Net Radio Discovery: CINEMIX!

Never having owned a CD player, I don’t have a lot of music in my iTunes library.  Tonight, wishing I had more calming instrumental classical music to listen to than Beethoven, I tried clicking on the Radio option for the first time, and, perusing the various classical internet stations on offer, found CINEMIX – “your film music station”.  Orchestral selections from movie scores — this is for me!  I love it!

Between track info, there was reference to a website, so I opened up Firefox and went to Cinemix.us.  You can listen online from there too.  178 other people were listening in at that moment.  So I’m not the only one that loves the orchestral film scores.  Hey, cool, you can make requests.  After hearing a familiar strain from A Room With A View, I tried browsing by composer and found they actually have something from Cliff Martinez’s beautiful and haunting score for Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris, which I remember searching for after I saw the film, but no stores had it.  No surprise, the Cinemix site offers convenient links to Amazon to buy what you’re listening to.  (Hmm, twenty bucks for Solaris… maybe I’ll finally get it.)  Also looks like there’s a subscription option so you can support the station that way.

I clicked on the request button and a window came up with further info and a note telling me my request had been delievered to the DJ application and would play shortly.  A couple tracks later, my Martinez request showed up in the “coming up” notes.  Wow, that was fast.  Next I checked for Michael Nyman but got sidetracked by Mychael Danna (they alphabetise by first name) — clicked on a track from Atom Egoyan’s Exotica but it it couldn’t fulfill my request as they’d already played it recently.  Fair enough.  Ran a search for Moulin Rouge to see if they had the closing credits theme (which I actually do have on my iTunes, thanks to my sister, but thought I’d look anyway.)  Perhaps that one’s a bit too electro-beated, but there was another selection from the film so I requested that.  Just browsing thru starting with A, I saw Alan Silvestri’s closing credits of Contact.  It’s playing right now.  (Coincidentally, just after a Mychael Danna piece from another Egoyan film, Ararat.)

Wonder if there’s a limit on the number of requests you can make in a time frame.  Doesn’t really matter, just listen and you’ll make discoveries.  Still, maybe I’ll go back to looking for something from Nyman’s shoulda-been-Oscar-nominated work on The Piano or an earlier Peter Greenaway film…

P.S. an hour later: Just discovered that the limit is 3 songs every 30 minutes. Fair enough.  Already requested theme from Brokeback Mountain, some Leonard Bernstein (West Side Story end credits), and Bernard Herrmann (North By Northwest.) Will just have to wait my turn for John Williams and Ennio Morricone and Philip Glass and Zbigniew Preisner and the Bach cello piece from Master and Commander…