I don’t know how you feel about music in the bathroom. Me, I’m enthusiastically for it, my theory being that you’re not doing anything in there that’s so exciting it doesn’t benefit from a soundtrack. I’m more than happy to provide the tunes myself – in common with many others, there’s something about a shower that brings out the showperson – but more often than not I’ll just fire up the clunky waterproof radio I have in there.
My favoured station is Resonance FM, an independent local channel that broadcasts from London Bridge, mostly because of the utter weirdness of its transmissions. It’s hard to imagine a station less concerned with fashion, market share or indeed basic listenability of its output.
This morning, for example, I showered for ten minutes or so, all the while serenaded by short, atonal outbursts from an alto saxophone. I didn’t hear the introduction to the piece, and it was still going when I finished and turned the radio off. It was obviously some kind of avant-garde jazz, but could just as well have been from the archives of music that the CIA plays at high volume for hours on end to break terrorist sieges.
It’s impossible to predict what’s going to come out of the speaker at any given time. Over the last few weeks, I’ve had the pleasure of Welsh choirs, Bollywood medleys, a discussion panel of conspiracy theorists talking about the secret sect that controls the world’s banking, Chinese opera, a spoken word programme (news? Stand up comedy? A documentary on snails?) in what sounded like Swahili, Bontempi Organ versions of great cinema theme tunes and a high pitched whine that went on for some minutes and I assume came from a Theremin.
I honestly really enjoy this brand of random eclecticism as it takes you out of your mundane, workaday routine and almost transplants you to Mumbai, Shanghai or an underground bunker in Idaho filled with delusional paranoiacs. It’s like Hot Tub Time Machine, only it’s a shower and it works with geography instead.
I have never consulted their programming schedule, but having just checked their website (http://resonancefm.com), I see the following programmes immediately listed – not so much a mixed bag as three completely separate ideas of what the abstract form of a bag should be:
- Mark Pilkington presents a talk recorded earlier this month at Chelsea School of Art and Design, as lecturer John Cussans discusses George Bataille, Haiti and Vodou.
- Little Atoms, Big Questions: Neil Denny and Stuart Clark are joined by author, journalist and broadcaster Michael Brooks, the author of the acclaimed non-fiction title 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense.
- 90 minutes of unadulterated black metal.
Obviously I’m hoping for the black metal next time I take a shower, but I’m resigned to the fact it could be sea shanties, commentary on a Gaelic football match or a recording of sheep noises. And that’s fine with me. As much as I’m baffled by its continued existence, I love that Resonance carries on carrying on.
