Last month, I closed CP Radio 018 with a hope - that by now I could be writing as I once did about the joyous inspiration brought about by a season of green growth. Walking through the city this past week, I noticed the trees along the sidewalks beginning to show the earliest signs of budding - thin, barely-there leaves reaching out from branches that, just weeks ago, were stripped bare and frozen under grey skies. The shift is quiet and unhurried, the way all meaningful transitions tend to be. It does not announce itself with fanfare, but rather with a slow exhale, as if the city has been holding its breath since November and is only now remembering how to release it.
There is a reciprocity between waiting and arriving that I think about often when building these monthly curations. To wait is to build anticipation, to sharpen one’s awareness of what is absent so that when it finally appears, the recognition is total - not just visual, but felt. We spent the winter months on CP Radio building sonic frames and exploring the textures of patience, of grounding, of finding warmth in the cold through the medium of music. 019 is the arrival. Not the explosion of summer, but the opening of a door - a playlist that moves with the energy of stepping outside and realizing, for the first time in months, that you don’t need to brace yourself against the air.
Can’t Beat the Heat, by Glyders, opens this month’s curation for a reason. Glyders are a duo out of Chicago - partners Joshua Condon and Eliza Weber - who have been making what they call maximal minimal rock and roll since 2014. There is something deeply honest about their approach to music, frugally inspired recordings on analogue equipment, building songs that are simple, hypnotic, and repetitive in the way that traversing through a familiar neighborhood is too - each pass revealing something you somehow hadn’t noticed before. Can’t Beat the Heat “radiates a sunburnt peace”, a phrase I borrow from a review of their album Maria’s Hunt that I found no reason to attempt to improve upon, reminiscent of that first warm day where you sit on a bench, close your eyes, and let the light do the work of reminding you that this, right here, is worth paying attention to. In 018, I wrote about Bobby Hebb’s Sunny transporting my mind to a brighter place while walking through snow. Can’t Beat the Heat doesn’t need to transport - it confirms. The warmth is no longer imagined. It is here.
If Glyders are the arrival of warmth, then Hako Is Alive and She Is 59, by MokuMoku, represents the beautiful stubbornness of what endures through time. MokuMoku is a project that lives at the intersection of jazz, fusion, rock, and soul, blending live instrumentation with sampling in a way that feels less like a collage and more like a conversation. The track samples Hako Yamasaki’s ヘルプミー (Help Me) from 1976 - which is important to note as the title is thus clearly not a metaphor, but a statement of fact, an acknowledgment that Hako Yamasaki is alive, that she was 59 years old when this track was created, and that her voice still carries weight across decades, languages, and oceans. There is something profoundly moving about an artist choosing to honor another artist not through imitation, but through presence - to say, in effect, you are still here, and because you are still here, so is the feeling you once gave us. In CP Radio 017, we explored Dylan’s (Bob) philosophy of perpetual becoming, the idea that one never truly arrives at a final version of oneself. MokuMoku extends this thought in a different direction - that the things we create do not stop becoming, that a song from 1976 can find new life in 2017, and again in 2026, when it lands on a playlist alongside Dire Straits, Kid Cudi, and James Blake. To be alive is to still be in conversation, even when the conversation spans half a century.
And finally, a song that holds a special place in this curation - Nothing New, by Evan Blix. Those who follow the Creative Pragmatist may recognize Evan’s name; he is a Tibi Close Friend, with a performance that reinforces, for us, the incredible depth of talent that exists just beneath the surface of what most people are paying attention to. Evan is a singer-songwriter from Santa Barbara, formerly the frontman of Glenn Annie, now forging his own path as a solo artist. His sound draws from the ‘70s piano-driven rock of Harry Nilsson and Paul McCartney, but filtered through something undeniably his own - a warmth and directness that makes each song feel like a letter written to someone specific, possibly you the listener. There is a rich tension in an artist who is reinventing himself, stepping out from the familiar structure of a band into the open air of solo work, releasing a song called Nothing New. It speaks to a truth that is easy to overlook - that sometimes the most profound newness is found not in novelty, but in the courage to see what has always been there with fresh eyes. Evan’s presence on 019 is a reminder that the CP ecosystem is not a broadcast, but a web - a living, growing network of people and sounds that continue to cross paths and feed one another in unexpected ways.
Alas April arrives, and with it, CP Radio 019 - thirty tracks that move between the meditative and the kinetic, the familiar and the uncharted, the warm and the bittersweet. From the lush funk of Cymande’s One More to the sprawling darkness of The Cure’s A Forest, from Charley Crockett’s outlaw chill to the electronic tenderness of James Blake, this month’s curation is built for the in-between - the weeks where winter’s grip has loosened but summer has not yet claimed us. It is in these transitional spaces, I’ve found, that we are most attuned to what music can do for us. Not to escape, and not merely to emphasize, but to accompany - to walk beside us as the world opens back up, one degree at a time.