Program #51, May 3 2001: Unthemed.

This program actually had a number of strong subthemes, but no one of them was intended to be dominant; rather, they were designed to be interlocking, and so I've decided to go on referring to the program as unthemed. Here's what was going on:

• First, I began celebrating the first-year anniversary of Prisms; it began a year ago this week, and I replayed my very first selection -- Varèse' Intégrales -- to mark the occasion. Anniversary observances continued through program #52 and program #53, the latter of which represented the actual one-year anniversary in terms of program count.

• I also took note of May Day and its legacy of attending to progressive political concerns, by segueing from Varèse (through the Varèse/Zappa connection) to, well, everything else: all the pieces after the first one had some political point to make, some slyly, some oddly, the latter two pieces through overpowering collages of sound samples and musical gestures.

• Christopher DeLaurenti, who formed N30 from field recordings of the 1999 WTO demonstrations, also hosts a program similar to Prisms on another area station (...though better to say, Prisms is similar to his program! as he was on the air first), and so yet another function of the evening was to underscore solidarity with the local creative-music/adventurous-radio-programming community. I have certainly appreciated the nice things he has had to say to me in the past.

• Finally, Xenakis' late-1960s masterwork, the emotionally exhausting Kraanerg -- inspired in part by the composer's experiences on one frontline of World War II -- pointed toward this month's upcoming all-Xenakis program, a high point of the second year of Prisms to come.