Kami Knake's a slow loader. She takes patience: not as a person and podcaster who has excellent ears and a pleasingly eclectic international taste. It simply takes a while to load the blog she's kept since the start of the year about what she was already doing at Bands Under the Radar because her pages offer sonic intros.
The music week may be over, but I'm not shlepping off to start a 3:00 pm shift at work without a mention of the podcast section added to the blogroll, containing a few of my favourites. People have understood that podcasts, which are often radio programmes you can download as mp3 soundfiles and enjoy on the move, are yet another development that's changing the ways we listen to music -- not just music, but almost anything you can imagine.
The iTunes Music Store offers thousands of them for free, big public broadcasting stations all round the world make them regularly, you don't need iTunes or an iPod to listen to them, but it helps since it's an easy way to subscribe. This got said because not everyone knows what they are.
Laney Goodman, a veteran specialist in Women in Music, is a podcasting pathfinder as an independent. That link takes you to others that also focus on female musicians.
Kami in California, MK in the U.K. (here's another way into NYUB) and TC in the Netherlands with Spacemusic are among my other favourite explorers who embrace men too and try to avoid beaten tracks. NYUB, spelt out in the blogroll, stands for "not your usual bollocks".
I like lots of the usual bollocks, but really enjoy the programmes, generally about an hour long and often monthly, like Kami's, that take an enthusiastic and exciting approach to music these people think are under the radar. At BBC Radio Five Live Up All Night's Kevin Anderson last October chose John Peel Day to blog such people with good reason. Kevin writes of the "tip of an iceberg" in uncovering independent music and new musicians, quite often unsigned. My growing, highly select list went up after diving down around the iceberg.
 The late Peel -- my tribute was logged as 'The Ringing of Bells' in November 2004 -- is a hard act to follow. Kami does in a relaxed way, regularly presents some very cool music and knows her stuff. She recently came out with episode 15 in a series whose sound quality took a big turn for the better too after the first couple of shows.
She's good company to chill out, like the men mentioned. On first listening, I remembered how simple things used to be back in the days when Peel the pirate broadcaster was snapped up by the Beeb. There were the blues, there was trad jazz, there was modern jazz, folk, country, rock'n'roll, rock ... and more and more "prog rock". "World music" made links, punk came along, but so did a plethora of musical categories we could well do without, useful only in specific contexts.
Kami and her counterparts often deal in what we called progressive rock. It's as simple as KISS without the "stupid".
What Kami and her kind -- let alone all the P2P (peer-to-peer) music file-sharers and today's "pirates" -- are doing to the music industry rolls up against some of it, hefty waves having a bash at eroding the cliffs of legislation. France's parliamentary deputies resume a debate on this tidal topic next Tuesday.
The climate in this country has become surprisingly auspicious and bright since they first had a go at changing copyright law in December. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for the future. There's just a chance the French legislators could prove to be progressive people on this front at least.
2:13:07 PM link 
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