afield for what they often refer to as contemplative music. That said, the collection includes a space music classic from Michael Stearns, his surprisingly undated Planetary Unfolding, a composition of slowly evolving electronic textures and subliminal melodies. In over 25 years and over 850 shows, they’ve only played Tangerine Dream in 13 programs. In fact, they never even played much “space” music. Although frequently branded as a “new age” show, HOS rarely plays material like Music for Meditation, Reiki Healing or Music for Yoga, except, perhaps, for Tony Scott’s ground breaking Music for Zen Meditation. Judging from First Flight, hosts Stephen Hill and his original partner, Anna Turner, who died in 1996, proved from the start to have highly refined tastes as the original connoisseurs of the drone zone.

Music from the hearts of space