Wednesday 31st December & Thursday 1 January, BBC Radio 4
6.00-9.00am and 4.30-5.00pm
Jarvis Cocker edited the last Today Programme of the year, 6.00-9.00am on December 31st, highlights from the show are available to listen again online.
The next day & year, voyager Quentin Cooper hosted a special The Material World Cape Farewell Show on New Year’s Day, with a programme billed as a ‘science-meets-art-meets-a-fair-bit-of-music special from the cold but not quite as cold as they used to be waters off the west coast of Greenland’.
Listen again online The Material World on BBC Radio 4 ›
BBC Radio 4 The Material World journalist Quentin Cooper photographed at midnight as he watches phytoplankton dancing in the wash of the Grigory Mikheev, against a backdrop of Northern Lights.
The sound just isn’t right. Despite the undoubted talents of all involved, what’s coming out of the speakers is a meaningless din. A lot of noise without even a clear base line. And, no, it’s not just that I’m getting older and this isn’t for me – everyone agrees that something is badly, possibly terminally, awry. The venue is the prime candidate for blame – an echoey acoustic nightmare which drowns everyone’s efforts in its own throbbing. But my travelling companions aren’t just creative, they’re determined. They adjust amps, tweak pitch, even change the tempo…. until finally the instruments and their surroundings are in harmony – and the steady beats coming out of the boom-box build up into a sweeping epic track: one which takes hours to record and reveals the layout and geology of miles of sea-floor beneath our ship.
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