This — this is a lament. This is an ode and a eulogy. Good bye Brave New Waves. You shall be missed.
It’s been a while since last we spoke. Sorry about that. Been very busy. Please, don’t take it as a slight — everyone’s busy these days — we had our separate lives and I thought you liked it that way. While I was discovering baile funk and the pop perfection that is Akon, you were exploring the lower depths of noise.
I would check up on you from time to time — like an old boyfriend checks on an ex — and what I heard you playing . . . well, let’s just say it wasn’t my bag. It tended to be…whiter
than what I listen to.
Wasn’t always that way. When we first met everything you said was fascinating and different. I was 19 (or maybe 18?) and new to the world of left-field music. I grew up on hip-hop, was in the first phases of my James Brown obsession and then you came along. Nobukazu Takemura, Tortoise, Afuken, and Negativland. All strange names. Even stranger music. I loved it, and you.
Every week — like so many Canadian kids growing up in the butt ends of this great land — I’d tune in and fall into a brave new world (get it?) of sound. I’d buy blank tapes by the truck load — recording my own mixtapes and making copies of you — playing them in my dad’s car, wishing (and hoping) that the world would come to its senses and give this great music a chance.
It was a pipe dream that would never happen. I moved on — my musical tastes solidifying as I got older — and sadly you weren’t a part of it anymore.
Now as your life comes to an end — a great and harrowing 23 years on air — I’m saddened that we lost touch. I’m also thankful for what you gave me. I am who I am in part because of you.
