Thinking Metal Music

Bridges 71 Air date : 11th January 2024 @ 1900 hours

The seventy first edition of Bridges will air at 1900 hours on 1th January 2025 on Radio Northumberland.

• Part One: Loud
• Joy Division, Love will tear us apart
• Eisbrecher, Everything is Wunderbar
• Flip Martian featuring Imogen Bebb, What Difference Does It Make
• Marsheaux, Mediterranean
• David Bowie, I'm Afraid Of Americans
• Dreamkid, Alleyway Fistfight
• Ion, Opening Titles (Perdition’s Flame)
• Ion, Blizzards At Sunset (Perdition’s Flame)
• David Bowie, Jump They Say
• GUNSHIP, China In Your Hand
• Peter Baumann, Strangers In The Night
• Sangam & Microgram, Keys Of Life
• Lisa Bella Donna, Ascension
• Part Two : Louder
• Ion, Say Goodbye to the World (Perdition’s Flame)
• Ion, Nick-Storm, Private-Eye (Perdition’s Flame)
• MFBB, Fireworks
• David Bowie, Sound And Vision
• Rashida Prime, Pure
• Dramatis, Oh! 2025!w
• Visage, The Damned Don't Cry
• David Bowie, This Is Not America
• Crosspolar Plains Apparition, Welcoming Acceptance
• S.A.W. plays Tangerine Dream, Rarebird
• Eisbrecher, Ohne Dich
• New Order, True Faith

Submission Guidelines (updated 10-Jan-25)

Here are a rough set of guidelines for submitting tracks to Bridges

1. First and foremost, we aim to be a family-friendly show. We don’t play tracks which a have strong sexual theme. End of. If your track features an explicit video then we won’t play your track. This is non-negotiable.Our audience includes children and young adults, and we need to adhere to OFCOM rules and guidelines once we have our DAB licence.

2. Don’t send us files. If you send me a 100Mb AIFF file of your latest hit then I’ll blacklist you and you won’t ever hear from us again. Send us a link to your file on Youtube or Soundcloud or, better still, a code for Bandcamp. Please do not send us Spotify links. We do not endorse, support or encourage the use of Spotify. If Spotify feels like paying its artists a reasonable amount of money in exchange for their use of our music then this policy will change. Until then, Spotify can get stuffed.

3. We don’t play tracks by a small number of artists simply because these artists have already been blacklisted. They know who they are.

4. The programme concentrates on a mix of Dark Electro, Machine Rock and Alternative. Basically, we play what we like and what we enjoy, as well as artists who, we feel, deserve to be heard by a wider audience. In particular, we’re interested in those artists who are having a really hard time getting noticed. Guess what? We were in the same boat when we started out. Got a hard-luck story? Tell us all about it.

5. Do NOT send us AI music

Please do not submit AI-generated music for consideration. We won't play it. End of story. I've already explained why on air but, for the sake of completeness, I'll repeat myself.

AI is still pretty dumb. AI pretends to be human. AI pretends to have feelings and emotions. Some algorithms have even passed the Turing Test so I guess that makes them human, right? No, it doesn't. AI music is hollow and empty and cannot create something genuinely new. Not yet anyway. Worse, certain organisations are using AI to generate music that they own. They create artist profiles that are entirely fake just to feed their own shitty businesses. They don't want to pay musicians. Musicians cost money and Joe Public will soak this shit up because they don't know any different. We're opposed to this. Strongly. I don't get paid for producing Bridges. I do it because I love music. AI companies do not love music. They love the money and that's all.

So don't send us AI music. Don't be part of the problem.

If you send us AI music and it's obviously AI music, and worse, you then insist that it's your own work then you're just a liar and I reserve the right to take the piss and humiliate you and your shitty tunes on air. I will ridicule your work and show you up for the miserable charlatan that you are. You have been warned.

The Music we play

So long as the piece is fundamentally electronic or alternative, your musical style is unimportant - content and context is paramount.

Length - the majority of the pieces we play are between three and six minutes in duration although we do, on occasion, play longer tracks. I think the longest so far was around fifteen minutes. However, If your track involves fifty minutes of long slow aimless meandering before getting to a vague and nebulous conclusion then sorry, Bridges is probably not for you.

We won’t play noise tracks. If your track is just five minutes of car alarms going off or an hour of filter-swept noodling then this programme is not for you.

We do play ambient, usually as part of our Sleepy-time thread. It's proven extremely popular, too.

We don’t play drones mostly because I DO NOT LIKE THEM. Our aim is to keep the listener entertained and engaged, and to provide the backdrop to their Saturday night. We do not want our listeners to switch over to another station. Careful, detailed precise scientific analysis has clearly demonstrated that nearly every scientient being in the Universe would rather gnaw its own foot off than listen to another artfully crafted three hour drone track. So, no... Don’t.

You Sir, are not metal.

We like our metal. We like our punk. We love our guitars. How heavy will we go? We don’t know. Try us. However, if it sounds like a Machine Gun blasting off two hundred rounds a minute with lyrics that appear to have been written by a hoard of Satan’s more playful minions then we’re unlikely to give it airtime. Fans of Norwegian Death Metal and Des O’Connor’s later works should look elsewhere.

Quality

We’re not massively bothered if you gift wrap your latest release in a roll of newspaper that’s been at the bottom of the cat’s litter tray for a month or if you stick it in a Jiffy bag with around a dozen or so nice, crisp ten pound notes. Art is subjective and we’re not critics. However, we do insist that you pay attention to the quality and format of your recording.

We must be able to read your files. It's not important if your track has been artfully rendered in glorious 24-bit, 96kHz pro audio or just hacked together with bits of old cassette tape. What matters is that we can import it easily into our audio system (Logic Pro X running on Apple Mac). Our shows are rendered and exported as 320 kps MP3 files so the source is not hugely important. WAV, AIFF or MP3 files are ideal. We can deal with other formats if we have to but we’d rather not. If it will take two hours to import and edit your Meisterwerk into Logic then we’ll probably just replace your track with something by Rammstein or Rick Astley. Your choice really, bubs.

Recording levels are very important. If the levels are so low that they’re barely above the noise floor then we cant play it. Similarly, if your levels were recorded at such a level that the waveform is just a dense wall of black that hits 0dB 100% of the time then... No. I probably won’t even look at it. I have no desire to blow my speakers out. Or my ears.

One final word - If you do send us something then it's very, very important that you send us your best possible work. If it's not your best possible work then why are you sending it?

We play the music we like. We play the music we think our audience will like. Our aim is to build an audience that keeps coming back to the show week after week, year after year. We want to develop and support a community of musicians, a scene, in the North East of England that is second to none because we believe we have a deep, deep well of highly skilled, very talented musicians and bands in this part of the world that deserves to be heard. We’re not partisan.

We’re also happy to work hand-in-hand with other radio shows within this region to develop and enhance the scene.

Great, you made it this far. Still want to send us something? Even better.

Our submission form has stopped working so... Send us a message using your standard mailer by clicking here with the following details:

• Your name
• Your e-mail address
• Your band name
• A link to your track ideally on YouTube, Bandcamp or Soundcloud but not Spotify

Talk soon,
David